Personality and Power is a reckoning with how character conspired with opportunity to create the modern age's uniquely devastating despots—and how and why other countries found better paths. The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were reshaped and wars were fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms.
Some readers will be grumpy, and rightly, about the omission of Americans. Shouldn’t Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, for instance, star in a head count of the most salient makers of modern Europe? Mr. Kershaw, an eminent British historian and the author of a monumental two-volume biography of Hitler, offers a poor reason for their exclusion ... Some of his choices are questionable in other ways ... Some may also find odd the inclusion of Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslavian dictator, but Mr. Kershaw makes a lively case for him ... A deft and thoughtful work of synthesis, drawing the best from many distinguished scholars ... The best chapters in Personality and Power are on the three Germans.
The book’s structure (neither biographies nor narratives) can feel awkward, but each case study buttresses Kershaw’s conclusion that the 12 'were not just makers of the 20th century' but 'were also made by it' ... Interplay of the individual and their context animates all of Kershaw’s case studies, not least in the Soviet Union ... There is, wisely, no unifying theory of personality and power in Kershaw’s conclusions.
A dozen lucid portraits of the leaders – half of them dictators, the others democrats, to varying degrees – who shaped Europe’s 20th century ... Kershaw fills his lively profiles with revealing details of the leaders’ characters, their working style and relations with the ruling structures that supported them ... Kershaw is at his most masterful in his sketches of the three German leaders in this book. He is also very good on Mussolini and De Gaulle. He is less convincing on Lenin and Stalin, where his reliance on secondary sources makes for a flat and conventional account ... Kershaw devotes the final chapter to a summing up of the factors that defined the exercise of power by all 12 leaders in the book. His purpose, as he tells at the start, is to test seven propositions about personal leadership. They are all fairly obvious ... There is much to be admired in Kershaw’s cogent and astute analysis of these leaders in power, but I’m not sure there are any general lessons to be learned.
