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[Expositions 12.2 (2018) 206–214]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Hollander, Paul. From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of 

Political Hero Worship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 338 pages. $29.99 

(paper). ISBN: 978–1–1074–1507–2. 

 

Reading Paul Hollander’s From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of 

Political Hero Worship brings to mind Mark Lilla’s wonderful essay entitled “The Lure of 

Syracuse,” from which Hollander quotes before his first chapter. In “The Lure of Syracuse,” Lilla 

introduces us to “a new social type”: “the philotyrannical intellectual,” who placed himself in the 

service of, and used his abilities to defend, one or another of the twentieth century’s tyrannical 

regimes.1 The existence, not to say prevalence, of the philotyrannical intellectual raises the 

question: “What is it about the human mind that made the intellectual defense of tyranny possible 

in the twentieth century?”2  

Hollander’s book takes its bearings from similar questions. Says Hollander: “There is 

considerable evidence … indicating that many well-known twentieth-century intellectuals admired 

dictators of various ideological persuasion, as well as the political system they represented. Such 

admiration, often merging into hero worship, was an integral part of a substantial body of political 

misjudgments” (2).3 The question is: Why? This question is all the more important, says Hollander, 

because “we do not expect intellectuals to sympathize with dictators, let alone admire them”; 

rather, “we expect them to possess sound political and moral judgment” (10). To shed some light 

on this question, as well as to illuminate “broader questions about politics and intellectuals,” 

Hollander takes us through a century of what he calls “political hero worship” on the part of 

intellectuals, beginning with the admiration expressed by some European and American 

intellectuals for Italian fascism and ending with contemporary intellectuals’ support for various 

current or recent tyrannical regimes. 

Hollander begins by cataloging support on the part of intellectuals both within Italy and beyond 

for Mussolini’s fascist rule. He concludes this chapter by suggesting an answer to his central 

question, one that he had also raised in the book’s preface: “While deteriorated objective 

conditions” contribute significantly to the propensity of intellectuals in such circumstances to 

defend or admire tyranny, “in the final analysis, modern political hero worship” is “nurtured by 

dormant religious impulses that surface in the virtual deification of the dictators here discussed” 

(82).4 In the following chapter on Hitler’s Germany, Hollander focuses on “misgivings about 



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modernity” on the part of Heidegger and others, some German and some not: the sense that “Hitler 

and his system could repair the damages of modernity, and create, or recreate, a more 

communitarian and just society … free of the symptoms of the corrosive moral decay or decadence 

they diagnosed and experienced in their own societies” (100, 116).  

Hollander next turns to twentieth-century communism as practiced in Stalin’s Soviet Union, 

Mao’s China, Rakosi’s Hungary, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. In Hollander’s account, many 

intellectuals supported these regimes for reasons similar to those that prompted intellectuals to 

express affinity for Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Some of these reasons have primarily 

to do with individual psychology—religious or secular-religious impulses, self-importance and 

susceptibility to what Hollander calls the “techniques of hospitality” (flattery, misleading tours, 

etc.), desire for “purity”—while others we might call more ideological in nature, such as the 

rejection of decadent modernity or inhumane capitalism, dissatisfaction with the styles of 

leadership available in democratic regimes, and what Tony Judt called “distaste for the lukewarm” 

(115, 182, 21). In Hollander’s telling, the attractions of tyranny on the left are quite similar to the 

attractions of tyranny on the right. 

What twentieth-century communism provided, and twentieth-century fascism lacked, was a 

coherent and thoroughly elaborated ideological system. Thus, communism presented for 

intellectuals a uniquely intellectual temptation, a total and totalizing framework through which to 

experience and analyze the world. This comes through in Hollander’s discussion of the Hungarian 

intellectual Georg Lukacs, who (here Hollander quotes Leszek Kolakowski) “accepted 

Communism whole-heartedly as a moral, intellectual, and political solution …. He believed that 

Marxism was the final answer to the problem of history, that Communism guaranteed the final 

reconciliation of all human forces … that the conflict between the individual and society … had 

in principle been resolved” (151). Because of his hold on absolute intellectual, political, and moral 

truth, Lukacs was able to overlook—in Hollander’s account, felt compelled to overlook—the often 

brutal realities of communism as practiced in the twentieth century. Hollander here discusses a 

phenomenon that characterized the relationship of many intellectuals to both Stalin’s USSR and 

Mao’s China: the indifference to evidence that might run counter to one’s intellectual or political 

commitments. A statement that Hollander attributes to Lukacs captures this admirably: “that even 

if every empirical prediction of Marxism were invalidated, he would still hold Marxism to be true” 

(151). 



Review of From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez  208 
 

From here, Hollander takes us to revolutionary Cuba. From the previous chapters on twentieth-

century communism, we carry the theme of “the appeal of lofty ideals,” which caused smitten 

intellectuals to “suspend critiques of … repressive political systems,” as well as the “entitlement 

to ruthlessness conferred by … strongly felt good intentions” (189; 241).5 The theme of hero 

worship, even infatuation, also carries into this chapter and here reaches its apogee in the breathless 

tributes paid to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara by their many (contemporary and, in Che’s case, 

posthumous) admirers.6 

What’s new is the striking way some of the psychological factors previously discussed—“a 

belligerent and resentful estrangement from his own country and … inflated notions of self-

realization,” as Hollander says of Norman Mailer—combined with infatuation and ideological 

consonance to produce the strongly personal connection some intellectuals felt, in Hollander’s 

account, with Cuban communism (218). For instance: Hollander brings to our attention a book 

authored by the sociologist C. Wright Mills in which Mills adopts “the voice of the Cuban 

revolutionary” (218). Here Mills becomes “the representative voice, alter ego, and self-appointed 

spokesman of Cuban revolutionaries,” expressing “authentically their feelings, thoughts, and 

ideas,” an “unusual instance in role-playing that probably reflected the longings of Mills to be part 

and spokesman of a revolutionary community” (218, 208). Hollander also shines a spotlight here 

on the support expressed by Mailer, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others for the “empowering, redemptive, 

invigorating, and therapeutic” violence that appeared in the Cuban revolution and in other leftist, 

anti-colonial revolutions across the developing world (222). 

In Hollander’s penultimate chapter, he draws our attention to the support expressed by 

intellectuals for a wide variety of more or less contemporary tyrannical regimes. The regimes and 

leaders discussed in this chapter span the ideological spectrum; thus, with a couple of notable 

exceptions (Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, for example), we see fewer ideological affinities between 

intellectuals and regimes than was the case in earlier chapters. But psychological factors remain: 

for Hollander, “it is safe to say that the impulses and illusions that in the past gave rise to political 

hero worship persist, at any rate in an attenuated form” (245). Many of the intellectuals discussed 

in this chapter seem also to share a distaste for the United States, which, Hollander suggests, may 

have prompted some of them to find admiration for America’s enemies, regardless of their 

ideological bent.  



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In his final chapter, Hollander sums up the factors that he says drove intellectuals to suspend 

“the use of their critical faculties” and support dictatorial leaders and regimes, and he singles out 

one explanation that appears at various times throughout the book: “the individuals who were 

inclined to make the political misjudgments and admire the dictators, harbored, and sought to 

gratify, unacknowledged religious needs and impulses” (266, 291). Thus “the roots of the political 

attitudes and illusions here dealt with may be found at the intersection of conflicting personal and 

political impulses and concerns,” so that “the political commitments of intellectuals are colored by 

their emotional disposition” (312). Hollander does not mean (I don’t think) to reduce intellectuals’ 

political concerns to reflections of their personal or emotional lives, nor does he mean to conflate 

the two; rather, I think he means to suggest that in attempting to explain the persistent phenomenon 

that is the focus of his study—support on the part of intellectuals for tyrannical regimes and 

leaders—both political or ideological factors and emotional or psychological factors must be 

considered, and both come to our attention when we examine what these intellectuals say and how 

they say it.  

 

The several explanations Hollander offers for the question his book poses—Why did so many 

twentieth-century intellectuals admire tyrannical regimes and leaders, even in the face of evidence 

about the unsavory (to say the least) nature of such regimes and leaders?—are both plausible and 

satisfying. Returning to Lilla’s “The Lure of Syracuse,” we might say that Hollander’s account 

tends toward the notion that intellectuals’ support for tyrants and tyrannical regimes follows from 

(in Lilla’s words) “religious impulses” and the “irrational passions that had migrated from religion 

to politics.”7 This does not mean that Hollander overlooks the “heartless intellectual rationalism” 

that characterized some of the intellectual support for tyranny discussed above: Lukacs, for 

instance, seems certainly to have believed that “all moral and political questions have only one 

true answer,” which answer was “accessible through reason” and in his possession.8 If anything, 

Hollander pushes us to collapse the distinction between “irrational passions” and “religious needs 

and impulses,” on the one hand, and the irrational devotion to various forms of political 

rationalism, on the other.9 

But there is one more point that emerges from Hollander’s accounts, and it’s a point that I think 

bears further discussion. This point also brings us back to Lilla’s essay, and to Plato, who, in Lilla’s 

telling, was tempted, against his better judgment, to try to affect a conjunction of philosophy and 



Review of From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez  210 
 

political rule in the Sicilian city of Syracuse. I speak here of an awareness that “the psychological 

force that draws certain men to tyranny … is the same force … that draws other men to 

philosophy,” such that the “philosophic life,” as exemplified by Socrates, “is the noblest one 

because it is supremely self-aware of”—and resists—“its own tyrannical implications.”10 Plato 

recognized, says Lilla, the “connection in the human mind between the yearning for truth and the 

desire to contribute to ‘the right ordering of cities and households,’” and therefore understood that 

intellectuals would always be tempted to try to actualize their ideas, and would be drawn to regimes 

that offer, in Hollander’s words, the realization of “the perennial desire of intellectuals, namely the 

linking of words and deeds.”11 

This is not the “compromise” that Socrates reaches with his interlocutors near the start of Plato’s 

Republic—“a mixture of powerless wisdom and unwise power”—but rather what appears to be 

“the absolute rule of wisdom,” political rule that takes its bearings, not from the “tangle and variety 

of experience,” but rather from a set of philosophical truths about how human beings ought to live 

together.12 This sort of rule opens up the possibility for human life to be reshaped in accordance 

with an idea, for human nature and the human soul to be rebuilt and—this time—perfected.13  

This is a point that Waller Newell makes in his book Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, 

and Terror, about what he calls “millenarian tyranny,” the distinctly modern sort of tyranny that 

characterizes the regimes and leaders on which Hollander focuses. The millenarian tyrant, says 

Newell, sees himself as a “sculptor of human souls” or “engineer of human souls”; millenarian 

tyranny is concerned with reshaping human beings and human communities so as to create a 

“miracle man” suited for a miracle society.14 Such tyranny takes its bearings, not from the limits 

imposed on politics by human nature—not, for example, from Aristotle’s “nuts-and-bolts” sort of 

objections to Socrates’ ideas that he raises in Book II of the Politics, or from James Madison’s 

sober assertion that the need for government itself is “the greatest of all reflections on human 

nature”—but rather from its sense of the infinite (or nearly so) malleability of the human soul.15  

The figuring of the tyrant or dictator as educator, “gardener,” “artist,” molder and shaper of 

souls, appears often in Hollander’s account.16 Many of Hollander’s intellectuals share a 

“conception of human nature, or rather the implicit denial that there was such a thing”; they 

therefore placed great hope in regimes and leaders “committed to the fundamental and coercive 

transformation of societies and human beings,” based on “the premise that human beings are 

malleable, their character easily shaped …” (305–306).17 The tyrannical regime dedicated to such 



211  Picariello 
 

a transformative project promises to close the gap between political thought and political action, 

to infuse the idea into flesh, to make the thought real.  

The intellectual therefore has a special connection to this sort of tyrannical regime, as such a 

regime begins, not with reality on the ground, but rather with the idea—often an idea of a future 

that is immeasurably better than the present—and acts upon the raw material of human life so as 

to fit it to this idea. For the intellectual, this kind of regime offers the tempting possibility that all 

impediments to progress may be swept away, that the ideal may be actualized now that obstacles 

to this actualization—so persistent in free societies—may be eliminated.18  

The irony of this special connection is that tyrannical leaders seem to think little of intellectuals, 

and seem to have little notion of the value (as opposed to the use) of intellectuals for their 

transformative projects. Hitler ridiculed intellectuals as “‘eggheads and ‘despondent weaklings,’” 

and speculated that “we might one day … exterminate them,” while Lenin’s “hatred of the 

intelligentsia … runs like a thread through his persona and public life” (86, 102).19 Intellectuals 

may sense for themselves a special place in the plans and projects of tyrannical leaders, but these 

leaders themselves seem to believe otherwise. As Plato learned in his encounters with Dionysius 

of Syracuse, tyrants don’t often care to receive philosophical instruction; rather, they prefer to 

instruct others. Intellectuals, like tyrants, may fancy themselves “engineers of souls”—but 

intellectuals’ flirtations with tyranny less often transform ideas into reality than saturate ideas with 

blood.20 Hollander’s book reminds us that the regrets of the twentieth century should serve as a 

salutary warning for the twenty-first.  

 

DAMIEN K. PICARIELLO 

University of South Carolina Sumter 

 

 

Notes 

1. Lilla 197. 

2. Lilla continues: “How did the Western tradition of political thought, which begins with 

Plato’s critique of tyranny in the Republic and his unsuccessful trips to Syracuse, reach the 

point where it became respectable to argue that tyranny was good, even beautiful?” (198). 



Review of From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez  212 
 

3. Many of my quotations from Hollander in this review include Hollander’s quotations from 

other authors. No distinction will be made here, and the interested reader is invited to 

consult Hollander’s book for further detail. 

4. “The new emphasis on ‘political hero worship’ … was intended to highlight the secular-

religious components of the attitudes I have been interested in for a long time. I expected 

that comparing the converging appeals of leaders of different political systems legitimated 

by different ideologies would lend support to the idea that the attitudes of the intellectuals 

here examined had more of a religious, or secular-religious, than political inspiration” (ix). 

5. “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty declared that ‘we should judge communism by its intentions 

and not by its actions’” (291). Hollander says that Marxist theory imbued many twentieth-

century intellectuals with “a conviction that a largely flawless social system can be created 

and that its creation demands and justifies … violence and repression” (43). 

6. This is perhaps most ironic in the case of Che, who, as Paul Berman notes, “was an enemy 

of freedom and yet … has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an 

unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice” (204). 

7. Lilla 200–202. 

8. Ibid. 

9. Lilla 202; Hollander 291. 

10. Lilla 208, 213. 

11. Lilla 214; Hollander 214. 

12. Bloom 312; Oakeshott 6. 

13. Hitler described National Socialism as “the will to create mankind anew”; Sartre, says 

Hollander, saw in revolutionary violence the potential for “a reborn humanity” birthed 

through “heroic acts of will” (87, 194). 

14. Newell 164–166. 



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15. Madison 319. 

16. As Mussolini said of Lenin, “Lenin is an artist, who has worked with human beings as 

other artists work with marble or metal,” and of himself, “The most important thing is to 

rule the masses as an artist dominates his material” (Hollander 75, 71). According to Stalin, 

“man must be grown carefully and attentively as a gardener grows his favorite fruit tree” 

(122). Western supporters of communist China believed in the creation of the “New Maoist 

Man”; Che Guevara, says Hollander, was dedicated to the creation of a “new socialist man” 

(198, 239). Hitler was described as “the great master of the education of his people,” who 

“has in a few years transformed our souls” (90).  

17. Hollander says that “the dictatorships which appealed to many Western intellectuals … 

were not ordinary authoritarian regimes but, as a rule, totalitarian ones, which proclaimed 

commitment to … the sweeping transformation of social institutions and even human 

nature” (16). 

18. Hollander quotes the journalist Walter Duranty on the Soviet reorganization of agriculture: 

“Future historians … may well regard the Russian struggle for collectivization as a heroic 

period in human progress … whether the villages preferred their dirt and ignorance to 

Progress or not, Progress would be thrust upon them” (124). 

19. Mao, says Hollander, “had little appreciation of intellectuals” (166). General Omar Torrijos 

of Panama, considered a “close friend” by writer Graham Greene, said: “intellectuals are 

like fine glass … which can be cracked by a sound” (260–261). 

20. The full quotation comes from a book Hollander cites about the French writer Romain 

Rolland: “By forging a community of mental and manual labor, the Soviets showed their 

understanding of the seminal role of the politically active writer, those ‘engineers of souls’ 

who helped to ‘inaugurate a more just, freer, better ordered humanity’” (135). The Cuban 

revolution, too, promised “a special relationship between the state and the intellectual” 

(228). Hollander also quotes Thomas Sowell about intellectuals in general: “their vision of 

the world is … a vision of themselves as a self-appointed vanguard, leading toward a better 

world” (13). 



Review of From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez  214 
 

Works Cited 

Bloom, Allan. “Interpretive Essay.” In The Republic of Plato. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: 

Basic Books, 1991. 

Lilla, Mark. “The Lure of Syracuse.” In The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals and Politics. New 

York: New York Review of Books, 2016. 

Madison, James. “No. 51: The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks 

and Balances Between the Different Departments.” In The Federalist Papers. Ed. Clinton 

Rossiter. New York: Signet, 2003. 

Newell, Waller R. Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror. New York: Cambridge 

University Press, 2016. 

Oakeshott, Michael. “Rationalism in Politics.” In Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. 

Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991. 


