Paul Hollander is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts. Born in Budapest, Hollander earned his BA from the London School of Economics and Political Science and his PhD from Princeton University, New Jersey. He received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, and was a Visiting Scholar several times at the Hoover Institution. He has published fifteen books, most of them dealing with communist systems, totalitarianism, political violence, extremism, propaganda, and the political attitude of Western intellectuals.

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, political dictators were not only popular in their own countries, but were also admired by numerous highly educated and idealistic Western intellectuals. The objects of this political hero-worship included Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and more recently Hugo Chavez, among others. This book seeks to understand the sources of these misjudgements and misperceptions, the specific appeals of particular dictators, and the part played by their charisma, or pseudo-charisma. It sheds new light not only on the political disposition of numerous Western intellectuals - such as Martin Heidegger, Eric Hobsbawm, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Susan Sontag and George Bernard Shaw - but also on the personality of those political leaders who encouraged, and in some instances helped to design, the cult surrounding their rise to dictatorship.