The role of great leaders in history has been a thorny issue that has troubled many social scientists and historians. Are the so-called great men the driving spirit of History, as Hegel put it, or are they instruments of History’s mission, to bring here Marx? There is no recipe for this conundrum, and the formula “either… or” does not work well for understanding the making of dictatorships, whose actions and policies affect the lives of millions. This is the message of our book.

Of course, when discussing “great men” or “great leaders,” we did not give the term a positive value understood through the parameters of progress as defined since the Enlightenment. With this, we do not join the post-modern chorus that rejects progress. Nor do we join those who think of Western modes of government as exclusively based on punishment and discipline, while considering as a fallacy the vision of democracy as a system of the people, for the people, from the people. In our book, we limit “greatness” to the impact extremely powerful individuals, who use their power in pursuing their goals, have on society, both in the present and future.

Tyrants, including men like Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-Dong, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Ceaușescu, Enver Hoxha, Tito, or Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Pinochet, and others less famous, fall into this category. They were all men coming from humble backgrounds who, in the course of the 20^th century, climbed to the top of power, determined to revolutionize and shape their societies according to prefabricated ideas, organized in the form of ideologies. The American political scientist, Kenneth Jowitt, has called the emergence of this type of leader the “Leninist Phenomenon,” which is the top-down transformation of societies by a selected group of extremely disciplined and fanatical revolutionaries.

After the takeover, they built their governing system based on the model of their parties, aiming to politicize every sector of life. Theirs were tyrannies of ideas that neglected the platitudes of everyday life, putting people on scaffolds and asking them to neglect and sacrifice themselves for the sake of the leaders’ ideals. The renowned German historian, Ernst Nolte, warned in the 1980s that Nazism cannot be understood without the Bolshevik Revolution. The emergence of Fascism and Nazism was a direct response to Lenin’s triumph in Russia.

They did not emerge in a vacuum but rather in a polarized ideological field. This book is part of a larger conversation that is taking place today, especially about the strengthening of the extreme right-wing parties. Such a phenomenon is not isolated but related to the advancement of the extreme-left agendas, which attack all the pillars of liberal democracy. We can draw important lessons from Enver Hoxha’s tyranny and tiny Albania that go way beyond their size because they teach us a non-local, timeless experience. My training in world, European, and Balkan history and my wide research in these fields helped me to contextualize the character of Hoxha temporally and approach him from a global perspective. 

Ongoing thread. More from Artan R. Hoxha to follow.