Ian Kershaw’s latest book evaluates the leaders that shook and shaped our world

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• Title: Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe
• Author: Ian Kershaw
• Genre: History
• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Pages: 512

Let us now praise famous men. And one woman.

And then condemn half of them.

In Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe, the distinguished historian Ian Kershaw takes on the eternal question of the role of the individual in history. His quest takes us to mini-biographies and assessments of 12 leaders of the 20th century and prompts us to assess 10 decades that – as John Reed put it in his 1920 volume that dealt with one of these figures, Lenin – shook the world.

Indeed, how many centuries can claim the richness of, for better and very often for worse, of Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and de Gaulle – all on one continent, and all entering the world stage in the century’s first 40 years? Not, arguably, the 18th; a similar group necessarily would span continents, for it would include Washington and Jefferson along with Louis XIV, George III and Frederick the Great and Peter the Great. Perhaps only the 19th, with the presence of Napoleon, Garibaldi, Mazzini, Queen Victoria, Bismarck and Lincoln and Lord Durham, comes close.

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But the 20th century offers us inspiring leadership (Churchill, even de Gaulle), mass warfare and industrialized civilian killing (Hitler, Stalin), and global disruption (Lenin, Gorbachev) – and in Kershaw’s portraits, each about 30 pages, we are exposed both to a century pockmarked by war and to the enduring conundrums of the historian’s quest: What is greatness? Do leaders change the world or respond to great change in the world? Is war – which brought Lenin, Mussolini Hitler, Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Tito and Kohl to power– the principal engine of transformation on earth?

These will never be fully answered, but Kershaw gives us a guide: “The scope for individual impact is greatest in or immediately following huge political upheaval when existing strictures of rule break down or are destroyed.”

That’s a starting point, though Kershaw also argues that armed conflict does not singly make for greatness – a term he pointedly avoids. “Hitler and Mussolini proved terrible military leaders,” he tells us. He could have thrown in Churchill, whose military acumen has been under recent assault. Plus there is this counsel, reminding us of the limits of leadership:

“While the actions of the war leaders obviously paved the way for military success or failure, victory depended heavily upon forces beyond their individual control: economic might, geography, international relations, scale of armaments production and the ability to sustain huge armed forces for far longer than the enemy was able to do.”

Kershaw begins his tour of this hall of fame and infamy with Lenin, and from the start raises questions about his worthiness in this literary Madame Tussauds: He paled against Trotsky as the most dynamic revolutionary of the time; he wasn’t alone, or even at the forefront, of opposition to the tsar; and he had nothing to do with the outbreak of rebellion in February, 1917 – in short he was, in the estimation of Russia’s revolutionaries, “a little less than a prophet – a guru of revolutionary thinking and also the inspirational organizer of a revolutionary movement whose time has come.”

And yet. (This is the century of the “and yet” – not the weasel words of the historian, but the phrase that illuminates the complexity of the historian’s task.) And yet: “Without him the 20th century would have been different, if in ways we can only dimly imagine,” Kershaw writes. “Lenin made a greater impact on history than any other individual of his era. He was a prime maker of Europe’s 20th century.”

At this faraway distance from the Second World War, Mussolini – ”the first populist politician of the mass media age” – seems to sink into the position of an afterthought to Hitler. Kershaw puts us right, reminding us not to minimize “what a malign, cruel individual he was, the baseness of his character, the brutality of his politics and the assault on humanity that he directed as Italy’s leader.”

In that, Mussolini was prologue to Hitler, who stands as Kershaw’s most persuasive case study on the importance of preconditions to politics – and history.

“Without the searing impact of the First World War on Germany, Hitler would have remained a political nobody,” he writes. “Without the devastating impacts of the Great Depression of the early 1930s on Germany, Hitler would not have been thought of as a possible head of government.”

Stalin is harder to evaluate – ”a monstrous individual” whose “very monstrosity … made possible the wider victory of the Allies.” So, too, Churchill, who helped “preserve liberty, democracy and the rule of law in the western world” but whose racial views “belonged to a rapidly fading age.” Then there is de Gaulle, who kept alive the flame of France after 1940, moved the country into decolonization and created a government, the Fifth Republic, that has endured for decades. (One great omission: Not a word in these pages about de Gaulle’s role in roiling Canada with his 1967 “Vive le Quebec libre” from a Montreal balcony.)

Kershaw’s portraits remind us of the huge importance of Europe in a century that brought the United States to its greatest power, prestige and cultural influence, for no American leader, with the exception of Franklin Roosevelt, approaches the impact of these European figures. These sketches also remind us of the primacy of the 1939-1945 conflict, for his postwar leaders – Adenauer (“one of western Europe’s outstanding statesmen”), Tito (“intelligent, self-confident, resolute, a dynamic man of action”), Thatcher (“unusually sure of her views”), even Gorbachev (’the towering European personality of the second half of the 20th century” and Kohl (author of “a pivotal moment for Europe”) – reacted to a world Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill and de Gaulle created.

Two points linger from Kershaw’s tour guide through this tortured and tortuous century. These figures remain so dominant in our world view that, even in the century that followed, none requires a first name; their surnames still send ripples across our consciousness, and across history. And the presence of Hitler and Stalin – and let us here add the names Franco and Tito – make the reader, and people across the globe, wary of leadership at all.