In the very first sentence of “Strongmen,” its author, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, declares that her book “reflects a lifetime of thinking about authoritarian rulers.” This revelation of an extensive personal timeline of toil—a lifetime, no less—places a burden on Ms. Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Many readers—and not just the most exacting among them—are likely to say to themselves: “This book had better be good.”
Alas, misgivings surface at the outset, when Ms. Ben-Ghiat provides a list of her “protagonists.” They span from “Mussolini to the Present” (as the book’s subtitle states) and include, apart from Il Duce (about whom Ms. Ben-Ghiat has written elegantly in her previous books) such stalwarts of the strongman species as Hitler, Franco, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin. Many will take delight in the fact, which others will find irksome, that Donald Trump is also on her list, whose members number 17 in all. Of these, only three—Somalia’s onetime dictator Siad Barre, Gaddafi and Saddam—are not of the political right. And of those three, only Barre might be called a straightforward leftist. Gaddafi professed a “revolutionary” ideology never before known to man; and Saddam, an ostensibly pan-Arab Baathist, reposed greater faith in terror than in dogma.
