But I want to make an additional point. Extraordinary individuals may be
the products of accident, but their accomplishments--positive as well as neg-
ative--constitute an important part of human history. Think of the nine-
teenth century without Napoleon or Lincoln, the twentieth century without
Stalin, Hitler, or the Roosevelt family. In the service of an ideology, post-
modern critiques of leadership--critiques that question the role of the leader
or any claims of extraordinariness--risk obscuring a vital and enduring fact
of life.

Far from being a motley crew, the leaders were carefully and strategically
chosen in order to reinforce the argument of the book. I wanted to indicate,
through such examples, that the gap between a prototypical indirect leader
and a prototypical direct leader is not absolute; one can proceed in small steps
from an Einstein or a Woolf all the way to a Thatcher or a Gandhi. By the
same token, I wanted to show the ways in which stories must be altered, as
one moves from addressing a small and relatively homogeneous group (like a
set of scholars in a discipline or at a university) to a large and quite heteroge-
neous population (like a group of dispossessed individuals or the citizens of a
nation). While I could have chosen different instances of a category ( Henry
Ford instead of Alfred Sloan as the head of a corporation; Ronald Reagan
instead of Margaret Thatcher as the leader of a nation), the categories, and
the order in which they are presented, are integral to the points of the book.

Along with detailed portraits of eleven leaders, I also include a survey of
ten important political and military leaders of the twentieth century.
Moreover, the detailed information in the Appendices allows comparisons
between my eleven leaders and a relevant "control group."

Certainly I prefer certain leaders to others, and my sample may be slanted
to some extent in favor of individuals whom I admire. It is crucial, however,