Author Description

Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin were three tyrants, the effects of whose brutal regimes are still with us. Each attained absolute power, and misused it in a gargantuan fashion, leaving in his wake a trail of hatred, devastation, and death. This remarkable study, while it examines the private and public lives of these three megalomaniacal leaders, is neither history nor biography. Rather, it takes the reader into the terra incognita of relationships between the strange lives of Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin and the ferocious, bizarre political systems they established. In A Brotherhood of Tyrants, D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb uncover manic depression as a hidden cause of dictatorship, war, and mass killing. Comparing Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin, they describe a number of behavioral similarities supporting the contention that a specific psychiatric disorder - manic depression - can be one of the key factors in a political pathology such as tyranny. Combining familiar facts from history and psychiatry, Hershman and Lieb have created a new theory suggesting that power and madness are linked by a mental disorder so variable in its effects that it condemns some people to twilight existences in mental hospitals while it propels others to every imaginable success. Focusing on these three dictators of modern history, A Brotherhood of Tyrants argues that manic depression has always been, and continues to be, a critical factor in compelling some individuals to seek political power and to become tyrants. It powerfully demonstrates how this disorder is the source of many of the typical characteristics - including grandiosity and megalomania - of a tyrannical personality, and provides a manual for the identification of the psychotic tyrant. In an epilogue, Hershman and Lieb outline the clinical signs of manic depression as described in the classic studies of the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926). The authors apply these clinical signs and symptoms to the pathologies of four notorious mass killers of recent times: David Koresh, Jeffrey Dahmer, Jim Jones, and Colin Ferguson. Hershman and Lieb argue that if these individuals had been identified in time as manic depressives, they could possibly have been successfully treated and hundreds of innocent lives could have been saved.