The Demigods

by Jean Lacouture

Lacouture's books on Indochina have a deservedly high reputation. This one, though part of it served as a Sorbonne doctoral thesis, displays wide but fragmentary scholarship stitched with speculative generalities. It is an ambitions study of personified, charismatic power, beginning with an abstract discussion, then examining four exemplars: Nasser, Bourgiba of Tunisia, Sihanouk, and Nkrumah. Lacouture tends to use the concept of ""a love affair between people and leader"" in too uncritical and unsubstantiated a way (then is hard put to explain why the people let their heroes fall with such equanimity). The chief-of-state aspect of personal rule is treated with only glancing policy analysis (he is especially vague and kind to Bourgiba in this respect). In discussing Nkrumah, Lacouture slides by his corruption. . . not, one feels, because he holds a brief for Nkrumah, but because it would introduce a realm of seedy political substance well beyond his emphasis on individual magnetism and