The drama of a leader who has apparently entrapped the minds of followers — whether it be Hitler or Mao Tse-tung, the Reverend Moon, the Ayatollah Khomeini, or the Reverend Jim Jones, with his power to produce mass suicide — this is a drama that often perplexes the outside observer. Headlines of such events present a troubling caution about the uneasy place of reason in human affairs, even in the modern world, and illuminate cases where independent perspective seems to dissolve. How does it happen?

Power, de Jouvenel (1945, p. 30) writes, is often a matter of inducing a habit of compliance. And so it is. But psychoanalysts and psychologists have gone further in clarifying, and empathizing