Introduction

Extremist leaders often end up either as heroes or villains. Sometimes they can be both at the same time, depending on what you are reading or whom you are talking to. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is usually considered a villain in the West, but to many people for a long, long time he was a hero. Mahatma Gandhi was often considered an extremist villain by the British government, as Nelson Mandela was to the apartheid South African government. Slobodan Milosevic is largely considered a villain now, but not by everyone, and he was once a hero to many Serbs.

One reason extremist leaders are either villains or heroes is that they have big goals – like a Communist society, independence for India, a democratic South Africa, or Greater Serbia. Leaders with big goals or radical agendas obviously are going to come into conflict with other groups in society who don't share those goals. The conflicts between communism and capitalism, independence and British rule for India, black votes and white rule in South Africa, and Serbian aspirations and those of the Croatians, Albanians, and Slovenians are obvious.

Our point of view is that extremists are rational. Their goals may be bigger than those of most of us, but from an economist's point of view, rationality just means that, whatever the goal, a person chooses the best means to achieve it. The goals themselves are neither rational nor irrational; we just take them as given.