Benjamin's second, more long-term project traces its roots back to his earliest research in political science, which engaged with the role of charisma and ideas of leadership throughout the history of Modern Europe. Originally, this project began as a way to expand our historical understanding of the German idea of Führertum, and how manifestations of this worked across the political spectrum to buttress Germans' acceptance of the Nazi dictatorship under the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler. More recently, Benjamin has expanded his interests in this topic beyond Germany to explore what links we can find between European countries during the interwar period which emphasize the importance of particular types of leadership to the success or survival of the nation. In the context of the two world wars, many Europeans, not only Germans, came to believe that national leadership required men (and indeed, these figures were valued for their masculine traits) who could unite their nations, harness the unified power of the "people," and make the necessary decisions about which groups were not part of the national body, and therefore needed the appropriate harsh treatment. Rooted in Max Weber's theory of political leadership and charisma and comparative intellectual debates across Europe around the image of the "strong man" and bonapartist traditions, this project seeks to understand how Europeans came to value these dangerous, dictatorial types of leadership, with today's troubling descent towards authoritarianism on the continent and in the U.S. firmly in mind.