There is no shortage of published work about Subcomandante Marcos, leader of Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). He is probably the most famous Latin American revolutionary since Che Guevara. Although the EZLN's military and substantive accomplishments were minor and fleeting, Marcos's skillful writing, dramatic flair, and charismatic genius propelled him onto an international stage.

Daniela di Piramo's book begins with a puzzle, but not the one you might expect, that is, how the leader of a movement with so little to show for itself became so famous. Rather, the author wants us to discard the idea that Marcos and the EZLN should be judged by conventional standards of success. Zapatista politics, she argues, “define ‘success’ in terms of quality of the political process rather than outcome” (p. 178)—a process that is egalitarian, nonhierarchical, participatory, and nondeterminative (that is, it proposes no predetermined destination). The puzzle, therefore, is whether charismatic authority can facilitate such a process. Ultimately, di Piramo concludes that it cannot. The personalistic element of charisma inevitably strangles the egalitarian vision.

The author is at her best in analyzing Marcos's discourse and dramatic strategies from the perspective of political theory. She brings to bear not only an impressive knowledge of the voluminous Marcos output but also the work of a wide range of conventional political theorists to analyze many of the concepts deployed, including identity, democracy, and dignity. These are useful contributions.

The efforts of di Piramo to examine the effectiveness of charismatic authority are somewhat less successful. It is fair, in principle, to ask us to judge Marcos by his own standards for success; it is even fair to ask us to believe that he is sincere when he describes his goals. As the author points out, if he used this cover story to get something else, he clearly failed. However, her empirical chapters draw exclusively on Marcos' writings, published interviews of Marcos, and some historical sources. She does not attempt to determine whether the Zapatistas (or anyone else) actually created egalitarian, nonhierarchical, participatory, and nondeterminative communities as a result of Marcos' ideas; it is hard even to imagine how one would do so.

Instead, di Piramo credits Marcos with “relative success” based on the fact that Marcos' notoriety bought the movement protection from suppression by the Mexican military, resources and support from outside Chiapas, and a platform to broadcast its message about indigenous rights, social justice, and participation (p. 77; emphasis in the original).

These are not new or controversial claims. One need only compare the fate of the EZLN to the fate of a contemporaneous guerrilla movement that emerged in the Mexican state of Guerrero two years after the EZLN, called the Ejército Popular Revolucionario (ever heard of it?). Marcos held the EZLN together as the EPR disintegrated and disappeared under military pressure. Clearly, the EPR needed better writers. Yet Marcos's accomplishments still represent a fairly low bar for success, especially when we compare them to the movement's stated goals, or to the real needs of the indigenous.

Then things get worse, as di Piramo describes Marcos's angst-ridden attempts to escape the seductive traps of charismatic authority, to avoid becoming the celebrity, the caudillo, or the revolutionary vanguard and thus undermine the goal of an egalitarian society. The lure of celebrity is present from the beginning. Of all the masked guerrillas on January 1, 1994, the media most wanted to interview Marcos: He was funnier, more articulate, more quotable. Many of the indigenous leaders spoke poor Spanish (if any). If he agreed to their requests, the movement got more attention—but Marcos loomed ever larger as the singular (nonindigenous) leader. This was especially problematic because the last thing the Zapatistas wanted was to recreate the pattern of a white caudillo seeming to make decisions for indigenous followers.

Likewise, Marcos came from a Marxist background; as a result, di Piramo argues, the lure of vanguard leadership was particularly dangerous. Thus, he defended the concept of mandar obedeciendo—“to lead by obeying.” Directions come from the people. “Leaders” obey these directions or are replaced. A better term for “leader” here might be “delegate” or “factor”—someone with no independent discretion. Secondly, the movement claimed not to know where the revolution is headed. There is no stated destination, not socialism, not democracy, nothing (pp. 154–56). The movement must be both “leader-less and solution-less” (p. 178).

The core element in Marcos' efforts to avoid personalism, however, was his adoption of the Marcos pseudonym and the ski mask. Anyone, theoretically, could be Marcos. Yet as he himself admitted, this was not sufficient; Marcos as a masked leader became more recognizable and iconic than the individual behind the mask would have been.

In short, di Piramo argues, Marcos tried as hard as he could to avoid letting his charisma dominate the transformative movement he sought to start. And yet, “charismatic authority remains just as much an obstacle as a facilitator of political change.” Marcos was trapped between the “explicit egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism of his message and the potential for his role to become a full-blown exercise in personalism” (p. 179). The only way out of the trap, she suggests, is to limit charismatic authority to brief periods—to kill (figuratively) the charismatic leader (p. 180). Charismatic authority helped the Zapatista vision survive and spread, but prevented it from achieving its goal of an egalitarian society.

This conclusion seems a bit facile and even unfair to Marcos. The failure to achieve an egalitarian transformation through a form of personalistic leadership may result not so much from the difficulty of taking the person out of personalism as from the challenges of the vision itself. A recent example demonstrates the point: The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 gained worldwide attention with its sit-ins and its denunciation of greedy capitalists. Like zapatismo, it sought to be a leaderless movement and it consciously avoided imposing any single solution. Unlike the Zapatistas, it avoided the trap of charismatic authority. But the ending was the same, or worse: Lacking a Marcos, the movement died quickly and left less of a footprint.

If the message determined its fate rather than the type of authority used to sell it, then one must question the generalizability of di Piramo's pessimistic conclusion. The author sets up her case as a “most likely” case for success: a charismatic leader who actually tried not to dominate the egalitarian movement. If we invert the story to highlight the type of message, then this is a case of a message with little or no place for leadership. Asking charismatic authority to promote this kind of message makes it a least-likely case for success. The role of charismatic authority in promoting transformative social projects that have a place for leadership might be different.

Yet not everything in political science is, or should be, about generalization. Daniela di Piramo has given us a fascinating literary biography of a fascinating man, embedded in crucial questions about how we should live together in society and about the limits of personal leadership, even for uniquely talented individuals. This is worth reading.