When I first proposed to write a book about Margaret Thatcher, I had a smaller book in mind. The title I proposed was Coal and Iron. I wanted to look at one episode in Margaret Thatcher’s career: the crushing of the National Union of Mineworkers between 1984 and 1985. To me, this was the most interesting story from her time in power. But publishers did not agree. The proposal was rejected everywhere I sent it; only Basic Books took an interest, but they asked me to broaden my focus. They wanted a proper biography of Margaret Thatcher, which they would sell as part of their series about the significance of various historic figures. The best-known in that series is Christopher Hitchens’ Why Orwell Matters. Thus my proposal became a book titled Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. While it was always clear to me that she was an interesting and significant 20th century figure, I couldn’t bring myself to conclude with certanly that she mattered in quite the same way Orwell did. It was, I thought, too soon to tell; and in the conclusion of the book, I nearly said so:

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I do not propose to appeal to judgments only time can make. No one now asks whether Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt were historical figures of enduring significance. They were judged as massive during their lifetimes; these judgments proved correct. But we should remember that a similar assessment was once made of Chiang Kai-shek. He was believed by his contemporaries to be  “the savior of mankind, the greatest person in the whole world, the lighthouse of freedom, the Great Wall of democracy.” He bustled and strutted over the world stage; he was the darling of American conservatives and a fulcrum of great power politics. Nonetheless, professional historians of China apart, no one now thinks of Chiang as one of the pivotal figures of human history. No one today would write a book titled Why Chiang Matters. I assume that quite a number of my readers will need to go to Wikipedia to remind themselves who he was.

Will Margaret Thatcher be placed among the pantheon of politicians with enduring significance? Or will she pass, like Chiang, into the fog of history? I cannot tell you. No one can. I can only tell you why she matters to us now.

Begin with a broader question: What do political figures who matter have in common? Why do some become larger than life? Here is my answer. The political figures who matter have two rare gifts. First, they are able to perceive the gathering of historical forces in a way their contemporaries are unable to do. What do I mean by “the gathering of historical forces?” I mean, they are able to sense the big picture. Lenin was able to discern a convergence of trends in Tsarist Russia — the migration of the peasants, the rise of revolutionary consciousness, the weakness of the Tsarist government, the debilitation inflicted upon Russia by the First World War—and to recognize what this convergence implied: The old order could now be toppled — not merely reformed, but destroyed. Tsar Nicholas II could not perceive this. It is thus that Lenin now matters and Nicholas II does not.

Second, when promoted to power, those who matter are able to master these historical forces. Chiang understood perfectly that China was vulnerable to communism and what communism in China would mean. He perceived the forces of history. But he was unable, for all his energy and efforts, to master them. And so, tragically, he does not matter.

Churchill perceived the forces of history and then mastered them. When Churchill met Hitler in 1933, he wrote immediately in his diary that the Führer was “glittering with intelligence.” It was an astonishingly perceptive judgment. It was at the time singular: Hitler was widely regarded outside of Germany as a buffoon. Thereafter, Churchill was steadfast in his warnings. He perceived the unique danger of Nazism when others could not see it or refused to believe it. When at last Churchill acquired power, he discharged his responsibilities in such a fashion as to gain him immortality.

When politicians matter, they matter because of these gifts.

Thatcher had these gifts. She perceived — as did many of her contemporaries — that Britain was in decline. She perceived that the effects of Marxist doctrine upon Britain had been pernicious. But unlike her contemporaries, she perceived that Britain’s decline was not inevitable. And she perceived too that socialism was not — as widely believed — irreversible.

Simultaneously, she sensed a wider and related tide in history that no other leader in the Western world, apart from Reagan, sensed at all. She understood that the Soviet Union was far from the invulnerable colossus it was imagined to be. She sensed, in fact, that it was unable to satisfy the basic needs of its own population. It was corrupt, moribund, and doomed.

Having perceived the gathering of historical forces, she mastered them. She reversed the advance of socialism in Britain, proving both that a country can be ripped from a seemingly over-determined trajectory and that it takes only a single figure with an exceptionally strong will to do so. She did not single-handedly cause the Soviet empire to crumble, but she landed some of the most devastating punches of the Cold War and, extraordinarily, emerged unbloodied from the fight.

There is an even larger sense in which Margaret Thatcher perceived and mastered the forces of history.

Since the eighteenth century, two views of political life have vied for dominance in the Western world. They are views about the hypothetical state of nature — the condition of mankind in the absence of government. The first view is that of Thomas Hobbes: The life of man in the state of nature, he wrote, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The second is that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”

Hobbes wrote Leviathan during the English civil wars of the seventeenth century. Such horrors as he had seen, he believed, arose because of the absence of government, and in particular, the absence of a government powerful enough to overawe men who would otherwise be fractious and dominated by self-interest.

Leviathan is a defense of a central and commanding power in political life. It is sometimes understood, for this reason, as an argument for totalitarianism. A close study of Hobbes suggests little to encourage this view. The form of this central power was to Hobbes largely a matter of indifference. He favored a monarchy, but this is not his key point. His key point is that there is a choice between anarchy and a powerful state. And since, as he could plainly see, anarchy was awful, he chose a powerful state.

This powerful state is the Leviathan, and it is a Leviathan because it possesses — in theory, at least — a monopoly on violence. Leviathan to this day remains a critical justification for the existence and the primacy of the nation-state. This was a primacy Thatcher sought instinctively and ferociously to preserve.

It is perverse that Hobbes is widely seen as providing a defense of absolutism in political life, for the historical trail between his thought and the unspeakable evils of the twentieth century is almost impossible to map. Neither Lenin, nor Stalin, nor Hitler, nor Mao thought in his terms; they did not justify their rule by an appeal to a state of nature in which men would find themselves enemies to one another. These were men, instead, who had read Rousseau.

It is Rousseau’s view of the state of nature, not Hobbes’s, to which the great and awful events that began with the Terror and ended with the Gulag may be traced. In Rousseau’s view, man is born both good and noble; if he finds himself in chains, it is because these chains have been imposed by government. A syllogism is implied. If these chains have been imposed by government, these chains must be snapped. If these chains must be snapped, violence must be employed — otherwise, men would free themselves. If violence must be employed, it must be employed without restraint. Every revolutionary movement from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first has seen the logic of this position: It is inexorable.

I do not believe Margaret Thatcher was a careful student of Hobbes — or of Rousseau, for that matter. To judge from her autobiography, she too misunderstood Hobbes’s point. Raisa Gorbachev, apparently, displayed an interest in the copy of Leviathan on Thatcher’s bookshelf during her visit to Chequers; Thatcher worried this might signify that Mrs. Gorbachev was a particularly hard-line communist. But while she did not properly understand what Hobbes had written, Thatcher was, nonetheless, in instinctive agreement with his views. Political life, she believed, must be organized around nation-states. These states must possess a monopoly on violence. The authority of the nation-state must not be compromised from the outside, by transnational bodies such as the European Union, or from the inside, by groups such as the National Union of Mineworkers.

Thatcher’s career may be viewed as a series of rebukes to those who would seek to diminish the authority of the nation-state and to reduce its monopoly on violence. She is thus not only one of the greatest enemies of socialism the world has known, but one of the greatest enemies of anarchy, as well. Again, she perceived the forces of history, and again, she mastered them.

That word brings me to my next point. Thatcher was enormously prescient. But she was not supernaturally prescient, and it is a mistake to assign to her the status of a secular saint. On some issues, she was simply wrong. Iraq was one of them. By “wrong,” I do not mean the invasion of Iraq was ultimately wrong. I don’t know yet whether it was, and this is not the place for this debate. I mean that she did not weigh properly the real risk that invading Iraq would lead to anarchy, and she did not foresee what would be required to contain that anarchy. In this sense, she got it wrong.

On other issues — critical issues — she was bizarrely oblivious. This is often the case, even among the political figures who matter most. If some politicians are given the gift of seeing into the loom of time, they are rarely given the gift of seeing it whole. Churchill saw with astonishing prescience the danger posed by the Nazi regime; in 1946, he saw with the same prescience the descent of the Iron Curtain. About India, however, he was blind, and he was blind again in thinking the call for social reform in postwar Britain could be ignored.

The world’s attention now is focused on the conflict with radical Islam. Rightly so. But let us be frank: About this, Margaret Thatcher was blind. In this regard, she doesn’t matter. I looked everywhere for evidence that she had even considered the issue carefully. I could not find it.

A final point. She matters now because her battles are not over. For a brief, perishable moment during the 1990s, it was possible to imagine that the great questions of history had been settled. But history did not, as Francis Fukuyama predicted, come to an end. Quite the contrary.

Socialism was buried prematurely. This fact has been little remarked, precisely because the world’s attention has in recent times been focused on the dramatic rise of Islamic extremism. Amid this anxiety it has been forgotten that the appeal of socialism as a political program is ultimately far wider, more seductive, and more enduring than political Islam. To the vast majority of the secular world, Islam is alien and will always be alien. Islamic law is widely and correctly perceived as a recipe for immiseration. This is not so of socialism, a political movement that like fascism embodies the religious impulse in secular form and is thus an ideology destined to rise again and again from the grave.

Wherever men are miserable — and that is almost everywhere — they will be vulnerable to those who promise Utopia, for if Hobbes expressed some portion of the truth, Rousseau expressed some portion of the truth as well. There is no inconsistency between the declaration that life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short and the declaration that man is everywhere in chains. That this observation is bleak is no reason not to think it correct. If for no other reason, I doubt the promises of socialism will ever lose their capacity to inspire.

She perceived these forces, and for a time she mastered them: This is why she matters to history. These forces are still at work; they must again be mastered.

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As time passes, I am inclined to suspect her achievements mattered less than I had thought. Jeremy Corbyn may well be elected head of the UK Labour Party next month. If so, it doesn’t seem an exaggeration to say that Thatcher’s achievements did nothing more than slow Britain’s inexorable decline; they most certainly didn’t end the debate.

In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, following the launch of his environment manifesto, Corbyn reveals that he wants to reinstate Clause Four, the hugely symbolic commitment to socialism scrapped under Tony Blair 20 years ago, in its original wording or a similar phrase that weds the Labour Party to public ownership of industry.

In surveying our presidential aspirants — from, Jeb, Walker, Fiorina and Marco to Hillary, Trump, Warren, and Sanders —  I look for such things as a fluent mastery of facts and policy, for the quality of being impeccably well-briefed. These, at least, should be the most minimal of qualifications for the office; when absent they suggest to me a candidate’s laziness, a contempt for the office he or she proposes to hold, and a frightening lack of awareness that the job they propose to do is difficult and serious — that the world’s future will depend upon them.

But I look as well for something more difficult to measure: Do any of these candidates seem to have a gift for perceiving the gathering of historical forces? For discerning which ones are truly important? Are they are able to grasp the big picture? If so, do they have the ability not only correctly to appraise, but to master those forces? Do they realize how much the world is changing, and how quickly — and do they understand why? Do they inspire in me confidence that they will know which battles are the ones to pick — and that they have what it takes to win them?

Do you see those abilities in any of the candidates, be they Republicans or Democrats?