While I share a healthy skepticism of the cultural politics of most Complit departments (as Terry Eagleton says, reinterpreting the role of women in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence doesn't exactly emancipate factory workers), this topic needs more clarification. Besides all the relevant external circumstances that had an exponentially greater effect on these leaders' lives than their field of matriculation, this doesn't describe what it would be about disciplines like literary theory and philosophy that would make for incapable leaders. I know plenty of patent attorneys and ambulance chasers who would make awful revolutionaries; and the immigration and human rights lawyers are no less gassy than your average postcolonial theorist.