To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33

MacGregor Knox has served as Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science since 1994. He was educated at Harvard College (B.A., 1967) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1977), and has also taught at the University of Rochester (United States). His writings deal with the wars and dictatorships of the savage first half of the twentieth century and with contemporary international and strategic history. They include Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941 (1982); The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War (ed., with Williamson Murray and Alvin Bernstein) (1994); Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (2000); Hitler's Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940–43 (2000); and The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 (ed., with Williamson Murray) (2001). Between his undergraduate and graduate studies he spent three years in the U.S. Army, and served in the Republic of Vietnam (1969) as rifle platoon leader with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

'This superb study stands alone as a deep comparison of the origins of the rise of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany. Reaching back to the early nineteenth century, Knox's book provides a detailed, thoughtful, and provocative analysis of the political, economic, and social structures in both countries that led to the catastrophes of the twentieth century. In my view it is the best account of the rise to power and the relationship of both movements to the Great War that has ever been done. Lively, pointed, and gripping, the book will surely become a classic.' Isabel Hull, Cornell University

• Introduction: dictatorship in the age of mass politics; Part I. The Long Nineteenth Century, 1789–1914: 1. Latecomers; 2. Italy and Germany as nation-states, 1871–1914; Part II. From War to Dictatorship, 1914–1933: 3. The synthesis of violence and politics, 1914–1918; 4. Kampfzeit: the road to radical nationalist victory, 1919–1933; Conclusion: into the radical national future: inheritances and prospects of the new regimes.