Other than in President G. W. Bush's denunciation of global terrorism as fascism, recent scholarly attempts to understand the rise and impact of fascism have provided rather sophisticated insights into why Europe in the first half of the twentieth century was drowned in terror, dictatorship, and violence. Some outstanding studies, such as Michael Mann's sociology of fascists, Robert Paxton's analysis of power and coalition building, and Robert Griffin's notion of fascism as a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism, have tested new approaches or offer provocative theses to understand what went wrong. MacGregor Knox, though, is more reserved. Refraining from cultural and sociological incentives, skeptical about “generic ‘models’” (p. 15), and doubtful of generalized views on the broad range of European fascist movements, his two-part work aims at a traditional comparative narrative of political, social, and ideological developments and decisions in those two countries where fascist regimes proved most powerful, Germany and Italy. Only the first half of his study is published and under review here. It covers the rise and empowerment of Mussolini's Fascism and Hitler's National Socialism until 1922 and 1933, respectively. Thus, it does not yet explore the most decisive difference of both regimes: the fact that only Nazism developed uniquely genocidal dynamics.

To “clarify the degree and levels of uniqueness and similarity of the two cases” (p. 15), Knox goes back into the nineteenth century. Deeply shaped by political cleavages, Italy and Germany failed to integrate their Catholic and Socialist subcultures, and the dominant “national” political cultures were not able to adhere broad social bases to shore up their state power (p. 136 f.). Whereas Italy suffered more from economic and social unevenness and regional fractures and proved less successful in adjusting to mass politics, Germany developed the more radical and decisive nationalist ideologies. Avoiding deterministic escapes into old ideas of a German Sonderweg, Knox still puts much blame on the role of Germany's social and political militarism and the military's as well as the middle classes' “manic self-confidence, ingrained gambling instinct, and strategic autism” (p. 139). Only World War I, though, unleashed the power of those ideas and forces that enabled fascism. Germany experienced the sharper contrast of nationalist euphoria at the beginning of the war and the most disruptive and humiliating experiences at its end, although nationalist camps in both Germany and Italy adhered to conspiracy theories to explain the national disasters, to front generation myths to compensate for them, and to leadership cults to overcome them. At the same time, democratic and parliamentary forces were stronger in Germany than in Italy. Whereas the Italian socialists flew into domestic violence right after the war and thus provoked the alliance of monarchy and fascism, the Weimar coalition of Social Democrats, political Catholicism, and Liberalism succeeded in barring the Hitler movement much longer. Finally, the bankruptcy of the parliamentarian regime gave way to fascism as well.

Knox neither promises nor offers new insights. Whoever looks for a reliable and detailed narrative account of Italy's and Germany's history from the nineteenth century “to the threshold of power” in 1922 and 1933 is well served by this book. Teachers of modern European, German, or Italian history classes will appreciate numerous excellent statistical figures. Other readers may miss any serious attempt to explore the meaning and impact of cultural and social practices as they have been stressed by recent studies on the topic. How could Italian Fascists and German Nazis be so successful in forging violent communities and movements? How did ideologies and myths find their ways into the minds of masses of people, and how did they fuel the actions of these people? Knox's agenda neither addresses such questions, nor does this volume pay much attention to what actually separated both movements the most, that is, their different relation to racial thought or, in a more general sense, their different handling of the tandem of inclusion and exclusion. Nazism did not only, as has been often said, prove most successful in synthesizing diverse ideological strands such as imperialism, anticommunism, anti-Semitism, eugenics, technological modernism, leadership cults, and totalitarian state philosophies, but its ideology and its political practice were also grounded in a most consequent and most violent combination of social inclusion and social exclusion. To be sure, these particular capacities of Nazism gelled only after 1933. We are curious about how the second volume deals with the accelerating divergence of Nazism and Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.