There has recently been no lack of historians or teams of historians taking on the challenge of a global communist history. The resulting publications include some of exceptional quality, and in finding a space within this field there is much to be said for bringing to it some distinctive theme or line of approach. The global idea of the Communist Party seems just perfect and immediately arouses the reader's interest. The party, after all, even more than the revolution, was arguably the central defining feature of communist politics. Through all the well-known vicissitudes of strategy, culture, and identity, the party was the indispensable element through which communists were mobilized, disciplined, and inspired. At the same, its persistence as an idea was conditioned on that it hadto be adapted, in practice, to a staggering variety of contexts, to which the original Leninist template was better suited in some cases than in others. As a structuring concept for a comparative and transnational communist history, the party idea could hardly be bettered.

Unfortunately, A. James McAdams's account does not particularly engage with these questions and its title arouses expectations that it does not entirely fulfil. Although, of course, he does not pass over What Is To Be Done?, McAdams is not much interested in theories of the party, or of the vanguard party. Nor is he much interested in either the classic texts on parties, like Robert Michels, or in the more recent comparative literature on party types and systems. There's not much either on the sociology of communist politics, or on the mystique of the party and its disciplines which was so central to the “appeals of communism” in its heyday. McAdams writes of the “youthful idealists, intellectuals, artisans, religious and ethnic minorities, and women's activists” for whom the idea of the party exercised a compelling attraction (5). Nevertheless, he has almost nothing to say about this aspect of communist politics, or the extensive literature to which it has given rise.

What he provides instead is a loosely-structured narrative history of communism. Its scope is certainly impressive. Beginning with European workers’ movements predating even Karl Marx, it then proceeds through the rise of social democracy to the first articulations of the Bolsheviks’ Communist Party idea. Further chapters deal with Cuba, China, the international communist movement, and the different phases of communist rule in the USSR and its east European satellites. The volume concludes with the exhaustion of the party idea and the collapse of the regimes animated by it through loss of any “will to stay alive” (498).

McAdams's writing is lively and jargon-free, and any non-specialist reader would find this an excellent point of entry into the subject. What the specialist may find missing is any distinctive analysis or sense of thematic development. The interplay of party and personality might have been one such theme. McAdams writes early on of the “decisive impact of the personalities” who shaped the party's different forms (12), and he returns to the theme of personality in his concluding comments. Nevertheless, the insight is not then systematically developed, for example in relation to the leader cults in which the troubled and complex relationship between party and individual was conspicuously demonstrated. Even the chapter so promisingly entitled “The Charismatic Leader and the Party” is more like a narrative overview of the Cuban Revolution focusing on Fidel Castro. Though McAdams insists on the distinctiveness of Castro's charismatic leadership style, he does not support the claim by reference to other communist leaders nor any explanation offered as to why (and how) charismatic leadership should have been allowed or encouraged in some political circumstances but not in others. One may wonder whether there was a regional tradition of radicalized military figures that also included the communist Prestes as well as Hugo Chávez and the obvious competitors of the authoritarian right.

Unfortunately, McAdams's conception of an “interpretive political history” (ix) does not really extend to such matters. No single author could possibly match the expertise of the teams assembled for other similar projects, and in many aspects McAdams's account seems rather heavily weighted towards an older, pre-1989 scholarship. Where the single-authored monograph can more than compensate is by the force of the single interpretative voice that holds the whole account together. This, however, is essentially a well-executed narrative history based on secondary readings, which in some aspects of the story have been rather superseded.