To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships

MacGregor Knox

sept 2007 · Cambridge University Press

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To the Threshold of Power is the first volume of a two-part work that seeks to explain the origins and dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. It lays a foundation for understanding the Nazi and Fascist regimes through parallel investigations of Italian and German society, institutions, and national myths; the supreme test of the First World War; and the post-1918 struggles from which the Fascist and National Socialist movements emerged. It emphasizes two principal sources of movement: the nationalist mythology of the intellectuals and the institutional culture and agendas of the two armies, especially the Imperial German Army and its Reichswehr successor. The book's climax is the cataclysm of 1914-18 and the rise and triumph of militarily organized radical nationalist movements - Mussolini's Fasci di combattimento and Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party - dedicated to the perpetuation of the war and the overthrow of the post-1918 world order.

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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.