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"How liberals, conservatives and reactionaries cooperated to neutralize progressives and rescue bourgeois Europe after WWI is this book’s story. A huge, fact-filled product of archival scholarship, it provides an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) examination of political processes in Italy, France and Germany between 1919 and 1929, focusing on elites, interest groups and classes. The conflicts and maneuverings among and within these sets of actors form one part of the drama.
What fascinated me, however, are the accounts of how they overcame their mutual antagonisms in pursuit of one overriding goal, namely containment of the Left—meaning not only communists, but also social democrats.
In doing so, politicians followed rules of parliamentary and electoral procedure. But the outcome for democracy was suicidal. Rescuing bourgeoisie sooner or later meant submitting to fascism, a force carried on widespread dissatisfaction with a corrupted, ineffective bourgeois elite."
– David Sogge

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