(from the back) Charles Maurras, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler. Three different men, in three different countries. One was a narrowly religious, fiercely reactionary journalist. One a former Marxist converted to a doctrine of personal power and national glory. One a failed artist and ex-Army corporal with grandiose visions and a flair for public speaking. At other times, all would have been considered harmless cranks. But in a France split by the Dreyfus Case and then bled white by war...in an Italy cheated out of the spoils of a costly victory and rife with social unrest...in a Germany shamed by defeat and shattered by Depression...each of these men gave voice to the vast discontent and desire for radical solutions that seemed destined to plunge Europe into a new Dark Age. This book is the story of that tragic era. "The most important attempt to fuse philosophical and historical thought since Hannah Arendt's _Origins of Totalitarianism_...a magnificently thoughtful, deeply original analysis of a central facet of our historical experience." -Fritz Stern, Columbia University