Bøker av William Smaldone

Until his death in a Gestapo prison cell, Rudolf Hilferding was one of Europe's most prominent socialist theorists and politicians. A leading economic thinker in the European socialist movement and an important politician in the German Social Democratic Party, he served as Weimar finance minister at the height of the inflation of 1923 and again...

This accessible text offers a concise but comprehensive introduction to European socialism, which arose in the maelstrom of the industrial and democratic revolutions launched in the eighteenth century.

The stories of the individual men and women who led German Social Democracy's failed efforts to fend off the Nazi onslaught in 1933 have largely been lost in the wake of the cataclysmic war, the Holocaust, and the division of Europe that followed Hitler's victory. Confronting Hitler recovers their stories and places them at center stage. In a series of biographical essays focusing on the experiences of ten leading Social Democratic activists, Smaldone examines their defeat in 1933 from the perspective of individuals enmeshed in political struggle. This study reveals what aspects of these activists' lives were most important in shaping their political outlook during the republic's final crisis and it illustrates the key factors that guided their actions in the effort to keep the republic alive. In addition, the biographies raise the important issue of the degree to which the defeat of German Social Democracy in 1933 is comparable to the experiences of other democratic socialist movements in the twentieth century.