Book Reviews : The European Right. A Historical Survey. Edited by HANS ROGGER and EUGEN WEBER. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965. Pp. vi, 589. $9.50.)

• Published date: 01 March 1966
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296601900148
• Author: Francis D. Wormuth
• Date: 01 March 1966
• Subject Matter: Articles

192
The European Right. A Historical Survey. Edited by HANS ROGGER and EUGEN
WEBER. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965. Pp.
vi, 589. $9.50.)
This is an extremely useful book for students of political theory or political
parties and indeed for everyone concerned with politics. Eleven chapters by special-
ists describe the history of anti-parliamentary movements of the Right in as many
European countries in the past hundred years. Since the chapters average less than
fifty pages, they are impressionistic essays rather than exhaustive narratives. Richard
Oastler is omitted from the chapter on England, and the Dreyfus affair from the
chapter on France. Surprisingly, although corporativism appears as an economic
formula of the Right in almost every chapter, Rerum lVovarum and Quadragesimo
Anno are nowhere mentioned in the entire book.
In introductory and concluding essays the editors attempt to establish a socio-
logical framework. They entertain and reject Lipset’s typology of movements; this
is certainly inadequate, but they produce no coherent substitute. We are told that
neither nationalism nor fascism is necessarily of the Right, but these are the chief
topics of all the chapters. Probably it would have been wiser to rely for integration
on a general historical survey which interwove the themes of national tradition,
corporativism, authoritarianism, and anti-Semitism which run through all the move-
ments.
The origin, the direction, and the dynamics of these movements are easily
enough explained historically. Individualism, anti-clericalism, parliamentarism,
...