Charles S Maier

"Winner of the 1998 Book Award, New England Historical Association" Charles S. Maier teaches history at Harvard University. He is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, Director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and Chairman of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies. His books include Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I and The Unmasterable Past: History,...

We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era's darker impulses-ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism-revived? “The Project-State and Its Rivals”...