ABSTRACT
PREVIEW The social stress created by rapid industrialization and urbanization, together with the economic and political turmoil at the end of World War I, caused the collapse of capitalism and the rejection of democracy in both Italy and Germany. The resulting political vacuum was filled by charlatans whose ideas constituted reactionary rejections of modern values and institutions. Mussolini and Hitler called upon their people to forsake reason and prudence and to follow them with unquestioned obedience toward mystical, irrational, and inevitably disastrous goals.
