Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists, by Azar Gat

Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 334. Notes, biblio., index. $85. ISBN:0-19-820715-8.

The third in a series of volumes tracing the evolution of modern military thought (the previous ones are The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz and The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century), Fascist and Liberal Visions of War deals with what might be termed the divergence of military that developed between the world wars, into a between those who focused on technology for the clash of forces � which Gat suggests had strong ties to fascism (though he perhaps might better have used totalitarianism), which led to World War II, and a more liberal approach which stressed economic and political conflict of protracted duration, that is a �cold war,� the origins of which he traces to the 1930s, when it failed, only to succeed later. An interesting, insightful, and thought-provoking work.

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