Continuing on with Mann's history of it all. He seems to have finished vols. 3 and 4 simultaneously but divided up the resulting Monster Fun Book into two, sort of like Brendan Sanderson partitioning the last Wheel of Time, except the patriarchal authoritarians with the messianic ideology don't win in Mann's 1890–1945 story. Ha ha! I am funny!

Mann continues to be lovely to read, though in going through this volume I kept finding myself saying "ruh-roh" as some element of the fascist ascent that had an obvious parallel in our time fell into place. Mann is darkly convincing about fascism as a distinctive, and distinctively effective, modern phenomenon, which came with a compelling ideology of renewal, dealt ruthlessly and successfully with its political opponents (including the old-regime conservatives who thought they could manipulate the fascists), and used militarism effectively both in war and as an economic policy. In Mann's account, without Hitler's maniacal overreach into Russia, Germany might well have succeeded in dominating the continent. On the flipside of this is Mann's remarkable suggestion that the rapid end of the European empires and the rise of US power (as well as the stability of the Soviet regime) were in a sense contingent results of World War II.

Mann is a "grand theorist" with his "four sources of power" and his totalizing history, but in a way the best part of his account is his determination to root out contingency. He is very good on the causes of the Great Depression as a set of "overlapping causal chains" rather than a single process. Likewise on the contingencies that allowed the labor movement and Roosevelt to make the New Deal happen in the US—and limited its eventual reach. Meanwhile, if you want Swedish Social Democracy, your labor movement needs to have agrarian allies.