AP Photo

It has often been pointed out that the economic crisis of the Thirties was one of the causes of the rise of authoritarian movements and regimes in that period; but the sense that democracy was inadequate in face of such an unprecedented situation ran far deeper than this, even among democracy's most fervent proponents. One has only to look at the number of book titles, in the early Thirties, which dealt with the problem, to see how central it was: for example, After Democracy (1932) by H.G. Wells, Democracy in Crisis (1933) by H.J. Laski, Is Democracy a Failure? (1934) by J. R. B. Muir. And one country at least seemed to many, at the time, to have proved that authoritarian rule could produce results. The German "economic miracle" created by the Nazis was...