Ivan Ermakoff. Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications. (Politics, History, and Culture.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2008. Pp. xxxiii, 402. Cloth $99.95, paper $27.95

On March 23, 1933, the unanimous support of the Catholic Center Party gave Adolf Hitler the necessary two‐thirds majority in the Reichstag for the Enabling Act and thus the legal authority to impose a dictatorship over Germany. On July 10, 1940, the overwhelming vote by senators and deputies granted Marshal Philippe Pétain power to promulgate the constitution for a “French State” based on his personal rule. For Ivan Ermakoff, these decisions are examples of “constitutional abdication” (p. 54). To investigate why elected representatives would cede their authority so absolutely, he has combined sociology's logistic regression and game theory methods with history's archival, documentary, and memoir sources.

Ermakoff considers the roles played by coercion, miscalculation, and collusion and claims that they were important but not determining factors of the collective abdications in Germany and France. Fear debilitated. In Germany, Nazi...