A Century of Demagogues in Europe

Published in a particularly turbulent year amid a global pandemic, renowned historian Ivan T. Berend’s latest book comes as a cautionary text reminding readers how times of crisis can act as the breeding ground for populism and the emergence of demagogic leaders seeking to take advantage of popular anxieties and discontent for their own personal or political gain.

Ivan T. Berend is a Distinguished Research Professor at the History Department of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and an expert on nineteenth and twentieth-century Eastern and Central European History. Now ninety years of age with decades of academic experience under his belt, he is a prolific writer with twenty-plus books and over a hundred scholarly and popular essays and articles.

Writing his latest book for a general audience, Berend’s A Century of Populist Demagogues: Eighteen European Portraits, 1918–2018 reads like a collection of short biographies which, in the words of the author, seeks to “introduce [demagogues] and their demagoguery as it was” (p. viii).

Indeed, A Century of Populist Demagogues explores the longstanding history of demagoguery and populism in Europe from the early twentieth century up to today by focusing on the lives of some of Europe’s most notable demagogic figures of the last hundred years.