A new account of the life and policies of the first German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, this concise historical-biography reflects, for the first time in English, the historical shift in emphasis from the traditional political-economic approach to the more complex social-economic one of post World War II scholarship.

Since the middle of the 1950s, much new material on Bismarck and nineteenth-century Germany and new interpretations of existing material have been published in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. Professor George O. Kent s brilliant synthesis, drawing on this...