As a study of the greatest middle class party of Imperial Germany, The Splintered Party is inevitably, in its broadest aspect, an inquiry into the weaknesses of liberalism in the Empire of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. How did the National Liberals, the dominant force in the Reichstag of the 1870s, become by 1914 a spent and divided power? Professor White explores this question from a new perspective, emphasizing regional circumstances as primary agents of the party's decline. The resulting portrait underscores the paradox of the National Liberals: a party with strength in all areas of...