The Hitler of History.

John Lukacs Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 316pp.

Adolf Hitler is the most important figure of the last one hundred years, claims historian John Lukacs, and an evaluation of Hitler's biographers is in order.

The first claim is at least debatable. Mao and the leaders of the Chinese revolution surely transformed the lives of more people, and the regime he began continues to shape the politics and economics of the world's most populous hemisphere. The consolidation of the Soviet revolution in the hands of Josef Stalin, and Stalin's ability to withstand the Nazi assault during World War II, ensured the extension of the cold war into the farthest reaches of the globe.

But these parlor games do not diminish Lukacs's second point, that Hitler's life requires sustained reflection. The Hitler of History is precisely that, a reasoned survey of over one hundred Hitler biographies in several European languages. The book displays astonishing erudition, and a philosophical acuteness rare in historical inquiry.

The basic story remains startling: a failed Austrian architect assumes dictatorial powers in one of Europe's best educated and most "civilized" nations ten years after a desultory beer hall putsch lands him in jail. Under his direction, the German economy thrives, and he wins adulation of an unprecedented sort. By 1938, Germans are marrying and having children at an extraordinary rate, a demographic marker of social confidence all the more remarkable when contrasted with falling birthrates and economic indicators in most Western nations. Had Hitler died in 1938, Lukacs observes, agreeing with biographer Joachim Fest, he would have been remembered by most Germans as the fulfiller ("der Vollender") of Germany's destiny. Seven years later Hitler committed suicide, but only after unleashing the most bloody of all wars, and spurring the most horrific of all genocides.

For Lukacs, the Hitler phenomenon demonstrates that nationalism - not communism, not socialism, not mass consumption - proved to be the "principal political reality of the twentieth century." Hitler was only "its most extreme representative." Marxian faith (or hope) that workers had no country weakened before the eagerness of workers to slaughter each other in World War I, and collapsed completely in the face of the Nazi regime. That Communist regimes survived into the late twentieth century testifies either to their ability to harness nationalist energy (Cuba) or to the military support of the Soviet Union (the German Democratic Republic, until 1989). Nationalism, too, meshed with Hitler's Judeophobia. Jews threatened the German nation, Hitler persistently stressed, and must be eradicated from it. His last testament, dictated a few hours before his death, pleads with Germans not to allow Jews to return to their midst.

Hitler's achievement (using the term in its most neutral sense) is in this way different from that of Caesar or Napoleon. He lived in a populist age, distant from the more hierarchical, ordered societies of the past. He had an uncanny ability to tell powerful Germans - industrialists, church leaders, politicians - what they wanted to hear, while building a base of support that would eventually allow him to eliminate all opponents. "To lead," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "means to be able to move the masses." When in September 1944, the government called for sixteen-year-old Germans to volunteer for service, 96 percent promptly did so. Concentration camp officials continued to slaughter Jews long after the outcome of the war was obvious. German workers professed confidence in the Fuhrer even as Soviet troops encircled Berlin.

Given this view of the Hitler phenomenon, Lukacs is understandably wary of nationalism's power. Patriotism, he maintains, is rooted in the land or the history of a particular country, but nationalism depends upon a myth of the people, a myth that often has exclusionary implications. Patriots appreciate other cultures, while nationalists rank them. Hitler was a nationalist, not a patriot. At times Lukacs worries that patriotism may be irrelevant in a democratic age, that nationalism is a form of Tocqueville's democratic tyranny.

This distinction seems to me forced. Populist nationalism has an often unseemly history, but Soviet, British, and American nationalisms proved more than a match for their Nazi counterpart. And the specifically American belief that the nation was uniquely devoted to social equality also laid the groundwork for successful civil rights protests during the 1960s. Southern segregationists thought of themselves as nationalists and patriots, too, of course, but at that moment more Americans saw their national ideals reflected through Martin Luther King, Jr., than through Bull Connor. Indeed, our recent inability to further social reform with appeals to national ideals - note the health-care debate of 1993-94 - may signal American nationalism's waning power.

Perhaps a more precise way of making Lukacs's point is to emphasize his rejection of a particular kind of nationalism, one that in effect becomes religious. This sort of nationalism fulfills spiritual and emotional needs by rallying partisans to an intense hatred of supposed national enemies. (One of Lukacs's most telling, and discouraging, examples is an allusion to a 1942 debate at the German Catholic bishops' conference, at which some priests suggested segregating Jewish Catholics into special communion services.) Lukacs's warnings about this kind of nationalism, as exemplified by the career of Adolf Hitler, are salutary, a reminder of how idolatry of nation can fatally limit our moral imagination.

John T. McGreevy, the author of Parish Boundaries (University of Chicago Press), teaches history at the University of Notre Dame.