Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock, was a British historian. He is best known for his book which was the first comprehensive biography of Adolf Hitler and influenced many other major biographies of Hitler.
In 1952, Bullock published Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, the first comprehensive biography of Adolf Hitler, which he based on the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials. This book dominated Hitler scholarship for many years. The book characterised Hitler as an opportunistic Machtpolitiker. In Bullock's opinion, Hitler was a "mountebank", an opportunistic adventurer devoid of principles, beliefs or scruples whose actions throughout his career were motivated only by a lust for power. Bullock's views led in the 1950s to a debate with Hugh Trevor-Roper who argued that Hitler did possess beliefs, albeit repulsive ones, and that his actions were motivated by them. Bullock's Guardian obituary commented that "Bullock's famous maxim 'Hitler was jobbed into power by backstairs intrigue' has stood the test of time." When reviewing Hitler and Stalin in The Times in 1991, John Campbell wrote of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny: "Although written so soon after the end of the war and despite a steady flow of fresh evidence and reinterpretation, it has not been surpassed in nearly 40 years: an astonishing achievement." In subsequent works, Bullock to some extent changed his mind about Hitler. His later wrtings show the dictator as much more of an ideologue, who pursued the ideas expressed in Mein Kampf despite their consequences. This has become a widely accepted view of Hitler, particularly in relation to the Holocaust. Taking note of the shift in interest among professional historians towards social history in the 1960s, Bullock agreed that in general, deep long-term social forces are decisive in history, but not always, for there are times when the Great Man is in his views decisive. In revolutionary circumstances, "It is possible for an individual to exert a powerful even a decisive influence on the way events develop and the policies that are followed."
Other works
Bullock's other works included The Humanist Tradition in the West, and The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, a three-volume biography of British LabourForeign Secretary Ernest Bevin,. He was also editor of The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought, a project he suggested to the publisher when he found he could not define the word "hermeneutics". He had earlier co-edited with Maurice Shock a collection on The Liberal Tradition: From Fox to Keynes. In the mid-1970s, Bullock used his committee skills to produce a report which proved to be influential in the classroom: A Language for Life, about reading and the teaching of English, was published in 1975. Bullock also appeared as a political pundit, particularly during the BBC's coverage of the 1959 British general election.
Later works
Late in his life, Bullock published , a massive work which he described in the introduction as "essentially a political biography, set against the background of the times in which they lived". He showed how the careers of Hitler and Joseph Stalin fed off each other to some extent. Bullock comes to a thesis that Stalin's ability to consolidate power in his home country and, unlike Hitler, not to over-extend himself enabled him to retain power longer than Hitler. It was awarded the 1992 Wolfson History Prize. American historian Ronald Spector, writing in The Washington Post, praised Bullock's ability to write about the development of Nazism and Soviet Communism without either abstract generalization or irrelevant detail. "The writing is invariably interesting and informed and there are new insights and cogent analysis in every chapter," he wrote. Nachmani says Hitler and Stalin:
