“Why would a group legitimize its own subservience and, in doing so, abdicate its capacity for self-preservation?” is the question asked at the start of Ruling Oneself Out (p. xi). Focusing on the Center Party's vote for the enabling act of March 1933, which gave Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution, and on the Vichy parliament's vote to grant full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain in 1940, Ivan Ermakoff studies how these decisions looked to the actors themselves, and finds that the pervasive uncertainty that characterized the situation leading up to each vote, and the actors' tendency to look to their peers for guidance, complicate monocausal accounts of groups marching to their death. Many prevalent attempts to explain these seemingly inexplicable collective actions tend to emphasize coercion, miscalculation, and collusion. Each of these explanations has its merits, and some are more persuasive than others. Yet each has its problems. Coercion, for example, which is the most compelling explanation of the lot, might lead one to expect those threatened to submit, yet fear just as often causes consolidation and vigorous collective resistance to the challenger.