Big Caesars and Little Caesars How They Rise and How They Fall - from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson |
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| Author:
| Mount, Ferdinand |
| ISBN: | 978-1-3994-0972-8 |
| Publication Date: | Jan 2025 |
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic & Professional
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| Imprint: | Continuum |
| Book Format: | Paperback |
| List Price: | USD $18.00 |
Book Description:
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'Wry, informative but deadly - a great book' Will Hutton
'Fast-paced and impassioned' Sunday Telegraph Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of Strong Men and their imitators. A fascinating exploration of how and why Caesars seized power and why they fell. There is a comforting illusion shared by historians and political commentators, that history progresses in a nice straight line...
More Description 'Wry, informative but deadly - a great book'
Will Hutton
'Fast-paced and impassioned'
Sunday Telegraph
Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of Strong Men and their imitators. A fascinating exploration of how and why Caesars seized power and why they fell.
There is a comforting illusion shared by historians and political commentators, that history progresses in a nice straight line towards liberal democracy or socialism, despite the odd hiccup.
Every democracy, however sophisticated or stable it may look, has been attacked or actually destroyed by a would-be Caesar, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Marx was wrong. Caesarism is not an absurd throwback, it is an ever-present danger.
There are Big Caesars who set out to achieve total social control and Little Caesars who merely want to run an agreeable kleptocracy without opposition: from Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell through Napoleon and Bolivar, to Mussolini, Salazar, De Gaulle and Trump. The saga of Boris Johnson and Brexit is a vivid, if Lilliputian instance of the same phenomenon.
The final part of this book describes how and why would-be Caesars come to grief, from the Gunpowder Plot to Trump's march on the Capitol and the ejection of Boris Johnson by his own MPs, and ends with a defence of the grubby glories of parliamentary politics.