The Early Roman Republic was like a Democracy
What Kind of Government Did the Roman Republic Have?
The Roman Republic began in 509 B.C. when the Romans expelled the Etruscan kings and set up their own government. Having witnessed the problems of the monarchy on their own land, and aristocracy and democracy among the Greeks, they opted for a mixed form of government, with three branches. This innovation became known as a republican system. The strength of the republic is the system of checks and balances, which aims to find a consensus between the desires of the various branches of government. The Roman Constitution outlined these checks and balances, but in an informal way. Most of the constitution was unwritten and laws were upheld by precedent.
The Republic lasted 450 years until the territorial gains of the Roman civilization stretched its governance to the limit. A series of strong rulers called Emperors emerged with Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., and their reorganization of the Roman form of government ushered in the Imperial period.
Branches of Roman Republican Government
Consuls: Two consuls with supreme civil and military authority held the highest office in Republican Rome. Their power, which was shared equally and which lasted only one year, was reminiscent of the monarchial power of the king. Each consul could veto the other, they led the army, served as judges, and had religious duties. At first, the consuls were patricians, from famous families. Later laws encouraged plebeians to campaign for the consulship; eventually one of the consuls had to be a plebeian. After a term as consul, a Roman man joined the Senate for life. After 10 years, he could campaign for consulship again.
The Senate: While the consuls had executive authority, it was expected that they would follow the advice of Rome’s elders. The Senate (senatus = council of elders) predated the Republic, having been founded in the Eighth Century B.C. It was an advisory branch, initially composed of about 300 patricians who served for life. The ranks of the Senate were drawn from ex-consuls and other officers, who also had to be landowners. Plebeians were eventually admitted to the Senate as well. The primary focus of the Senate was Rome’s foreign policy, but they had great jurisdiction in civil affairs as well, as the Senate controlled the treasury.
The Assemblies: The most democratic branch of the Roman Republican form of government were the assemblies. These large bodies — there were four of them — made some voting power available to many Roman citizens (but not all, as those who lived in the outreaches of the provinces still lacked meaningful representation). The Assembly of Centuries (comitia centuriata), was composed of all members of the army, and it elected consuls annually. The Assembly of Tribes (comitia tributa), which contained all citizens, approved or rejected laws and decided issues of war and peace.The Comitia Curiata was composed of 30 local groups, and was elected by the Centuriata, and served mostly a symbolic purpose for Rome’s founding families. The Concilium Plebis represented the plebeians.
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-roman-republics-government-120772
The Roman state evolved from an elective monarchy to a democratic classical republic;
According to tradition and later writers such as Livy, the Roman Republic was established around 509 BC, when the last of the seven kings of Rome, Tarquin the Proud, was deposed by Lucius Junius Brutus and a system based on annually elected magistrates and various representative assemblies was established. A constitution set a series of checks and balances, and a separation of powers. The most important magistrates were the two consuls, who together exercised executive authority such as imperium, or military command. The consuls had to work with the Senate, which was initially an advisory council of the ranking nobility, or patricians, but grew in size and power.
Other magistrates of the Republic include tribunes, quaestors, aediles, praetors and censors. The magistracies were originally restricted to patricians, but were later opened to common people, or plebeians. Republican voting assemblies included the comitia centuriata (centuriate assembly), which voted on matters of war and peace and elected men to the most important offices, and the comitia tributa (tribal assembly), which elected less important offices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome#Republic
6a. The Roman Republic
The Romans established a form of government — a republic — that was copied by countries for centuries In fact, the government of the United States is based partly on Rome's model.
It all began when the Romans overthrew their Etruscan conquerors in 509 B.C.E. Centered north of Rome, the Etruscans had ruled over the Romans for hundreds of years.
Once free, the Romans established a republic, a government in which citizens elected representatives to rule on their behalf. A republic is quite different from a democracy, in which every citizen is expected to play an active role in governing the state.
Citizen: The Roman concept of the citizen evolved during the Roman Republic and changed significantly during the later Roman Empire. After the Romans freed themselves from the Etruscans, they established a republic, and all males over 15 who were descended from the original tribes of Rome became citizens. Citizens of Rome distinguished themselves from slaves and other noncitizens by wearing a toga; most wore a white toga. During the Empire, each emperor wore a purple toga to distinguish himself as the princeps, or "first citizen."
Citizenship varied greatly. The full citizen could vote, marry freeborn persons, and practice commerce. Some citizens were not allowed to vote or hold public office, but maintained the other rights. A third type of citizen could vote and practive commerce, but could not hold office or marry freeborn women.
In the late Republic, male slaves who were granted their freedom could become full citizens. Around 90 B.C.E., non-Roman allies of the Republic gained the rights of citizenship, and by 212 C.E, under the Edict of Caracalla, all free people of the Roman Empire could become citizens.
The Twelve Tables: One of the innovations of the Roman Republic was the notion of equality under the law. In 449 B.C.E., government leaders carved some of Rome's most important laws into 12 great tablets. The Twelve Tables, as they came to be known, were the first Roman laws put in writing. Although the laws were rather harsh by today's standards, they did guarantee every citizen equal treatment under the law.
https://www.ushistory.org/civ/6a.asp
Rome’s Transition from Republic to Empire
Rome transitioned from a republic to an empire after power shifted away from a representative democracy to a centralized imperial authority, with the emperor holding the most power.
The Roman Republic was founded in 509 B.C.E. after the last Etruscan king that ruled Rome was overthrown. Rome’s next government served as a representative democracy in the form of a republic. Initially, Rome’s wealthiest families, the patricians, held power and only they could hold political or religious offices. Everyone else was considered plebeian, and no member of this group could hold office. Over a period of nearly 200 years, however, the plebeians fought for and gained power within the government.
The republic stood strong for several centuries. However, as Rome’s power and territory expanded, internal conflicts began to emerge as citizens and families struggled for power.
The Roman Empire dramatically shifted power away from representative democracy to centralized imperial authority, with the emperor holding the most power.
Though the Roman Republic stood for several centuries, tensions within the government began to tear it apart. Civil wars started between groups with different loyalties, which brought about the transformation of the republic into an empire.
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/romes-transition-republic-empire/
Lessons in the Decline of Democracy From the Ruined Roman Republic
The U.S. Constitution owes a huge debt to ancient Rome. The Founding Fathers were well-versed in Greek and Roman History. Leaders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison read the historian Polybius, who laid out one of the clearest descriptions of the Roman Republic’s constitution, where representatives of various factions and social classes checked the power of the elites and the power of the mob. It’s not surprising that in the United States’ nascent years, comparisons to ancient Rome were common. And to this day, Rome, whose 482-year-long Republic, bookended by several hundred years of monarchy and 1,500 years of imperial rule, is still the longest the world has seen.
Aspects of our modern politics reminded University of California San Diego historian Edward Watts of the last century of the Roman Republic, roughly 130 B.C. to 27 B.C. That’s why he took a fresh look at the period in his new book Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny. Watts chronicles the ways the republic, with a population once devoted to national service and personal honor, was torn to shreds by growing wealth inequality, partisan gridlock, political violence and pandering politicians, and argues that the people of Rome chose to let their democracy die by not protecting their political institutions, eventually turning to the perceived stability of an emperor instead of facing the continued violence of an unstable and degraded republic. Political messaging during the 2018 midterm elections hinged on many of these exact topics...
“It is profoundly dangerous when a politician takes a step to undercut or ignore a political norm, it’s extremely dangerous whenever anyone introduces violent rhetoric or actual violence into a republican system that’s designed to promote compromise and consensus building.”
The solution to keeping a republic healthy, if Rome can truly be a guide, is for the citizens to reject any attempts to alter these norms he says. “I think the lesson I take away most profoundly from spending so much time with these materials is basically, yes, we do need to assign blame to politicians and individuals who take a shortsighted view of the health of a republic in order to try to pursue their own personal objectives or specific short-term political advantages.”
The example of the Roman Republic shows the result of not policing those norms and keeping violence in check is the potential loss of democracy. “No republic is eternal,” Watts writes. “It lives only as long as its citizens want it. And, in both the 21stcentury A.D. and the first century B.C., when a republic fails to work as intended, its citizens are capable of choosing the stability of autocratic rule over the chaos of a broken republic.”
How Democratic Was The Roman Republic? The Theory and Practice of an Archetypal Democracy
In Federalist No. 34 Alexander Hamilton, arguing for the ratification of the United States Constitution, claimed that the Roman Republic had “attained to the utmost height of human greatness.”1 The Roman Republic, at least an idealized version, was explicitly the model that the founding fathers looked to when developing their own democratic constitution. By and large, this model has succeeded in establishing a stable democracy. American success and the subsequent global proliferation of democratic regimes in the twentieth century have made the triumph of democracy, with its roots in Ancient Rome, a persuasive narrative. However, this raises an important question: how democratic was the Roman Republic?
Evaluating the Roman Republic’s constitution and how it was applied in theory and practice it becomes clear that the Roman Republic, while constitutionally quite democratic, was in practice a fundamentally undemocratic society, dominated by a select caste of wealthy aristocrats. This can be seen both through the structure of ‘democratic’ institutions and the power to make war and peace in the Roman Republic...
...Though America's founders looked to the Romans in developing our democracy, the Roman Republic, while constitutionally quite democratic, was in practice a fundamentally undemocratic society, dominated by a select caste of wealthy aristocrats.
The most celebrated discussion of the Republic’s political system comes from Polybius himself. In his view, Rome’s strength and stability came from its mixed constitution of ‘kingship,’ ‘aristocracy,’ and democracy.’ According to Polybius, the Roman constitution “had three elements, each of them possessing sovereign powers…regulated…with scrupulous regard to equality and equilibrium that none could say for certain…whether the constitution…were an aristocracy or democracy or despotism." This conception of the Roman political system is immediately telling in a few respects. Most importantly, it demonstrates that ancient writers did not understand the Roman Republic as a democracy in the sense one would likely attribute to the modern United States. Instead, Rome was governed according to a mixed constitution where democracy was important, but also only one part of the system that could only work if it remained checked by kingship and aristocracy, in the Senate and consuls respectively. In fact, Polybius believed that this mixed system prevented a cycle of revolutionary upheaval and resulted in “a union sufficiently firm for all emergencies and a constitution than which it is impossible to find better.”...
...The Roman Republic was never intended to be a democracy. Instead, as
acknowledged by Polybius, it was an experiment that sought to fuse
democracy, aristocracy and monarchy into the perfect socio-political
system. On a superficial level it appears to be quite a success in this
endeavor when one considers the half millennium that, according to the
Roman constitution, democratic and aristocratic institutions were able
to jointly govern the largest and most powerful state in the
Mediterranean world. However, when put in practice, its attempts to
incorporate a powerful democratic element can only be seen as a clear
failure. Once put into practice, the Roman Republic’s institutions were
simply too reliant on the aristocracy for structure, cohesion, and order
for democracy to persevere.
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1492/how-democratic-was-the-roman-republic-the-theory-and-practice-of-an-archetypal-democracy
Dictatorship in History & Theory - Bonapartism Caesarism & Totalitarianism
In Western political thought Caesarism, whether associated with, or subsumed under, its various cognate concepts such as tyranny, dictatorship, and Bonapartism, has had a durable and contradictory history. From the perspective of the history of ideas, the emergence and development of the bundle of ideas described by the term Caesarism is more than an intellectual attempt to formulate categories capable of capturing and characterizing it as a political and historical phenomenon. Theories of dictatorship and tyranny are also ideological constructions with normative and moral content, and thus political.
It is only since the French Revolution and its aftermath, however, that Caesarism and its various interpretations have assumed both political and intellectual importance. It is the emergence of modern forms of politics, and the undermining of traditional norms and institutions, that has fueled debates over the nature and role of Caesarism. Thus, in the nineteenth century, ideological and theoretical battles reflected and expressed political alignments and social conflicts among liberals and conservatives (in the classical European sense), monarchists and Bonapartists, classical Marxists and republicans. In the twentieth century, the political struggle among liberal democrats, socialists, communists, and Fascists was expressed in part by ideological polemics over the nature and meaning of such terms as totalitarian dictatorship and totalitarian democracy
https://cambridge.org/dictatorship-in-history-and-theory/concept-of-caesarism-in-gramsci/
Caesarism and Democracy: Historical and Normative Perspectives
The experience of democracy in the modern West is inextricably linked to Caesarism. The first European republic to base itself on universal male suffrage had transformed, within a half-decade, into the Caesarist French Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon: a state-form that combined personal rule; a plebiscitary understanding of legitimacy; a centralized administration; military adventurism; an authoritarian approach to the press and civil society; and a rhetoric that appealed at once to Revolutionary, nationalistic, and democratic ideals. For many observers at the time, the Bonapartist regime not only recalled Roman history (hence “Caesarism”). Even more, it betokened what was to come in a democratic future: Caesarism appeared, as the great Liberal legal scholar Henry Maine put it, to incarnate the “very principle of democracy” itself.
Even after the collapse of Bonapartism, reflection on Caesarism remained a staple of democratic theory and the incipient social sciences through the first few decades of the twentieth century, before fading into the background of political theory and public discourse for several decades. However, recent trends – populism; the personalization of politics; the dominance of the executive over the legislature; a perceived decline in liberal and growth in authoritarian sentiments; among others – have all raised once again the question of the connection between Caesarism and democracy.
https://uchv.princeton.edu/events/caesarism-and-democracy-historical-and-normative-perspectives
Forget Fascism: In the U.S. and Israel, Caesarism is on the Rise - Opinion
“Caesarism” is an accepted term for a form of regime in which the state is ruled by a strong, charismatic ruler. It’s modeled on the regime of Julius Caesar, the sole ruler of the Roman republic, and the man who brought about its destruction. What is required for Caesarism to emerge is for all groups with political power in the state to be engaged in mutual struggles, so that only the leader can satisfy the desire of all of them. All other institutions and public offices are voided of content; the leader concentrates all the real power in his hands, relying on the army. As the Israeli historian Zvi Yavetz described it, everyone receives conflicting promises, and then only the genius of the leader can preserve unity.
In contrast to a monarchy, however, in a Caesarist regime the institutions of the republic remain intact and all the magistrates retain their old titles. Julius Caesar rejected the trappings of monarchy that his followers wished to heap on him. Nor was “Caesar” his title; that was simply his family name. It’s his adopted son, Augustus, who is considered the first caesar of the Roman Empire.
The regime of the Roman Republic was completely different from a modern democracy. Nevertheless, comparisons between such governments and Rome have been put forward persistently over the years. The sociologist Max Weber argued that mass democracy necessarily leans toward Caesarism, in terms of the existence of a direct connection between a charismatic leader and the people, which undermines the power of parliament.
Modern Caesarism is not entirely distinct from democracy, but springs up within it. A moderate form of Caesarism is discernible in some of the outstanding leaders of modern democracy, such as Abraham Lincoln and Charles de Gaulle. But in its extreme form, Caesarism deteriorates into sheer autocracy, as with Napoleon Bonaparte or his nephew, Napoleon III. The Caesarist ruler becomes an emperor, and the republic an empire. And if all goes well, a new, quasi-royal dynasty is engendered. A “dictator anointed with oil of democracy,” as the historian Theodor Mommsen put it...
...The stage after Caesarism is dynasticism. Whereas Julius Caesar’s power was based on his charisma and political skill, the Julio-Claudian Caesars who followed him ruled, simply, by dint of lineage. The senators who assassinated Julius Caesar thought they had put an end to the danger of tyranny and had restored the republic. But from the people’s point of view, Caesar represented liberation from the despised elite. The only question that remained after his death was who would fulfill the role of sole ruler. After Augustus’ death, rule passed naturally to Tiberius, his son by his wife Livia. But even before that, Augustus had made Tiberius his right-hand man.
At a certain stage, the dynasty demonstrates its strength through rulers who are actually idiots, sadists or suffering from insanity. They manifest their power through grotesque behavior and brutal actions. The fact that they continue to rule despite their unfitness proves that the decisive factor is not ability but blood. Thus, two generations after Julius Caesar, the Roman Empire was led by the depressive Tiberius, who closeted himself on the island of Capri, where he pursued his addiction to sexual depravity. He was followed by his insane brother, Caligula, who established a brothel in the palace and dressed and actually fought as a gladiator. Yet, throughout a large part of his reign, Caligula enjoyed great popularity among the Roman masses. They loved dancers, and Caligula knew how to dance – and also how to humiliate the upper classes...
Fascism or Caesarism? | Eurozine
Warnings about resurgent fascism are not entirely unjustified. And yet they can still blind us to the political dangers we are now facing. It is Napoleon, not Hitler, who exemplifies an enduring threat to modern democracies, argues historian of modern France David A. Bell.
- Is fascism making a comeback?
As a historian, my first reaction has been to answer the question with a resounding ‘no’. My professional training has led me to think of fascism as a specific historical phenomenon, largely limited to the period from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, and built around highly regimented mass movements. These movements struggled to bring about the revolutionary transformation of society, worshipped omnipotent leaders, had a mystical belief in the power of violence, and were committed to a racialized cult of the nation grounded in fantasies about a mythical past. Fascist movements also included powerful paramilitary auxiliaries such as the Nazi SA and Mussolini’s Black Shirts. In the fascist states, the movements took control of the government and transformed it into an instrument for achieving their repressive, and even genocidal, aims.
By this specific historical definition, it is hard to see fascism at work in the world today, and certainly not in the United States. The Republican Party, whatever its flaws, is not a regimented mass movement, with dedicated cadres under party discipline. America’s fringe right-wing militias are not latter-day Black Shirts. Neither are the few hundred border control agents whom the administration sent into Portland and other U.S. cities this summer.
Many commentators have recently argued, with some justice, that this historian’s definition is too restrictive. If a politician’s rhetoric, attitudes, ideas, and tactics echo those of earlier, self-proclaimed fascists — perhaps with sly, dog-whistle intentionality — must we really resist saying so? Is the word never appropriate in the absence of a full-fledged fascist movement akin to Mussolini’s or Hitler’s?
Authors such as Jason Stanley (How Fascism Works) and Federico Finchelstein (From Fascism to Populism in History and A Brief History of Fascist Lies) make a strong case for not keeping the political f-word off-limits in political discussion.
Even so, warnings about fascism can still all too easily blind us to the nature of the political dangers we are now facing. Politicians and parties may ‘perform’ fascism, as Stanley puts it, and include elements of it in their programs, without having either the desire or the ability to create anything like the fascist regimes of the past. But the word carries such intense associations, and provokes such intense emotions, that this key distinction gets blurred, leaving us without any real sense of what the ‘fascists’ we are criticizing actually want, or have the ability, to achieve.
When democracies fail, they do so in many ways, and most of these ways do not lead to full-fledged fascism.
It’s worth remembering that most of the European states in which democracy collapsed during the interwar period, including Poland and the Baltic states, did not become fascist.
Among influential figures on the American right today, some dream of a Protestant theocracy, others of an ‘integralist’ state grounded in reactionary Catholic traditions that trace their origins all the way back to the early nineteenth-century high priest of reaction, Joseph de Maistre. Populism has many variants, some of which have close links to fascism (as Finchelstein emphasizes), and some of which do not. As for many congressional Republicans, their vision for American society looks far more like a capitalist oligarchy dominated by the ultra-wealthy than anything that existed in fascist Europe between the wars.
History also offers many different examples of authoritarian, one-person rule, most of which were not fascist either. Many of these – hereditary, divine-right monarchies, for instance – are not likely to find many adherents in the early twenty-first century.
But one variety of authoritarianism has historically proved far more popular than fascism, and remains quite relevant in the present day. This is what nineteenth-century writers called Caesarism: a system in which an authoritarian ruler claims to derive legitimacy from the popular will and to serve as a focus of national unity.
- Caesarists past
Unlike self-described fascists, who often voiced extreme contempt for democracy, ‘Caesarists’ generally described their ideal regime as the truest form of democracy, which is why self-described democrats have often been easily seduced by it. Today, at least several prominent regimes can be described as Caesarist and offer an attractive model to aspiring authoritarians elsewhere – including, perhaps, in the United States.
To understand Caesarism, the best place to start is with Napoleon Bonaparte. Although the word ‘Caesarism’ itself only dates from the second half of the nineteenth century, the writers who coined it generally saw Napoleon as its greatest exemplar. And indeed, Bonaparte actively invented Caesarism’s most important elements, while wrestling with the legacy of French revolutionary democracy.
When the French Revolution began in 1789, the 20-year-old Napoleon supported it enthusiastically. He admired Maximilien Robespierre and owed much of his initial rise to Robespierre’s brother. As an ambitious and successful young general after the Terror, even while promoting himself as a charismatic savior figure, he remained on the left side of France’s tumultuous political arena.
When he seized power in 1799, Napoleon claimed to have done so in order to save the Republic. Like the Jacobins, he submitted his new constitution, which granted him sweeping powers, to the French people for their approval. Even if the new interior minister – his brother Lucien – cheated to make the results look quasi-unanimous, Napoleon’s constitution had the support of a genuine majority of French voters.
Even when Napoleon took an imperial crown five years later, in imitation of the Roman Caesars, he did not fully break with the republican past. He called himself ‘Emperor of the French’ rather than ‘Emperor of France’, and the official act implementing the decision stated: ‘The government of the Republic is confided to an Emperor’.
Napoleon’s propagandists strenuously attempted to reconcile this nominal republicanism with autocratic rule – and in doing so, sketched out a striking vision of political authority.
In a high-profile eulogy for George Washington, delivered in Napoleon’s presence at the Invalides in 1800 and transparently designed to cast the Corsican as Washington’s spiritual heir, Louis de Fontanes argued that when a country had suffered a great political crisis, it needed ‘an extraordinary personality to come to the fore who, thanks to his glory alone … imposes order in the midst of confusion’. Fontanes further asserted that in the early history of republics, customs and morals mattered more than the letter of the law (which Bonaparte’s coup had rather spectacularly violated) and that rulers should ‘govern more by sentiments and affections than by orders and laws’.
In subsequent writings, Fontanes and others asserted that holding together a fractious, divided state demanded an extraordinary, dominant personality capable of forging an intimate, emotional bond with the citizenry. In Napoleon’s case, this bond was most powerfully formed in moments of popular rejoicing over his military victories.
Despite his imperial pretensions, Napoleon never succeeded in transforming his personal charisma into durable imperial institutions. When, in 1812, conspirators spread the false rumour that he had died in the Russian snows, deceived officials debated what sort of provisional government to establish in his place. Not for a moment did any of them consider proclaiming his infant son the new emperor.
In exile, Napoleon himself observed that ‘the State was me … I was, myself, the keystone of a new edifice built on such fragile foundations! Its survival depended on each one of my battles.’ In his spectacular, doomed attempt to return to power in the ‘Hundred Days’ of 1815, he once again sought support by posing as the democratic choice of the people and by liberalizing the constitution.
In the nineteenth century, Napoleon’s autocratic rule, costly wars, and ultimate defeat made him a distinctly problematic political model. Europe’s greatest writers viewed him with a combination of awe and horror, as in Nietzsche’s memorably concise description of him as ‘this synthesis of Unmensch and Übermensch’.
The later charismatic leader who most closely resembled him, Simón Bolívar, repeatedly denied the similarity. In 1825, one of Bolívar’s subordinates compared South America to France in the late 1790s, and urged his leader to stage an Eighteenth Brumaire-style coup: ‘You are now in a position to say,’ he wrote, ‘what [Napoleon] said at the time: the intriguers are going to ruin the country. Let us go and save it … General, this is not the land of Washington. Here people bow down to power out of terror and self-interest.’ Bolívar responded angrily: ‘Colombia is not France and I am not Napoleon … Napoleon was great and unique, and besides, exceedingly ambitious. Here things are very different. I am not Napoleon and do not want to be. Neither do I want to imitate Caesar.’
Yet despite Bolívar’s disclaimer, the vision of political authority that he developed in the 1820s came strikingly close to the one propounded by Napoleon and his propagandists. As Bolívar strove to unite much of South America into a single country, he too argued for the necessity of a single, dominant political leader who would enjoy sweeping executive powers, chosen by ‘acclamation’ and bound to the people by powerful emotional ties generated in large part through military victories. Only such a leader, Bolívar insisted, could hold together a country deeply divided by race and extremes of wealth. And despite his protestations to his subordinate, Bolívar had a lifelong fascination with Bonaparte, whose coronation he had personally witnessed in Paris in 1804. In 1828, he confided to a French aide that the ‘general effusion of every heart’ manifested on that occasion ‘by more than a million individuals, seemed to me … the ultimate ambition of man’. If Napoleon was the first great Caesarist of the modern period, Bolívar was the second.
Many others would follow these men’s examples, including, most prominently, Napoleon’s own nephew Louis-Napoleon. In an 1839 volume entitled Napoleonic Ideas, the younger Bonaparte offered his own concise summary of Caesarism: ‘The nature of democracy is to personify itself in a man.’ In 1851, he staged a coup against France’s Second Republic, and soon afterwards proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III. He repeatedly tried to reproduce, with a striking lack of success, his uncle’s military glory. It was one of his supporters, Auguste Romieu, who first popularized the term ‘Caesarism’. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well, many authoritarian, militaristic rulers have reasserted the Napoleonic credo, claiming to serve as a necessary focal point of national unity, claiming to have a direct, emotional bond with the people, and demonstrating this bond through plebiscites, rallies, and other instances of political theater.
- Caesarists present and future
Along the way, Caesarism has also attracted considerable intellectual support, most prominently from the great German social theorist Max Weber.
In the last years of his life, after Germany’s defeat in World War I and the chaotic birth of the Weimar Republic, Weber agonized about the dangers of ‘headless democracy’. He stressed the importance of charisma – a concept he himself largely invented – as a fundamental form of political authority, especially during the foundation of states. In a famous exchange with General Erich Ludendorff, Weber dismissed Weimar as a Schweinerei (a horrible mess) rather than a true democracy. ‘In a democracy,’ he continued, ‘the people choose their leader, whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, “Now, shut up and get on with things.” The people and the parties may no longer interfere with him.’ Ludendorff quipped that he could like such a democracy, but Weber added: ‘Later the people can sit in judgment. And if the leader has made mistakes – to the gallows with him!’
It isn’t hard to find contemporary autocrats who fit the Ceasarist mold: Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is another. But the most prominent of them all is Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Like Napoleon, Putin preserves the forms of democracy, regularly running for election and submitting constitutional changes (including the recent one that will allow him to remain president into his eighties) to national plebiscites. He too claims that he serves as a necessary focal point of national unity, in a country too fractious – and left too divided by the collapse of the Soviet Union – to do without it. He too wants national political life to turn tightly around his own charismatic personality, and he makes a show of cultivating relations with individual Russians, notably in annual televised shows in which he sits for hours taking calls from carefully-screened ‘ordinary citizens’. Putin, like his Caesarist predecessors, has built his rule in part on military victory: over Chechnya in 2000, over Georgia in 2008, and in the seizing of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
Donald Trump clearly admires Putin, whom he has repeatedly praised, defended, and tried to bring back to the G-7. According to former CIA director Michael Hayden, ‘there is a bit of autocrat envy in terms of the president’s attitude toward the President of the Russian Federation’. Trump shares Putin’s disdain for restraints on executive power and craves the same sort of direct, unmediated connection with the population. The decision by the Republican National Convention this week to dispense with a party platform and simply to support whatever Trump wants is a Caesarist move. The decision to have half the lead speakers at the Republican Convention come from Trump’s own family recalls the way Napoleon Bonaparte made his extended empire into a family business staffed in large part by his brothers and sisters.
Still, Trump also differs from Putin and historical Caesarists in several respects. He has no military victories to his credit, even if he claims to have won several trade wars, and routinely treats foreign countries (especially allies) with bumptious hostility. While he offers boilerplate praise for democracy, he rarely presents himself as the people’s servant (he can’t bear, after all, to see himself in a subordinate position). Most significantly, the hyper-partisan Trump barely even gestures towards the idea of national unity. He did do so during the 2016 presidential campaign, when he seemed to challenge the mainstream of his party over foreign military action and also over cutting federal spending. (Remember ‘infrastructure week’?) But in office, he has shown nothing but disdain for his political opponents and their supporters.
But we would be very short-sighted indeed if we saw Donald Trump as the only potential authoritarian on the horizon. Nor should we assume that subsequent dangers of the sort will necessarily emerge from the same hyper-partisan Republican party that produced Trump.
It is also possible that, as the country pitches further and further into vicious partisan conflict and political paralysis, the greater the opening will be for a true Caesarist figure who claims to stand above and beyond the parties, and to provide a source of national unity. The same social media that has so effectively contributed to the current partisan divide could easily be exploited by a charismatic, supposedly non-partisan politician to build a powerful base of popular support.
If such a person came to the presidency with support from across the political spectrum, he or she could quite possibly abuse executive power to a far greater extent than even Donald Trump has dreamed of, in the name of quelling the extremes and bringing the country together.
Such an outcome may seem unlikely in this moment of such horrendous partisan divisions and hatreds, and it is by no means inevitable. But consider this. In the year 1794, France was in thrall to a partisan conflict that by any measure dwarfs what we are currently living through in the United States. Civil war raged in several parts of the country, ultimately taking hundreds of thousands of lives. A radical regime was ruling through terror, executing tens of thousands of its opponents, and contributing to a cycle of violence that would continue with a White Terror and further bloody uprisings. But just five years later, an enormously charismatic military hero – who in 1794 had still been largely unknown – seized power, and did in fact manage, for a time, to unite much of the country behind him, even while establishing a repressive autocracy.
To me, the rise of a nominally democratic strongman in America in the years ahead seems no more unlikely than the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte would have seemed in the France of 1794 – or the election of Donald Trump at the beginning of the 2010s. The conditions, and precedents for it, exist. It isn’t an American fascist we have to fear – it’s an American Caesar.
https://www.eurozine.com/fascism-or-caesarism/
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Caesarism in the Post-Revolutionary Age -
Markus J. Prutsch
Chapter 7. Outlook: Legacies of Caesarism
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/caesarism-in-the-post-revolutionary-age/ch7-outlook-legacies-of-caesarism
Chapter 4. From Bonapartism to Caesarism: The Mid-Century and
Louis-Napoléon
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/caesarism-in-the-post-revolutionary-age/ch4-from-bonapartism-to-caesarism-the-mid-century-and-louis-napoleon
Caesarism in Democratic Politics: Reflections on Max Weber
https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-4035/
