Big Caesars and Little Caesars by Ferdinand Mount

Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of Strong
Men and their imitators. Caesarism is alive and well. Yet in modern times
it's become a strangely neglected subject. Ferdinand Mount opens up a
fascinating exploration of how and why Caesars seize power and why
they fall.
There is a comforting illusion shared by historians and political commentators
from Fukuyama back to Macaulay, Mill and Marx, that history progresses in a
nice straight line towards liberal democracy or socialism, despite the odd
hiccup.
In reality, 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. This 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 frequently crops up in this author's narrative as 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 (...)

Ferdinand Mount was Editor of The Spectator and of The Times Literary
Review . For many years he was head of Margaret Thatcher's think-tank - The
Number 10 Policy Unit. He is an authority on politics today, and writes
regularly for The Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and the London Review
of Books.
Apart from political columns and essays, he has written a six-volume series of
novels, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with The Man Who Rode
Ampersand, based on his father's racing life, and included Of Love And
Asthma, which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. His most recent books
are Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca, and the novel

Bloomsbury
On Sale: Sep 26/23
6.02 x 9.21 • 304 pages
8 pages of in-text black and white illustrations
9781399409711 • $47.00 • CL - With dust jacket
Political Science / History & Theory