Big Caesars And Little Caesars: How They Rise And How They Fall From Julius Caesar To Boris Johnson
Author: Ferdinand Mount
Stock information
General Fields
: 26.99 AUD
: 9781399409728
: Bloomsbury
: CONTINUUM
: 01 September 2024
: 26.99
:
:
: books
Special Fields
: Ferdinand Mount
:
: Paperback
:
:
9781399409728
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.