Caesarism
카이사르주의
A term, after the Roman dictator Julius Caesar, for authoritarian rule in which a single leader, backed by the army and the masses, stands above parliament and constitution. It came into vogue in the mid-nineteenth century over the Second French Empire; in his preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire in 1869 Marx rejected it as a superficial analogy that forgot how utterly the class struggles of antiquity differed from modern ones. In the twentieth century Gramsci analysed it anew as a solution that emerges from a crisis in which opposing class forces are deadlocked.
In depth
The German historian Johann Friedrich Böhmer first used the word in 1846, though for the state's political subordination of the Catholic Church. In 1850 Auguste Romieu's L'ère des Césars defined it as the military rule of a warlord, and the term quickly came into vogue; in 1858 the Westminster Review criticised "clumsy eulogies of Caesarism as incarnate in the dynasty of Bonaparte". In Germany Theodor Mommsen and Jacob Burckhardt brought it into political debate as a catchword.
Napoleon III's Second Empire, which combined an authoritarian regime with a proactive social policy, notably the Ollivier law of 1864 that allowed workers to strike, has been described as "social Caesarism", an attempt to rally the workers to the regime against hostile liberal employers. The sociologist Max Weber believed that every mass democracy went in a Caesarist direction, and named the plebiscitary character of elections, disdain for parliament and intolerance of autonomous powers within government as its marks.
Marx refused the term. In his preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire in 1869 he wrote: "Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor." The great productive mass, the slaves, formed only the passive pedestal for those combatants, so comparing the modern Bonapartist regime to Caesar ignored the material conditions of class struggle. Marx analysed the same phenomenon as Bonapartism.
In the twentieth century the term returned. Italian Fascism and Benito Mussolini espoused Caesarism, and Oswald Spengler saw it as the final phase of modernity that would succeed democracy. In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci located its roots in a "crisis of authority", a crisis of representation in which social groups no longer identify with their parties. He distinguished a progressive Caesarism that carries a revolution forward, as with Napoleon I, from a regressive one that blocks proletarian revolution, as with Napoleon III, and allowed for a "Caesarism without Caesar" carried out by a coalition such as the British National Government.