'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.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
THE IDEA OF A CAESAR
1 Why is he there?
2 The Hero Worshipper
3 Augustus and Auguste - and Adolf
4 The Comforting Illusion
5 How it Starts
PART TWO
THE MAKING OF CAESARS
1 The Invention of Charisma
2 The Timing
3 The Prep
4 Being Lied to is Good for You
5 The Assault on Parliament
6 The Enemy at the Gates
PART THREE
THE UNMAKING OF CAESARS
1 Catiline on the Run
2 Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot (?)
3 The Dinner Party that Never Was
4 The Beer-Hall Putsch
5 Mrs Gandhi's Emergency
6 Donald Trump and the March on the Capitol
PART FOUR
THE SACREDEST PLACE
