Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall - From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson - Softcover

Mount, Ferdinand

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1399409727 ISBN 13: 9781399409728

Verlag: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of Strong Men and their imitators. Caesarism is alive and well. Ferdinand Mount opens up a fascinating exploration of how and why Caesars seize power and why they fall.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ferdinand Mount is a novelist, essayist and former editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2002. As a political figure, he was head of the Number Ten Policy Unit. As a journalist, he has contributed regular columns to The Spectator, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. He is the author of several books, including Of Love and Asthma (part of his six-volume series A Chronicle of Modern Twilight) which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1992, Making Nice and The Pentecost Papers. He lives in North London with his family.

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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 grubby glories of parliamentary politics and a thought-provoking roadmap of the way back to constitutional government.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Continuum
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1399409727
• ISBN 13: 9781399409728
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales; sales@vanditmar.nl; ; Hondiuslaan 44; Utrecht; 3528 AB; Niederlande