Caesarism in Nineteenth-Century British Political Thought

Previous scholarship on Caesarism has focused overwhelmingly on continental Europe. Insofar as Britain has been mentioned at all, it has been as a mere foil to the latter: ostensibly, the kind of democratic dictatorship known as “Caesarism” was wholly alien to British traditions of limited, representative, and parliamentary government; as such, the British dismissed it out of hand; the concept never gained any purchase within British thought; indeed, the word itself was not even used in Britain until 1857 (according to the OED , cited by several scholars). By drawing on an array of periodical and newspaper sources, the proposed contribution will challenge this orthodoxy along three principal lines: first, it will demonstrate that Auguste Romieu’s L’ère des Césars (1850) was widely reviewed in Britain, with the result that both the word and the concept of “Caesarism” passed immediately into British usage; second, it will demonstrate that rather than merely dismissing the concept out of hand, mid-century British thinkers engaged seriously with it, formulating an elaborate critique of “Caesarism” as practiced on the Continent; third, it will demonstrate that, as the century wore on, above all due to the democratization of the British constitution that occurred as a result of the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts, many British thinkers came to believe that Britain was in fact at imminent risk of collapsing into Caesarism, most likely through the emergence of a charismatic parliamentary leader such as Benjamin Disraeli. In this sense, the received belief that Britain was somehow “immune” to Caesarism might hold for the mid-nineteenth century, but it does not hold for the late nineteenth century.