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.
