In recent years, there has been a deepening convergence between scholarship on global intellectual history and on legal history. To take just one example, a recent book on international law, by Arnulf Becker Lorca (2014), carries “global intellectual history” in its subtitle—a stance related to the author's emphasis on the constitutive role in the field of non-European legal actors. A sustained reflection on the convergence between legal studies and global intellectual history, however, still remains a desideratum, at least in the sense that we do not yet have even a basic platform where scholars with different space/time and (trans-) cultural specialization come together to reflect on how studying legal concepts gains from global intellectual history. This forum, which results from a conference organized at Heidelberg University in 2016, attempts a preliminary intervention here. The introductory remarks are not meant to be conclusive; they invite responses.

What could be timelier than a forum on Caesarism?1 Had this collection of articles been published only a few years earlier, I would have introduced the topic quite differently. Recently, Caesarism has become the keyword of US (and therefore, to a certain extent, global) politics, being used to explain both internal and external political–ideological dynamics.2 As such, Caesarism is increasingly replacing that much-used (and abused) concept of recent years: populism. Only time will tell whether it will be a permanent or temporary replacement, or whether another type of conceptual relationship (possibly a symbiotic one) will develop.

This article takes as its organizing principle Napoleon’s relationship, first, to the legacy of Julius Caesar in the French Revolution, and then to the legacy of Octavian, which guided his rise to power. It concludes with an analysis of Napoleon’s legacy in the concept of Caesarism as it developed in the nineteenth century, and the extent to which his own relationship to the classical heritage of the first Caesars actually failed to influence this legacy. The French revolutionaries lived in dread of Julius Caesar: he was the powerful general who turned his army on Rome, seized dictatorial powers, and sparked the events that led to the fall of the Republic. Napoleon had to share these fears if he was to avoid Caesar’s own fate. Throughout the years of his rise to power, Napoleon was dogged by the legacy of Julius Caesar, rather than inspired by it. Conversely, once in power, he drew direct inspiration from the example of Octavian, who “appropriated the Republic, rather than overthrew it”: Napoleon took absolute power gradually, declared that “the Republic was entrusted to a hereditary dynasty” and, above all, kept the army and his commanders firmly away from political power during his rule. He sought his power base not in the masses, but in the propertied classes—his “masses of granite.” It was the antithesis of Peronism. The Consulate and Empire were resolutely civilian regimes, even if their ethos was militaristic. Only at the very outset of his rule, through the plebiscites, and during the desperate period of the 100 Days, did Napoleon deploy a style of government that directly foreshadowed future Caesarism. Rather, it was in hindsight that late generations were able to fashion Napoleon as a Caesar, from the example of a general who took power.

This article reverses prevailing scholarly assumptions according to which in Victorian Britain Caesarism was neglected in both theoretical parlance and public discussion. It shows how intellectuals as ideologically different as Bagehot, Seeley, and Maine, as well as other (less well known) commentators writing in newspapers and periodicals, theorized about Caesarism–Napoleonism primarily according to cultural considerations. This means that they looked at “democratic Caesarism” as a form of society rather than exclusively as a political phenomenon, emphasizing how a series of civilizational deficiencies attributed to the masses enabled Caesarist politics. Moreover, the article argues that these critiques were part of a broader (Arnoldian) antidemocratic discourse that targeted democracy as a cultural desert. Democratic Caesarism was thus seen as being characterized by the masses’ uncultured attitudes, ethical–political irresponsibility, and exaggerated care for materialistic interests. The main goal of this criticism was to expose the damaging consequences of democratic life for British politics and civilization.

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.

The article investigates whether specific characteristics are associated with urbanist policies under Caesarism. It offers a brief account of Caesarism as such before mainly focusing on nineteenth-century France. The article asks whether Caesarism finds expression in urban planning and particular forms of architecture. It then proceeds to answer the question, focusing mostly on Paris under Napoleon III.

The goal of my article is to investigate the relationship between Caesarism and Elite theory across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, I will focus on Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), the older and, to a certain extent, most authoritative representative of the so-called Italian Elitism. By relying on a careful examination of a variety of texts, I will show how Pareto moves from an initial criticism of the Caesarist theory (conceived as a form of personalism) to a much more positive conception of it; that is, as a political tool able to save the state from the impending “catastrophe.” The analysis of Pareto’s reasoning is developed against the backdrop of a broader consideration of Elitist thinking as a whole, as well as with regard to the fin de siècle European culture—Pareto representing, therefore, the case study for the investigation of a wider political and intellectual movement.

This contribution explores the cultural foundations of the concept of Caesarism, from the late positivist naturalization of national characters up to Fascism. The first section argues that the ill-defined concept of Caesarism circulating in Italian political discourse was based on the assumptions of late Tainian positivism, naturalistic and organicist, intertwined with a nationalist discourse. The second section traces how this imprint, combined with wartime, radical, antisocialist patriotism, forged a conception of the people modeled on the hierarchical military structure, sealing the genetic link between Fascism and the Great War. The third section illustrates how, after Fascism came to power, the combination of warlike hierarchical organicism and the principle of leadership took shape during the debate on constitutional reforms, particularly in the thinking of Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco. The fourth section suggests that the mutual hybridization of Rocco and Gentile’s positions produced an original paradigm of “corporative Caesarism.”