British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
14TH BRITISH ACADEMY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP SYMPOSIUM
Abstract
The Origins and Future of Caesarism in Europe: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Perspectives
Dr Iain McDaniel
For many political thinkers writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, Caesarism represented the worst imaginable future for modern European states. While some argued that Caesarism could not possibly survive under modern conditions, others suggested that Europe's nation-states - with their growing bureaucracies, large permanent armies, centralized administrative apparatuses and increasingly regulated economies - were heading rapidly towards a kind of dictatorship that was comparable in scope and nature to the rule of the emperors of ancient Rome. Some conjectured that modern Caesarism would be the inevitable outcome of the clash between socialism and capitalism in modern states. Others predicted that it would be the consequence of failing to solve the 'national question' in parts of central Europe. Still others argued that Caesarism would be an inevitable consequence of the combination of militarism, political centralisation, and universal suffrage that characterised many nineteenth-century states.
This talk will examine how a variety of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers strove to make sense of Caesarism. I will claim that, far from being a peculiarly French or German preoccupation, writers throughout the continent (including those from Italy, England, Austria and Hungary) deployed the idiom in their analyses of national and broader European predicaments. I will also suggest that, while there was enormous disagreement on the immediate sources of the phenomenon, almost every serious political theorist working between 1848 and 1914 agreed that Caesarism had to be understood as a corrupt amalgam of 'democratic' and 'imperial' principles in modern political life. The idea of Caesarism – or 'imperatorial democracy,' as it was sometimes described – thus stood at the heart of nineteenth-century conceptions of sovereignty. In this latter respect, the talk will offer a fresh perspective on two of the key concepts in modern political thought.
Iain McDaniel holds an MA in Intellectual History from the University of Sussex and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based in the Faculty of History at Cambridge. He also holds a Bye-Fellowship in History at Queens' College, Cambridge.
Iain works on the history of political thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is particularly interested in reconstructing the intellectual history of modern critiques of military government and modern despotism, and his research examines, broadly, conceptions of the relationship between civil government and military powers and responsibilities in European political discourse from c. 1750 to c. 1900. He is currently working on two book-length projects which deal with these subjects from different historical and theoretical perspectives. The first extends his doctoral dissertation, which analysed the political theory of the Scottish philosopher and historian Adam Ferguson, with a particular focus upon Ferguson's little-studied History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783) and its connection to European political and historiographical debates of the eighteenth century. The forthcoming book will provide a complete reinterpretation of Ferguson's political thought and its place in Enlightenment debates about the relationship between civil societies and their armies. Iain's second major research project is a British Academy-funded study of the concept of Caesarism as it developed in the political and intellectual controversies of the nineteenth century. This study focuses, in particular, on the enormous political and intellectual challenges faced by nineteenth-century political thinkers in seeking to reconcile the imperatives of nation-building and military security with those of democracy and universal suffrage. The project thus aims to revise contemporary understandings of the clash between democratic and imperial legacies in the intellectual history of the modern state after 1789.