On Caesarism

A topical and provocative concept, if not a fully coherent one.

Apr 24, 2023

Précis, aka TL;DR: in which we explore the concept of Caesarism, which has become an in-vogue term among some commentators and aspiring political theorists in the United States. I discuss the term as a concept potentially helpful to social scientific research, note it as a partisan descriptor for a particular type of politics, and then look to its usage as an eye-raising shorthand for ‘what should be done’ according to some.

I find that the first approach only works if we can settle on one of a few, fairly narrow definitional options - which may be analytically useful, especially if we’re thinking about selecting across unusual historical cases. The second seems too partisan and pejorative to be helpful, although seeing the term in action does allow us to assess the motivations and fears of the user, respectively. And finally, the last proposition matches how most recent thinkers and authoritarian theorists have been using the term, and will probably remain as such in the coming years. Illustrating this, I provide a provocative example of what these sorts of discussions on the ideological margins looks like. For better or worse, expect to see Caesarism show up more and more as we continue our collective journey through the current age of ideological discontent. A brief review of recent publications concludes the newsletter, as always.

Motivations for the Unfamiliar Reader

The casual reader may wonder why Caesarism is a topic of interest, especially those not familiar with ongoing debates among anti-establishment political writers popular online. The core question is one of political regime or political order, about which this newsletter is directly concerned. To spoil our discussion from the start, there are a variety of right-wing political thinkers in the United States that have begun talking about the idea (or even necessity) of a future ‘Caesar’ to solve a variety of intractable political issues. This is often coupled with assessments that the current American political regime (for them, ‘The Regime’) is illegitimate and needs to be fundamentally restructured. We will discuss this in detail below, and the fact that such discussions even exist is the motivation for this essay in the first place. Needless to say, the topic is very spicy, and involves figures who are in fact opposed (with varying degrees of openness) to the US government itself.

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I have an academic interest in these conversations as a scholar of contemporary authoritarian regimes and ‘illiberal’ or reactionary ideologies in general. Indeed, I have written before on America’s growing cohort of ‘authoritarian theorists’ popular in online circles. While still marginal, these figures have a growing readership especially on the ‘dissident’ or illiberal Right, and whose arguments have found their way surprisingly quickly into mainstream political discussions. Most interestingly, these discussions make real claims based in political theory - that Caesarism is a way to refer to a real political phenomenon, something that exists in the historical record, and is useful as a means to describe an empirical observation about political regimes and politics generally. So I thought what better way to approach the issue than to take it at face value. What is Caesarism? Could we use it in a conceptual way? Are social scientists missing out by not applying the term to our own research? Or is this just another term of art for the discontented and the partisan?

We will find that, as with many new ideas percolating on the ideological margins today, Caesarism has an old pedigree - and one that indeed was once a contested topic in social scientific scholarship itself. Importantly, it was indeed considered a relevant way to classify a subset of political regimes, although it would be cast aside in favor of other labels and characterizations over time. As we are explicitly interested in political regimes and their classification, the concept’s genealogy is illuminating. There really is something here, we shall see. Although whether we can use it neutrally or sufficiently distinct from other concepts and tools is less clear. And naturally, if we’re going to take the term on conceptually we need to review how it is being actually used by writers today as well.

What Is Caesarism?

Caesarism is not a commonly-used concept in modern political science, although the earlier one goes back, the more likely one will find references to it. And the shadows of the idea certainly filters through into today’s academic work, although it takes a little digging to uncover. Yet the term is amorphous, and therefore interesting, given that Caesarism is now increasingly deployed in several corners of the internet, and floats just under the water for a growing list of nascent, radical-reactionary thinkers today. Before we look at how it is currently being used in contemporary discussions, mostly by a subset of individuals associated with the American ‘dissident Right,’ it is useful to explore the history of the term itself from a scholarly perspective.

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We can think of Caesarism in three distinct ways: 1) as a social scientific concept that denotes a specific type of political regime or political order that could be used in comparative scholarship; 2) as a descriptor of politics in general (i.e. a ‘caesarist’ or ‘caesarian’ politics); and 3) as a term that collects a proscriptive argument for how one might decisively transform modern politics through a sudden regime break.

We can start with what we have from the academic tradition. The go-to for discussions of Caesarism is the scholar Peter Baehr, who has written extensively on how the term’s definition has shifted over time, although admittedly he is less clear on what he thinks it actually is or should be. We will take what we can from Baehr and then move forwards towards a synthesis with other usage practices. Putting this genealogy together, we will end up at a rough conceptual definition that captures a very specific experience of authoritarian rule.

For Baehr, the ideas surrounding the term, usually in reference to the threatened rise of a new ‘Caesar,’ were long associated from the 16th to 18th centuries with the dangers of unrestrained demagogy. This sort of tyrannical populism was the enemy of stable political constitutions, whether monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic (i.e., the Polybian or Classical understanding of political regime we have discussed before.) The American Founders, for example, were terribly concerned with a ‘Caesar’ emerging - in this sense a tyrannical or despotic individual seizing power from republican (i.e. pluralist, rights-defending elite rule) government.

In this early sense, we can understand the post-colonial Latin American experience of national dictatorships under figures like Simón Bolívar as examples of this early way to understand the dangers of Caesarism. From this perspective, both traditional monarchy and republican government are thus opposed to Caesarism, which represents a failure of political order and its collapse into usurpation and despotism. Even so, 18th and early 19th century writers did not use it as an ‘ism.’ That would wait until the early 1850s, when the term would be popularized in the European context by Auguste Romieu in his L'ère Des Césars. He viewed it as a way to describe a new, modern age dominated by the “rule of military warlords.” This would be only the first effort at substantively defining the concept, however.

By the mid-19th century, Caesarism had changed its meaning somewhat, and had developed to refer specifically to the ‘authoritarian populism’ of Emperor Napoleon III (and, much more misleadingly, to the rule of Otto von Bismarck in Imperial Germany). This Caesarism was seen as unique, insofar as it described a form of imperialist, authoritarian rule that was legitimized by popular acclamatory plebiscites, had an especially modernizing character, and was distinct from traditional monarchy, classic republicanism, and constitutional government in general. It would be associated with the trapping of military authority, but different from many military regimes at the time, which were often seen as liberal, or reformist, efforts to overthrow traditional monarchy through the pronunciamento (i.e., elite military coups d'état).

We can see the core 19th century understanding of the term to be something like ‘strong leaders seeking mass support’ or ‘Bonapartist authoritarian rule based on plebiscitary acclamation.’ Usage at this time almost always referred to new, authoritarian regimes keyed into modernization and industrialization drives, which was also disinterested in inherited, traditional institutions in favor of newness and change. One key insight from this approach is that Caesarism is decidedly modern, rather than ‘Reactionary’ in the old, European throne-and-altar sense. Yet this framing would shift again in time, however. And curiously, it would be temporarily detached from authoritarian rule itself.

The key theorist of Caesarism by the turn of the 20th century was the famous German sociologist Max Weber (to whom we owe core definitions of the state, the nation, and political legitimacy today). Weber would redefine Caesarism as form of charismatic, legitimate authority found in democracies. Baehr argues that Weber was concerned with detaching the term from its Napoleonic, authoritarian particulars, and that, “in the guise of modern plebiscitary leadership, [it could be] situated within a vibrant parliamentary structure.” It was thus associated with Weber’s view that democracies, once dominated by mass politics rather than elite clubs, would largely find stability through Führerdemokratie (“leader democracy”) led by politically-charismatic, individual figures that could communicate with the masses directly. Old-style parliamentarism would be incompatible with (democratic) Caesarism, but subordinated parliamentarism, in the Weberian sense, would not.

Weber’s Caesarism was very different from the Caesarism of the mid-19th century, and would be an important point in debates with Carl Schmitt, Hermann Heller, and other German political theorists. It would also remain a touchstone concept in French political discussions. Yet this heyday as a (still rare-ish) term of scholarly art would not last - indeed, it would fall by the wayside fairly quickly. Here is a Google NGram graph from 1800-2019 showing trends in term-usage:

Usage of Caesarism, 1800-2019 (Google NGram Database - generated February 2023)

By far the largest wave of usage was in the wake of Napoleon III’s coup and the Bismarck era in Germany. Weber’s redefinition was important for scholarly debates, but still not widely in use. We also can see that the term would reemerge briefly in 1930s-1940s, and then once more in the 1960s. The former can be explained by the rise of fascism and other non-traditionalist, authoritarian regimes in Europe, and the latter by the explosive growth in military juntas and personalist dictatorships that followed the end of colonialism in Africa and Asia, as well as the renewed political turmoil of mid-century Latin American regimes. Caesarism here returns to its more Bonapartist element, as a military-inflected, personalist authoritarian regime emerging as a break from the past of colonial or elite-cartel rule. It also maintains some of Weber’s emphases, including ideologies of modernization which would be shared by cases like Mussolini’s Italy as well as postcolonial modernizing-nationalist regimes such as those in Tanzania, Senegal, and Ghana.

One example of mid-20th century usage comes from Gabriel Almond, writing in the mid-1950s, who described political systems perpetually threatened with a kind of “Caesaristic” breakthrough, in which “these systems tend… to be threatened by, and sometimes to be swept away by, movements of charismatic nationalism which break through the boundaries of the political sub–cultures and overcome immobilism through coercive action and organization. In other words, these systems have a totalitarian potentiality in them.” He notes that “Anglo-Saxon” parliamentary regimes are resistant to this sort of politics, and mainly seems to refer to France and other Latin or “continental” political cultures.

Notably, Caesarism does not stick around as a preferred term of art after the 1970s. This is because the generic term ‘authoritarianism’ will win out, pushed by scholars like Carl Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hannah Arendt, Samuel Huntington, and Juan Linz (among others) who sought to distinguish non-democratic regimes around the world from the eye-catching, totalitarian examples of Nazi Germany, the Stalin-era Soviet Union, and Maoist China. Those authoritarian regimes that seem to fit the ‘Caesarist’ characterization taken from the 19th century will be mostly re-termed as military regimes, personalist regimes, or “praetorian” regimes.

Since then, there has been very little work that describes regimes as Caesarist. One exception is a recent article in East European Politics by Robert Sata and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski. They develop a concept they term “Caesarian politics,” which describes a polity dominated by three pillars of “(1) patronalism… [and] (2) state capture that are justified with (3) exclusionary identity politics” - which they elsewhere summarize as “rule legitimised through electoral success that uses patronalism, state capture and exclusionary identity politics to enact anti-pluralist regime change to help charismatic leader(s) become true Caesar(s)".”

Unfortunately, Sata and Karolewski are referring to modern Poland and Hungary, which already have a huge cotton industry of scholarship inventing and applying new terms to describe their contemporary politics. “Democratic backsliding,” “illiberalism,” “electoral authoritarianism,” and many other terms are far more common when referring to these cases, and this usage does not seem to follow in connection to every previous usage of Caesarism, which highlights the role of military or martial leadership, hyper-charismatic personalism, or sharp regime breaks. Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński might be the bête noirs of modern European politics, and at least the former can be plausibly said to lead a (soft) electoral authoritarian regime, but they seem very removed from the way anyone else has used the Caesarist term.

One final way that scholars have used Caesarism is as a loose descriptor for hegemonic, or untrammeled, executive rule. This aligns with Weber’s plebiscitary leader characterization and is focused on executives in democratic regimes, although the purpose tends to be highly partisan. Various American presidents have been described as having Caesarist impulses, from FDR’s long tenure as the dominant figure of Interwar and WWII-era US politics to George W. Bush’s military adventurism and unitary-executive theory of government to perceptions of Barack Obama’s politics of administrative overreach. The ideas of the “imperial presidency” and the “presidentialization of politics” overlap here, and are more commonly used. It also seems clear that describing democratic political leaders as Caesarist is primarily a means to describe the illegitimacy of ones’ political opponents, usually from a hard left or right position.

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An Attempt at Defining Caesarism

Given the genealogy above, we are left with a hodgepodge of usages, some describing political regimes, some as a style of politics, and some as simply an antipathetic characterization of political opponents. The simpler, older ways seems in many cases the way through - if we use Napoleon III as the core case of Caesarism in the modern age, then we can identify a few common threads:

1) a break from the previous political regime headed by a singular, charismatic figure with clear military associations;
2) an authoritarian regime that makes active and ritualized use of popularity among the masses to legitimize rule; and
3) a political order unconcerned with mediating or pluralist institutions and whose ideology embraces newness and modernization.

Unfortunately, it is not clear that this is a more useful concept than others on offer. Still, an incomplete, preliminary list could be built of regimes fitting this generalized definition, including the Second Empire of Napoleon III, Fascist Italy under Mussolini, Álvaro Obregón’s Mexico, Getúlio Vargas’ Brazil, post-monarchical Egypt under Nasser and Sadat, France during the uncertain, extra-constitutional period under Charles de Gaulle, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, South Korea under Park Chung-hee, and a few others like the Ghanaian regime of Jerry Rawlings or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

If we drop the military connotations, we could find Antonio Salazar’s Portugal and other Interwar-Era ‘authoritarian constitutionalist’ regimes like Konstantin Päts’ Estonia. If we loosen the plebiscitary components, we could include a variety of elitist, modernist authoritarian regimes in Latin America like Porfirio Díaz’s Mexico, Primo de Rivera’s Portugal, or Pinochet’s Chile. If we drop the strong modernization imperative we could throw in Francisco Franco’s Spain or Józef Piłsudski’s Poland. And if we look backwards from Napoleon III and stretch things a little more, someone like the ‘folk-caudillo’ Juan Manuel de Rosas of Argentina might fit, along with more populist-tagged examples of pronunciamiento-style juntas of the 19th century.

This exercise, and its variations, leads us to run the risk of making a category of regimes that might not be all that similar, and which might be better captured by other, cross-cutting concepts. Some of these cases are complicated by attempts at building dominant, hegemonic ideological parties or complicated bureaucratic-corporatist arrangements, which does not fit especially well with the particularly autocratic, single-leader notions of Caesarism and can be better expressed by concepts like ‘fascism,’ ‘bureaucratic-authoritarianism,’ (Arab/nationalist/secularist) postcolonial socialism, ‘Third Worldist’ revolutionary movement-regimes, and so on. We also run the risk of just building out a list of right-leaning or rightist regimes born from coups or revolutions.

This survey suggests that there is something here, but it is not yet clear what it is. The definition I’ve provided above works to typify a subset of authoritarian political orders in modernity, and perhaps it might prove empirically useful. Some questions, if we were to build out a full case list, do follow: are Caesarist regimes longer-lasting than other coup-initiated regimes? Do they achieve modernization better? Do they produce enduring political cleavages or movements in the decades following? How path-dependent are politics after Caesarist relative to non-Caesarist coups? Does democracy come easier or with more difficulty after Caesarism? Perhaps useful questions to ask, but we need to make sure the concept is not too overlapping with other ways to categorize authoritarian political orders.

Caesarism as a Radical Political Goal

While there may be a case for using Caesarism as a substantive concept from a social science perspective, that’s not why people are reviving the term today. For some rising thinkers and theorists associated with the American ‘dissident Right,’ Caesarism is less a term to describe regimes of the past, but rather a term that captures goals for the future. In this sense, Caesarism is another way of describing (sometimes in hopeful terms, other times as knowing resignation) the end of the current American political regime and the one to come. Unsurprisingly, this is a very provocative topic - we are approaching it in this newsletter from a purely analytic perspective.

The question of Caesarism is a prominent thread in the current thinking of modern-day ‘authoritarian theorists.’ Deeply discontented with how contemporary American democracy works, and unconvinced that electoral victories will halt perceived decline, these writers have taken to discussing Caesarism as a potential answer to the question of ‘what happens next,’ and even (for some) a potential manual for ‘what is to be done.’ The discussion is wider-ranging than one might think, and has shown up in many right-leaning publications in the last year or two especially. Two thinkers that have touched on this most directly are the Straussian political theorist Michael Anton, a professor at Hillsdale College, and the hard-right authoritarian theorist Charles Haywood, an independent blogger with a large reach in dissident Right circles.

Anton is famous for his ‘Flight 93’ essay ahead of the Trump victory in 2016, as well as a pessimistic book on the trajectory of American politics, The Stakes. In his monograph, he describes a potential break-up of the United States and outlines the possibility for the emergence of a ‘Red Caesar’ or a ‘Blue Caesar’ (corresponding to current hyperpolarized American political divides). Anton notes that ‘Blue America’ is more likely to remain as an oligarchic network, while ‘Red America’ could very well see a Caesar emerge. The discussion is broad and hypothetical - Anton is not a true authoritarian theorist as I have defined the term elsewhere, at least not openly, but deeply concerned with the potential for a national breakup. Yet one can read it fairly easily as an exploration into what the benefits of a ‘Red Caesar’ might be. It is probably fair to say that Anton is the one who has most popularized the Caesarist idea as a thought-experiment for dissident Right discussions since his book’s publication.

Haywood is a different character, in that he not only has explored the idea of a coming American Caesar, but clearly and openly advocates for one as well. His own project for the last several years has been developing a political philosophy for a future, authoritarian American political regime. In doing so, he has ventured into the concept of Caesarism from multiple points - he prefers to term this future regime as ‘Augustan,’ referring to the Roman political settlement after the end of the Republic and the tyranny of Julius Caesar himself. Haywood also sees the crack-up of the American polity as inevitable, rather than something that can be avoided.

For both thinkers, Caesarism is primarily a descriptor for the way forward as American democracy collapses in on itself. Anton is more circumspect and concerned, at least in public writing, while Haywood takes an advocacy approach. Both view Caesarism not as an ideal itself, given the chaos and turmoil of any potential regime break in the US. But both also use it in the more analytical way noted above - as a rupture from the political development of the American polity characterized by harsh, authoritarian governance.

There is a remarkable discussion on the subject that was recently published online - which is really the motivation for this newsletter essay in the first place. We can use it as a good example of what the Caesarism discussion happening online looks like in earnest practice. It collected five dissident Right, or dissident Right-adjacent, thinkers and commentators to discuss the subject over drinks: Matthew Peterson, Michael Anton, Charles Haywood, David Reaboi, and Darryl Cooper. In addition to Anton and Haywood, the rest are online dissident Right influencers with large social media presences and projects to build out a hard right alternative to the current center-right establishment. You can find the video of the discussion here:

The gist of the conversation is about 1) what Caesarism is, and 2) why it may be either inevitable or preferable to the current state of affairs. Peterson describes Caesarism as “one man who will arrest the decline of our declining republic.” Haywood is even more direct, taking the advocate position of Caesarism as being a “gordian knot solution” to current political woes. And he describes a hypothesized Caesar as an “authoritarian reconstructor of a society’s polity.” Anton meanwhile gives a process account of Caesarism as “the rule of one (monarchy) after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.” He provides a few examples, including Franco and Pinochet.

All of these points fit decently well with the synthesized conceptualization I provided above - a personalized, authoritarian regime that breaks sharply with the previous political order, with the intention to solve political impasses through decisive action. Perhaps notably, however, it is not clear whether this would occur through a military or military-associated figure, as is common in older uses of the term.

Another point of interest is the agnosticism of whether the proposed Caesar would really be a dissident Right figure at all. Cooper sums this up thusly: “Caesar’s not on your side, Caesar’s on Caesar’s side, the relationship is transactional.” Haywood’s writing has followed this framing in the past as well, arguing that it’s not clear whether a Caesar would be good, just that he would inevitably arrive on the scene, full-stop. In this sense, one does not choose a Caesar, but rather the political situation will be in such disequilibrium that one emerges regardless. The advocacy, for many in this sort of discussion, is that the current situation is perceived to be sufficiently bad already that it may be comparatively better all things considered. The divide between Caesarism as solution and Caesarism as just inevitable is not hard, but a question of emphasis. One can think of the former as a theory of victory in politics, the latter as a structural theory of regime collapse.

The latter fits the empirical record of coups d'etat across the modern era that we might plausibly call Caesarist. Louis Napoleon, Díaz, Horthy, Salazar, Piłsudski, Obregón, Franco, and Vargas are all potential models for enterprising Caesarists. But these models are as much about ‘saving the state’ as counterrevolutionary figures, or as well-placed elites stepping into a chaotic political disequilibrium to halt cycles of instability as they are about simple partisan desires.

Where do we go from here? I took just one podcast as an example, but there are many others to choose from in this general milieu. As I write on authoritarian regimes in my own academic work, and have taken an interest in ideological developments in American context, I intend to keep tracking these sorts of conversations. My expectation is that we will see more discussions of Caesarism in the coming years. This is not least because people like Anton and Haywood, as well as other authoritarian theorists like Curtis Yarvin, are clued into it directly and have large readerships. From the other side of things, certain GOP politicians are described as having Caesarist intentions by unfriendly media, so it may be that these ideas get ever further traction due to standard reactive dynamics of deep partisanship and high polarization.

It’s worth thinking through what these conversations mean, although they remain very much so in the world of radical criticism and speculation, rather than any actionable program. We may never see a real Caesarist politics (and I’m happy to editorialize that I really do not recommend it), but it is certainly true that our current era of political uncertainty and hyperbole lends itself to taking the question on very seriously.