Research Catalog

Title

Caesar and the fading of the Roman world : a study in Republicanism and Caesarism / Peter Baehr.

Author

Baehr, P. R. (Peter R.)

Publication

New Brunswick, NJ : Transaction Publishers, 1998.

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Holdings

Details

Description

viii, 359 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• For many centuries, Julius Caesar was a name that evoked strong feelings among educated people. Some of these responses were complimentary, but others came from the point of view of "political republicanism" - which envisaged Caesar as a historical symbol for some of the most dangerous tendencies a polity could experience. Caesar represented everything that republicans detested - corruption, demagogy, usurpation - and as such, provided an anti-model against which genuine political virtue could be measured.
• Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World examines the reception of Caesar in republican thought until the late eighteenth century and his transformation in the nineteenth, when he enjoyed a major rehabilitation in the literary culture and historiography of the day.
• In the nineteenth century, Caesar enjoyed a major rehabilitation; from being a pariah, he was elevated in the writings of people like Byron, De Quincey, Mommsen, Froude, and Nietzsche to the greatest statesman of his age.
• Simultaneously, Caesar's name continued to function as a term of polemic in the emergence of a new debate on what came to be called "Caesarism." While the metamorphosis of Caesar's reputation is studied here as a process in its own right, it is also meant to highlight the increasing enfeeblement of the republican tradition. The transformation of Caesar's image is a sure sign of changes within the wider present-day political culture and evidence of the emergence of new problems and challenges.
• This volume is an important study that will be of value to sociologists, political theorists, and historians.

Subjects

• Caesarism > History
• Republicanism > History
• Political science > History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

1. Caesar Within the Republican Imagination -- 2. The Advent of Caesarism -- 3. Bismarck and the Crisis of German Politics: Max Weber and His Contemporaries I -- 4. From German Politics to Universal Sociology: Max Weber and His Contemporaries II -- 5. Caesarism in Twentieth-Century Political and Sociological Thought.

ISBN

1560003049 (cloth)

LCCN

97016701

OCLC

• 36806774
• ocm36806774

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries