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 antimodel 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.
Critical of hereditary monarchy and emphasizing the collective
political obligations citizens owed to their city or commonwealth,
republican thinkers sought to cultivate institutions and mores best
adapted to self-governing liberty. The republican idiom became an
integral element in the discourse of the American revolutionaries
and constitution builders during the eighteenth century, and of
their counterparts in France.
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.
Drawing on history, political theory, and sociology, "Caesar
and the Fading of the Roman World "uses the image of Caesar as a
way of interpreting broader political and cultural tendencies.
Peter Baehr discusses the significance of living not in a
postmodern society, but in a postclassical one in which ideas of
political obligation have become increasingly emaciated and in
which the theoretical resources for the care of our public world
have become correspondingly scarce. This volume is an important
study that will be of value to sociologists, political theorists,
and historians.
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