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saliently for Schmitt, the Marxist revolutionaries who sought to establish a Bolshevik “dictatorship of the proletariat.” On the other were the liberal supporters of the Republic whose antipathy toward the institution of dictatorship was not only historically misinformed, Schmitt claimed, but also jeopardized the political system that guaranteed their very existence. Eliding dictatorship with Caesarism and Bonapartism, liberals were bereft of an important resource with which to confront their enemies and save the Republic.

As a response to the Weimar political impasse, Schmitt offered a defense of a variety of dictatorship based on the Roman precedent, an emergency mode or rule that would suspend legality in order to protect society at large and, once the danger was over, restore the status quo ante. Such a “commissarial” dictatorship stood in contrast to the “sovereign,” Jacobininspired dictatorship appropriated by Marxist revolutionaries who sought to found an entirely new social and political order with unlimited powers for those who ruled.

When Schmitt first began to formulate his ideas on dictatorship, his principal concern was to rescue the concept from theoretical obfuscation and the institution from illegitimate use and calumny. Properly understood, Schmitt seemed to be saying, Caesarism, Bonapartism, and Bolshevism could all be countered in periods of modern emergency by resort to “commissarial” dictatorship. Yet, as John McCormick shows, Schmitt’s argument became ever more extreme. From appearing to defend the idea and practice of commissarial dictatorship, Schmitt gradually abandoned it, substituting right-wing Caesarism for its leftist incarnation. By the time Schmitt joined the National Socialist party in May 1933, the unchecked “plebiscitary legitimacy” of the leader of the Reich had replaced the “statutory legality” of constitutional instruments and assemblies. The constitution that commissarial dictatorships were supposed to restore had become an irrelevancy.

Schmitt’s metamorphosis was conditioned not only by the economic and political crises of the Weimar Republic, but also by how he interpreted modern liberalism. Convinced of liberalism’s intellectual feebleness in times of extremity and its inability to oversee fundamental political change, he looked elsewhere for solutions. McCormick counters Schmitt’s defeatism by invoking Bruce Ackerman’s theory of constitutional politics, which attempts to show the resilience, dynamism, and participatory resources of the American Republic and, by extension, liberalism’s transformative capacities. Still, it is striking how much the sterility and weakness of liberalism – perceived or otherwise – dominated radical thinking about Bonapartism and Caesarism in the interwar years. A conspicuous example is to be found in

the analysis of one of Schmitt’s Marxist adversaries, Antonio Gramsci, the subject of Benedetto Fontana’s chapter.

Gramsci’s theory of Caesarism is one of the least explored dimensions of his thought and, as Fontana demonstrates, one of the most complex. The theory emerged as part of Gramsci’s attempt in the Prison Notebooks (1929–36) to account for the triumph of Italian Fascism and its precondition, the collapse of the revolutionary left and of liberalism. In his account, liberalism’s travails were given explanatory pride of place. Gramsci argued that, in contrast to the experiences of Britain and France, Italian liberalism never developed a “hegemonic” relationship to the subordinate classes – that is, never managed to mobilize that degree of consent required for a class to govern with moral and political authority. The Italian ruling class and its allies had become mired in a particularistic and factional “economiccorporate” phase of development. Thus they were ill-equipped to mobilize the support of the masses to resolve structural crises. It is true that, as a Marxist, Gramsci saw the impending collapse of any modern state as an opportunity for revolution and the dismantling of bourgeois institutions. The problem was that a revolutionary conjuncture could also serve as the occasion for Caesarism.

Though Gramsci gave the concept of Caesarism different articulations, distinguishing, for instance, among qualitative and quantitative, progressive and reactionary modalities, the weight of his argument falls on the combination of domination, dictatorship, and police power that a Caesarist solution typically brings to a social-political crisis.

According to Gramsci, Caesarism emerges out of the decomposition of a ruling bloc faced with a militant challenge to its position and privileges. At some point, one particularly disquieted element in this bloc concludes, usually after conflicts with its previous allies, that the opposition of the subordinate classes is too strong to vanquish. In consequence, the breakaway element “invites” an extraneous force to intervene and resolve the crisis. The result is the subordination of all classes, temporarily at least, to this external force. Italian Fascism, on Gramsci’s account, represented the solution chosen by an exhausted ruling bloc. Fascism “was the logical and natural evolution of the liberal state” or, more precisely, of a liberal state that since the Risorgimento had failed to become authoritative and to project successfully its class interest as the common good.

We have seen that from Weber to Schmitt and Gramsci the concept of Caesarism remained influential in political discussion. From 1945 onward, however, it gradually fell, with a few exceptions, into desuetude though the partner notion of Bonapartism continued to have resonance in France. For

many political thinkers, the era of Fascism, Nazism, and Bolshevism had exploded familiar categories of thought. But how was the recent past to be depicted?

Few writers, Margaret Canovan explains, gave more thought to this question than Hannah Arendt. She perceived that the concepts of Bonapartism, Caesarism, and even of dictatorship itself were completely inadequate for understanding the enormities perpetrated in Europe before and during World War II. Moreover, though the Axis had been defeated, the world was still threatened by Stalinism, a regime with disturbing parallels to National Socialism. The concept Arendt deployed to describe both systems was “totalitarianism.” She assiduously sought to avoid the simplifications the Cold War brought to the discussion of this notion.22 Arendt confined the term to the twin regimes of Hitler and Stalin and emphasized their unprecedented character. (She described the post–Stalin Soviet Union as a one-party dictatorship; of Maoism she knew little.) She also defined totalitarianism in a way markedly different from most of her contemporaries.

Totalitarianism, Arendt argued, was a system of domination quintessentially typified by “motion” rather than by Gleichschaltung (synchronization), by unceasing turbulence rather than by a centralized, all-controlling state. To confuse totalitarianism with dictatorship or to see it as a type of dictatorship was to miss a fundamental distinction. Once consolidated, dictatorships typically become routinized and predictable, domesticating and detaching themselves from the movements that were their original social basis. Totalitarian regimes, in contrast, rise to power on a movement and, once installed, employ motion as their constitutive “principle” of domination. The mercurial will of the leader whose next decision could nullify all previous ones; ideologies of race or history to whose inexorable “laws” human beings are constantly sacrificed; the police institutions and death camps whose only purposes are to transform citizens into foes, plural individuals into an identical species and then corpses: All these features characterize a regime-type of permanent revolution and transgression. Indeed, it is the grotesque futility and destructiveness of totalitarian systems, their attack on every norm that might anchor human life in something stable, that makes them so resistant to methodical analysis.

Warning against the use of inappropriate categories, Arendt argued that the totalitarian leader was less a charismatic figure in the Weberian sense

22See Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995); and William David Jones, The Lost Debate. German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Urbana and Chicago, 1999), 173–220.

than a figure of extreme vacuity whose fanatical zeal and all-encompassing ideology were deeply attractive to those whose “world” had fractured around them. Included in what she called the “masses” were people of all classes, or rather of none since class allegiances themselves had disintegrated under the impact of war, the implosion of nations, and expulsion of whole populations. The masses were the prime targets for totalitarian mobilization. They were made up of all those individuals characterized by social isolation and “weird disregard for ordinary utilitarian self-interest that comes from the experience of being entirely expendable.”

Arendt’s analysis, then, was concerned principally to delineate a new phenomenon for which a new category and subcategories were required. The point was not that previous kinds of tyranny could never be recapitulated, but that it was folly to conflate such modes with those so violently brought into existence in the 1930s and 1940s. Whether Bonapartist regimes could ever reassert themselves was not a question in which she was particularly interested. However, it was precisely this issue that once again assumed prominence in the land of Bonapartism’s birth.

The precipitating events were Charles de Gaulle’s rise to power in May 1958 to deal with the crisis in North Africa; the referendum soon after that gave him unusually extensive powers as prime minister of the Fourth Republic; and his election as the first president of the Fifth Republic in December 1958. De Gaulle’s military background (“The General”), his habit of using referenda to endorse and validate his authority, and his peremptory, autocratic manner, all made the polemical analogy with Bonapartism irresistible, particularly among leftist critics of the regime.

Nonetheless, the parallel was not confined to detractors of de Gaulle. It also quickly became, Jack Hayward observes, a staple of discussion among academic analysts such as Rene´ Remond´ . Gaullism and Bonapartism, Remond´ declared, had a number of features in common: “control of the media of mass communications; reassuring property owners and business accompanied by ‘social concerns’; Saint-Simonian technocratic reformism; an assertive foreign and military policy, and an authoritarian, monocratic political regime, supported by a centralized administrative elite, notably through the partisan activities of the prefects.”

For Hayward, however, the parallels tell us relatively little. For one thing, many previous republican administrations had evinced characteristics similar to those now being attributed to Gaullism/Bonapartism. For another, the political career of de Gaulle, which Hayward prefers to describe as a “heroic” rather than a “charismatic” or “crisis” form of leadership, displays qualities markedly at variance with the two nineteenth-century Napoleonic regimes.

De Gaulle presided over the loss of French colonies, not their creation. He was defeated not in war, but through “suicide by plebiscite” in 1969. This proved his willingness to accept the precedence of a free, popular vote over his own authority. In this way, de Gaulle facilitated the transition from heroic rule to the more humdrum politics of Georges Pompidou. Most of all, however, de Gaulle created something unique for French politics: a system that, by combining a directly elected president and parliament, synthesized the republican and Bonapartist legacies. “As a heroic leader,” Hayward concludes, de Gaulle was “able to survive his role as a crisis leader to become the founding father of an enduring regime combining assured republican authority and relative constitutional stability with dirigiste economic modernization.” Whatever else this matrix of elements and achievements might be called, it would be singularly inaccurate to deem it “Bonapartist.”

IV

Much of the perplexity and ambiguity that has accompanied the modern discussion of Caesarism and its cognate terms was also experienced in ancient times, according to Claude Nicolet and Arthur Eckstein. Consider more closely the idea and institution of dictatorship, which from at least the seventeenth century has been understood in two opposed ways: as a legal or “regular” office that enables a magistrate to be invested temporarily with great emergency powers to resolve a crisis and uphold the constitutional order; and as a type of rule that overthrows the legal order and replaces it by capricious, violent tyranny. Such a strange juxtaposition would appear to be semantically incoherent. Yet, as Nicolet argues, the roots of this equivocation are to be found in the history of the Roman Republic itself.

Because the classical sources on which historians rely are a mixture of folklore and records of actual events, the practice of dictatorship between 501 and 202 B.C.E. is actually a good deal more obscure than we are often inclined to suppose. With that caveat, however, the following features are discernible. The dictator was legally nominated by one or both consuls (rather than being plebiscitarily acclaimed); he was invested with exceptional powers for a short period of time, usually six months; and although supreme, he had no authority to abolish other magistracies. In short, this kind of dictatorship was limited and, ostensibly at least, designed to secure the common good. By contrast, the “revival” of dictatorship by Sulla and Julius Caesar after more than a century of disuse offers a very different political scenario. Under these warlords, constitutional restraints lost their leverage, the leader’s dominion

became unlimited, the army became his client, and the Senate succumbed to the violent rule of a single man.

But is this stark antinomy between the two kinds and two phases of dictatorship as straightforward as it seems? Nicolet agrees that the Sullan dictatorship is a watershed in the history of the Roman Republic. From there it is but a short step to Caesar and to the Augustan Principate that followed. He also notes that the majority of dictators appointed between 501 and 202 and usually classified as constitutional were engaged in military campaigns against foreign powers or in attempts at domestic conciliation, rather than in sanguinary repressions of sedition. Nevertheless, Nicolet maintains there were precedents for Sulla’s style of rule, notably the intervention of the people in electing or endorsing the dictator. The Republican dictator increasingly came to resemble the “providential man” later associated with Caesarism. True, this term was unknown at the time, though Caesar was anathematized by his enemies as a popularis (the Roman word for the Greek demagag¯ os¯ ) candidate. But Nicolet believes that later appropriation of the term Caesarism to denote the primacy of military conquest, military leadership, and plebiscitarian representation is an altogether appropriate application of the original model.

So, with a somewhat different emphasis, does Arthur Eckstein, who, in the concluding chapter of this book, examines both the social psychology of the imperial administrator and the fear that his rule has recurrently provoked in those who have experienced or observed its excesses and depredations. Eckstein’s thesis is that “the experience of governing a large province on one’s own, the experience of exercising sole responsibility over large regions and great numbers of people, the experience of independence and power and control, the taste for it (and in some cases the great wealth that could be derived from it), all this sometimes created what one might call an ‘imperial counterculture’ to the law-ruled state at the center.”

The classic exemplar of this counterculture is Julius Caesar, whose long campaign in Gaul, virtually unrestrained by the normative and juridical constraints of the metropolis, made the thought of returning to senatorial life humdrum and repellant. Moreover, irregularities in Caesar’s command in Gaul made it appear that only through the help of Pompey could his safety be guaranteed in Rome. Pompey doubtless could have guaranteed Caesar’s liberty, but in so doing he would have turned Caesar from demigod to dependent. That would have been an intolerable position for a man who had enjoyed absolute power for nine years in Gaul. Rather than submit to these unwelcome constraints, Caesar chose to make war on his own city. After a republican conspiracy shorted his career as dictator for life, Caesar became

the archetype of the imperial “administrator” who – personally ambitious, contemptuous of regular governance and routinized accountability, habituated to rule by edict rather than law, and often seduced by wealth beyond imagination – threatened to overrun the central state.

In Caesar’s case, the fear was understandable. Those metropolitans who warned of impending disaster were vindicated, often posthumously. But in other instances, Eckstein continues, alarm has often been exaggerated. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Empire witnessed more than once the rule of imperial administrators – Warren Hastings and Sir Richard Wellesley serve as examples – who seemed the very incarnations of Caesarism but who in fact were forced to accept discipline imposed by the metropolitan center or, after their return home, were left to vegetate in an oblivion they bitterly resented.

In twentieth-century America, General Douglas MacArthur provoked another such imperial scare. Before he was relieved from his Far East command by President Harry Truman in April 1951, MacArthur had not only directly disobeyed presidential orders on a number of occasions; he had also ruled defeated Japan as a virtual second monarch and made national policy by extending military protection to Chiang Kai-shek against the People’s Republic of China. Back home, rumors and nervous jokes circulated that MacArthur was prepared to countenance a coup d’etat´ on his return. That the “American Caesar” failed to do so is, to be sure, attributable to MacArthur’s own belated sense of limits. It was also, however, the result of a republican constitution whose founders, steeped in the classical tradition, took care to incorporate a series of institutional arrangements designed to preempt the “specter of Caesarism into the civil arm of government.”

V

This volume notes, then, the bicentenary of the Eighteenth Brumaire by considering its consequences, direct and remote, for the subsequent history of France, Germany, and Europe. Not least among these effects were those basic contested concepts initially registering the diverse meanings given to the two sequences connected with Napoleon and Louis Bonaparte. Some chapters treat the ways that major theorists such as Tocqueville and Marx conceptualized these two sets of events and, by treating them as either the same phenomenon, or as drastically different, took positions that became crucial to nineteenth-century theories of politics and history. Other chapters examine such issues as the sustained historical analogies with classical Rome

that were such a striking feature of nineteenth-century political argument; the alleged parallels between Bismarck and Louis Napoleon; and, in the twentieth century, the supposed Bonapartism of Charles de Gaulle. A third group of chapters considers the complex interactions among these concepts, first coined in the nineteenth century, and political thought and action in the twentieth.

In concluding these introductory remarks, it is worth touching on some of the pivotal questions and issues that this volume throws into relief. When, why, and how do certain concepts cease to be inescapable parts of the political vocabulary, and drop out of discourse? Concepts once nearly synonymous lose their connections; sometimes concepts previously differentiated become conflated. It can happen that even when the meaning of a concept remains relatively stable, its antonyms may change. The attention of cultural and intellectual historians has hitherto been focused on the successful introduction of new modes of thought. The processes involved in the eclipse or transformation of concepts once crucial to political and social discourse now deserve sustained consideration. This is but one of the areas for investigation suggested by this book.

Another is the question of how the relative salience of Bonapartism, Caesarism, and dictatorship altered drastically as memories of the two Bonapartes receded, and their relevance became increasingly obscure. During the stormy periods that preceded and followed World War I, these concepts had to be adapted to new developments in the politics, societies, and economies of Europe. Significantly, the term dictatorship was used during only two periods of the nineteenth century to designate a modern regime: first, referring to France, between 1789 and 1815; and second, briefly after 1852, to denote the Second Empire. In the 1920s and 1930s, liberal opponents of the Italian Fascist and Nazi regimes adopted dictatorship as their term of choice to designate what they were fighting against. What it meant in this context was a highly oppressive and arbitrary form of rule, established by force or intimidation, enabling a person or group to monopolize political power without any constitutional limits, thus destroying representative government, political rights, and any organized opposition.23 While such a characterization might seem to establish an overwhelmingly negative meaning for dictatorship, the situation was complicated by the use of the term by the Soviet Union and Third International. After 1917, and

23This definition combines the summaries of these theories provided by Nolte, “Diktatur,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, I, 922–3, and Baehr, “Dictatorship,” in The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, 198.

particularly during the 1920s, Lenin’s interpretation of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” remained crucial to the Soviet Union’s official congratulatory self-description. In 1919, the International affirmed Lenin’s reduction of political alternatives in the modern world to “Bourgeois democracy or proletarian dictatorship!” thereby lending “dictatorship” a strongly positive connotation. But, in 1933, the International converted the meaning of dictatorship into a stridently pejorative term meant to discredit Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany: “Fascism is the openly terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinist, and imperialist elements of finance capital.” Still, as mentioned previously, Hitler refused to call himself a dictator, insisting that “Fuhrer¨ ” was the only title that did justice to his leadership of the racially pure Germanic community (Volksgemeinschaft).

Meanwhile, well into the 1940s, in liberal, constitutional states, dictatorship continued to be used as the polar opposite of democracy in countless books, as well as in political discourse.24 After 1945, dictatorship gradually was replaced by or conflated with totalitarianism, as in the title of Friedrich and Brezinski’s Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956). Margaret Canovan points out in her chapter that Hannah Arendt derided all previous uses of dictatorship to designate the systems she herself defined as totalitarian. Even so, beginning with the 1960s, and accelerating with the end of the Cold War, there was mounting opposition both from various political camps and from academic analysts to classifying the Third Reich and the Soviet Union together. Well before 1989, the extended, liberal sense of dictatorship had largely supplanted totalitarianism in academic comparisons of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, although not in general political discourse. Thus the career of dictatorship continues, while that of Bonapartism and Caesarism has virtually ceased.

24For a long list of book titles using the opposition between dictatorship and democracy in English and French, as well as in Italian, and in German (often written by political exiles), see Nolte, “Diktatur,”

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, I, 923, note 45.

PART I

Bonapartism to Its Contemporaries