Towards an Intellectual History of Caesarism: Introduction

Abstract

What could be timelier than a forum on Caesarism? 1 Had this collection of articles been published only a few years earlier, I would have introduced the topic quite differently. Recently, Caesarism has become the keyword of US (and therefore, to a certain extent, global) politics, being used to explain both internal and external political–ideological dynamics. 2 As such, Caesarism is increasingly replacing that much-used (and abused) concept of recent years: populism. Only time will tell whether it will be a permanent or temporary replacement, or whether another type of conceptual relationship (possibly a symbiotic one) will develop.