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An Immunity to Authoritarianism? Bagehot, Bryce, and Ostrogorski on the Risk of Caesarism in America

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Abstract

This paper considers the early lineage of assumptions, current in both the public sphere and the academy, that the United States was safe from capture by an authoritarian populist figure because of some combination of long-standing democratic institutions and a supportive civic culture. It analyzes the arguments of three influential European commentators—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877), James Bryce (1838–1922), and Moisei Ostrogorski (1854–1919)—who studied American democracy during the period in which a new species of one-man rule, generally known as “Caesarism” and originally associated with the regime of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, was thought to be an inherent threat to liberal democracy. For different reasons, all judged that the United States, through a confluence of fortuitous circumstances, distinctive institutions, and national character, was largely immune to Caesarism. After considering their arguments for this alleged immunity, and especially the nature of the connection between institutions and national character, the article concludes with a discussion of how these earlier analyses might inform how we think about fears of democratic reversal in the United States in the age of Trumpism.

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Notes

  1. On the various uses of the term in this period, see Melvin Richter, “A Family of Political Concepts: Tyranny, Despotism, Bonapartism, Caesarism, Dictatorship, 1750–1917,” European Journal of Political Theory 4, no. 3 (2005): 238–243; Peter Baehr, “Accounting for Caesarism: Introduction to Gollwitzer,” Economy and Society 16, no. 3 (August 1987): 341–356; Peter Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma, and Fate: Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 11–58.

  2. George L. Mosse, “Caesarism, Circuses, and Monuments,” Journal of Contemporary History, 6, no. 2 (1971): 167–182, examines political techniques “beyond the plebiscite” (p. 169) that attempted to fill the void between leader and people.

  3. Bryce’s classic The American Commonwealth, originally published in 1888, was the most influential work on American politics since Tocqueville. It has been called the central work of a new kind of empirical and present-oriented political science in America. See Robert Adcock, Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science: A Transatlantic Tale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 235–267. Bryce also wrote a two-volume comparative study, Modern Democracies (1921) that reiterated and generalized the lessons of The American Commonwealth. Bryce visited the United States frequently and became British ambassador to the United States and the fourth president of the American Political Science Association. Ostrogorski’s Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (1902), aided by Bryce’s sponsorship, rapidly became an indispensable reference for many social scientists, including Weber, Michels, Pareto, Schumpeter, and Duverger. Perhaps more influential in Europe than America, his work was nevertheless promoted by W. G. Runciman and Seymour Martin Lipset, who called him “one of the most important originators of the sociology of organizations and of political sociology,” “Introduction to M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (Chicago, 1964), 1:xi.

  4. Space precludes a fuller discussion of Tocqueville’s seminal analysis in Democracy in America of why a Caesar-like figure was unlikely in the United States, but Tocqueville was an obvious touchstone for both Bryce and Ostrogorski and brief comparisons emerge below. For a rich conceptual history of references to Caesar in the American founding era, see Baer, Caesarism, Charisma, and Fate, pp. 187–209. Federalist arguments that wise constitutional organization of power and leadership would preclude presidential demagogy largely won the day and were adopted and adapted in Tocqueville’s discussion in Democracy in America.

  5. The French text of Tocqueville’s letter has been lost, but a retranslation appears in Alexis de Tocqueville, Œuvres Complètes, (Paris: Gallimard, 1951–2021) 6:1, 119–29. Hereafter cited as OC with volume and page.

  6. “On the New Constitution of France and the Aptitude of the French Character for National Freedom” (1852), in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, 15 vols., ed. Norman St. John-Stevas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965–1986) 4:51. Hereafter cited as Works with volume and page. Whatever his private speculations, Tocqueville resolutely resisted relying on national character as a causal factor in political analyses, a reliance that would have challenged both his comparative method and his underlying commitment to create liberty. On this point, see James Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 2nd edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 82–96.

  7. The central role of France and Napoleon III in stimulating more general discussions of what came to be called Caesarism was widely recognized in the late nineteenth century and is confirmed by modern scholarship. According to William Lecky, governments learned from this example “how easily a plebiscite vote could be secured and directed by a strong executive and how useful it might become to screen or to justify usurpation.” Democracy and Liberty, 2 vols. (Liberty Fund: Indianapolis, 2012, originally published 1896), 1:14, Project MUSE. Iain McDaniel’s recent work on Constantin Frantz in Germany has shown how Frantz’s original reflections on Louis Napoleon led to more general thoughts “on the ways in which liberal-democratic politics might spawn their own forms of plebiscitary Caesarism.” Iain McDaniel, “Constantin Frantz and the Intellectual History of Bonapartism and Caesarism: A Reassessment,” Intellectual History Review 28, no. 2 (2018): 317.

  8. Bagehot, “The Collapse of Caesarism” (1870) Works, 4:156.

  9. “The Collapse of Caesarism,” Works, 4:156.

  10. “Letter VII on the French Coup d’état of 1851” (February 19, 1852), Works, 4:77.

  11. “On the New Constitution of France, and the Aptitude of the French Character for National Freedom,” (January 20, 1852), Works, 4:49.

  12. Works, 4:51.

  13. Works, 4:49.

  14. “Caesareanism as it now exists” (March 4, 1865), Works, 4:111.

  15. On the centrality to Bagehot of the notion of government by discussion and deliberation, see William Selinger & Greg Conti, “Reappraising Walter Bagehot’s Liberalism: Discussion, Public Opinion, and the Meaning of Parliamentary Government,” History of European Ideas 4:2 (2015), 264–291.

  16. “On the New Constitution of France, and the Aptitude of the French Character for National Freedom” (January 20, 1852), Works, 4: 50.

  17. He later tackled it explicitly in Physics and Politics (1872). On this point and on Bagehot and national character in general, see Georgios Varouxakis, Victorian Political Thought on France and the French (London: Palgrave, 2002), 103–122.

  18. “On the New Constitution of France, and the Aptitude of the French Character for National Freedom” (January 20, 1852), Works, 4: 50.

  19. On this current in English political thought, see Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 207-246 and Sandra M. Den Otter, “The Origins of a Historical Political Science in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” in Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880, eds. Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir, and Shannon C. Stimson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 40-48.

  20. For an analysis of Bagehot’s comparison of parliamentary and presidential regimes, see William Selinger: Parliamentarism From Burke to Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 175–181.

  21. “What May Be in America” (August 17, 1861), Works, 4: 273.

  22. “Is the Success of the North Possible?” (June 29, 1861), Works, 4: 262.

  23. The Economist 19 (June 8, 1861): 621, quoted in Michael Churchman, “Bagehot and the American Civil War,” Works, 4:184.

  24. “English Feeling Towards America” (September 28, 1861), Works 4:328.

  25. Modern Democracies, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1921) 2:121. Hereafter cited as MD with volume and page. Thus Bryce specifically charged Tocqueville with failing to see the essential similarities between the English and Americans. “[M]uch which is merely English appears to Tocqueville to be American or democratic.” “The Predictions of Hamilton and Tocqueville” (1887) in The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,1995, text of the 1910 third revised edition) 2: 1546. Hereafter cited as AC with volume and page. On the place of the comparative historical method and its “Anglo-Saxon” assumptions in Bryce’s thought, see Hugh Tulloch, James Bryce’s American Commonwealth: The Anglo-American Background (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1988), 34-53; Richard A. Cosgrove, Our Lady the Common Law: The Anglo-American Legal Community, 1870-1930, chap. 3: “One ancient root: James Bryce and the legal dimension of Anglo-Saxonism” (New York: New York University Press, 1987).

  26. MD 1:37, 208.

  27. MD 1:142. Throughout his work, Bryce uncritically assumes the crucial influence of climate on national character, especially in the case of Africans.

  28. MD 1:139.

  29. MD 1: 142.

  30. In 1867, Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution: “The Americans now extol their institutions, and so defraud themselves of their due praise. But if they had not a genius for politics; if they had not a moderation in action singularly curious where superficial speech is so violent; if they had not a regard for law, such as no great people have yet evinced, and infinitely surpassing ours—the multiplicity of authorities in the American constitution would long ago have brought it to a bad end. Sensible shareholders, I have heard a shrewd attorney say, can work any deed of settlement; and so the men of Massachusetts could, I believe, work any constitution.” Works 5: 349–50.

  31. “Introduction” to William Dunning, The British Empire and the United States: A Review of their Relations during the Century of Peace following the Treaty of Ghent (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), xxii-xxiiii. Bryce further noted that “the main factor working for peace [between England and the United States] has been the good sense and self-control inherent in the character of the two peoples” (xxxi).

  32. See, for example, AC 2: 900–901, 939, 941; MD 1:140; MD 2: 121, 159.

  33. AC 2: 988–993; MD 2:121.

  34. Tocqueville. Democracy in America: historical-critical edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, 4 vols., ed. Eduardo Nolla and James T. Schleifer, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010) 2:414. Hereafter cited as DA Nolla/Schleifer with volume and page.

  35. AC 2:1130; See also AC 2:987; AC 1:333.

  36. The view that Black participation in Reconstruction had been a disaster was popularized by John Burgess and William Dunning at Columbia, who sparked an extraordinary efflorescence of scholarship on the period among their graduate students, joined by scholars at Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. With a few notable exceptions, the Dunning School dominated historical scholarship on the meaning of Reconstruction until the 1960s. See the essays in The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction, ed. John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013).

  37. See, for example, Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 61-85 and Rogers M. Smith, “The Puzzling Place of Race in American Political Science,” Political Science and Politics, 37:1 (2004): 41-45.

  38. MD 2:48.

  39. AC 2:901, 1136. Convinced of the need for and rightness of black political exclusion, Bryce was more troubled by some forms of social apartheid, since he assumed that the gradual advancement of the black race out of “barbarism” could only happen through association with whites. See AC 2:1143–1189.

  40. MD, 1:137.

  41. AC I:531.

  42. AC1:310–315.

  43. AC 1:349.

  44. AC 1:358.

  45. AC 2:1244.

  46. “Max Weber and the Avatars of Caesarism” in Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism, ed. Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 173.

  47. Bagehot, Works, 3:463. Cf. Weber’s similar judgment in “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in Weber Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 342.

  48. James Bryce, “William Ewart Gladstone,” Studies in Contemporary Biography (London, Macmillan, 1903, accessed as Project Gutenberg eBook #31677), 153.

  49. Weber, “Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Order,“ in Political Writings, 222.

  50. Bagehot, Works, 3:479.

  51. Bryce, “Gladstone,” 142–160.

  52. AC 2: 943–944.

  53. AC 2:1502.

  54. AC 2: 893.

  55. AC 1:58. Despite or because of the way he assumed emergency powers, Lincoln was more often contrasted with than likened to a Caesarist leader. See Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: from Ancient Rome to the 21st Century (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), chap. 5: “Caesarism and Liberal Democracy: Napoleon III, Lincoln, Gladstone, and Bismarck,” 136–193.

  56. AC 1:59.

  57. AC 1:245.

  58. AC 1:40: “... the responsibility of a great office and the feeling that he represents the whole nation tend to sober and control the president.”

  59. He compared the phenomenon of quasi-dictatorial presidential power to dictatorship in the early days of the Roman Republic, safely conferred because of the virtue of the citizens. “Opinion is in the United States so sure of its strength that it does not hesitate to let the President exceed his constitutional rights in critical times. It was the same with the dictatorship in the earlier days of the Roman Republic and for a like reason” (MD 2:162). See also AC 2:1269.

  60. AC I:362.

  61. MD 2:72–73.

  62. AC 1:61. Bryce concluded that “Caesarism is the last danger likely to menace America” (AC 2:1244).

  63. MD 2:73.

  64. AC 2: 888; Cf. MD: 2: 160: A “sane, shrewd, and tolerant type of political opinion” is “widely diffused through the whole native population.”

  65. AC 1:245.

  66. AC 2:1503–04; Bryce, Preface to Ostrogorski in Ostrogorski, 1:xlvii; MD 2:96.

  67. AC 1:9; AC 2: 1506–1507; MD 2:164. In the chapter of Modern Democracy on Australia, Bryce also mentions recuperative forces linked to “hereditary virtues.” The (white) Australians have great “recuperative power;” they are a “virile and high-spirited race, energetic and resourceful, a race which ought to increase and spread out till it fills the vast spaces, so far as habitable by man, of the continent that is its heritage.” See MD 2:264.

  68. Woodrow Wilson, “Bryce’s American Commonwealth: A Review,” in AC 2:1581.

  69. They built, of course, on a half century of discussions in the United States and Europe of how the growth of political parties had been transforming the landscape of American politics. For a discussion of European debates on the American political party system after Tocqueville, see Gaetano Quagliariello, Politics without Parties: Moisei Ostrogorski and the Debate on Political Parties on the Eve of the Twentieth Century, trans. Hugo Bowles (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), 60–74.

  70. On the complicated relationship between Bryce and Ostrogorski, see Paolo Pombeni, “Starting in Reason, Ending in Passion: Bryce, Lowell, Ostrogorski and the Problem of Democracy,” The Historical Journal 37, no. 2 (June 1994): 319–341. Bryce’s introduction to Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties helped to ensure its wide readership, but he kept his distance from Ostrogorski’s “Rhadamanthine” attitude and disputed his pessimistic view of the power of the caucus in British parties, noting that Ostrogorski had exaggerated, and that British party leaders were “free of the more sordid elements and in a different class of men” than those in the United States. James Bryce, “Preface,” Moisei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, 2 vols., trans. Frederick Clarke (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902) xlii-xliii. Hereafter cited as Ostrogorski with volume and page.

  71. Ostrogorski, 2:593. Ostrogorski here refers to the misplaced worries of “anxious minds,” who feared that President Grant would break political norms by running for a third term and use his popularity as a platform to seize power in a Caesaristic coup.

  72. Ostrogorski, 2:594. While Ostrogorski thought of federalism as a mechanical or structural barrier to the emergence of Caesarism, he neglected Bryce’s ancillary argument that decentralization strengthened the political norms of compromise and self-restraint that Americans inherited from Anglo-Saxon forbears.

  73. Ostrogorski, 2:561.

  74. For Ostrogorski’s scholarly apprenticeship amidst French intellectual and academic preoccupations, see Quagliariello, Politics without Parties, 5–85. For his debts to English reformist anti-partyism, see Gregory Conti, “Ostrogorski before and after: Three moments in antipartyism and ‘elite theory’,” Constellations 27 (2020) 170–175.

  75. Ostrogorski’s rare references to the “Anglo-Saxon” roots of the Americans usually describe the religion bequeathed by early settlers. See 2:154, 2:257. There are no laudatory references to a specifically Anglo-Saxon character. He mentions the widespread claim that the English character was marked by an “Anglo-Saxon” hostility to political abstractions only to denigrate that view as completely unfounded (1:99–100). Moreover, he omits praise of the reconciliation of North and South after the Civil War, calling it a ruse to get voters to vote at the behest of machines. Indeed, he notes that “the frame of mind developed in the southerners under the slavery regime naturally inclined them to such renunciation of private judgement” (2:122). White southern elites’ appeals to “save civilization” by disenfranchising blacks were in his view transparently self-serving (2:124). Finally, Ostrogorski thought Blacks were fully capable of learning to be citizens and immigrants were no more corrupt than the native New England farmer enmeshed in the spoils system (2:344–345, 431).

  76. Ostrogorski, 2: 546.

  77. Ostrogorski, 2: 457.

  78. Ostrogorski, 2: 552.

  79. Ostrogorski, 2: 573.

  80. Ostrogorski, 2: 567.

  81. Ostrogorski, 2: 426–429, 438–39, 460.

  82. Ostrogorski, 2:546, 595.

  83. Ostrogorski, 2:593, 595.

  84. See, for example Ostrogorski, 2:43–44, 55. Bryce denied that Americans were especially materialistic; rather they were energetic and competitive, traits inherited from the English, but intensified by the pre-eminent place of commerce and industry in American society. MD 2:121.

  85. Ostrogorski, 2:574.

  86. Ostrogorski, 2:55, 2:361.

  87. Ostrogorski, 2:592–593. Ostrogorski sometimes contrasts the “European” passion for power, still capable of spawning power-hungry Caesars, with a new form of politics organized as a commercial enterprise. See 2:195.

  88. See his chapter on “What Type of Despotism Democratic Nations have to Fear” in the 1840 volume of Democracy in America. There he painted a dystopian portrait of a nation of passive sheep guided by a centralized power, a regime that, in the worst of all cases, would be “delivered into the hands of an unaccountable man or body.” DA Nolla/Schleifer, 4:1256. Cf. his parliamentary speech of January 18, 1842 (“Discussion de l’Adresse”) in which he used similar imagery to castigate his fellow deputies and chide them for their lack of civic courage: “I say...that it is by going down this route that nations ready themselves for a master. I do not know where he is, and from what direction he might come, but he will come, sooner or later, if we follow this path for long” (OC 3:2, 199).

  89. Ostrogorski, 2:671–681.

  90. Ostrogorski, 2:673.

  91. AC, 2:607–740. As Gregory Conti has argued, any attempt to coopt Ostrogorski into the “elitest” company of Mosca, Michels, and Pareto ignores his underlying democratic utopianism. “Ostrogorski: Before and After,” 175.

  92. Ostrogorski, 2: 596.

  93. Kurt Weyland, “Why US Democracy Trumps Populism: Comparative Lessons Reconsidered,” PS: Political Science & Politics 55: 3 (2022) 478.

  94. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018) 2.

  95. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 33–71.

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Welch, C.B. An Immunity to Authoritarianism? Bagehot, Bryce, and Ostrogorski on the Risk of Caesarism in America. Soc 60, 501–515 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00843-y

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