How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond

Editorial Statement
Preface and Acknowledgements
Contents
Contributors
Part 1: The Death of the Roman Republic – Concepts
New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old Perspectives on New Problems
How Did Ancient Greek Democracies Die? Not (Normally) by Demagoguery
Consensus Breakdown: Or, How Cicero Was Wrong About Rome, and We Might Be Wrong About America
Part 2: The Death of the Roman Republic – Causation
Reform Unwillingness and the Death of the Roman Republic
The Role of the Economy in the Fall of the Roman Republic
Alternative Visions and Fractured Allegiances: The Role of Disillusion, Alienation and Disengagement in the Late Roman Republic
Enabling Laws, Rule of Law, and the Transformation of the Roman Republic
Dominari illi volunt, vos liberi esse – Populist Reason and Rhetoric in Sallust
Part 3: The Death of the Roman Republic – Effect
The View from the Periphery: Local Elites, Roman Elites, and the Western Provinces during Rome’s Crisis of the 80s BCE
In the Wake of Autocrats: The Plight of Matronae in the Late Republic
Just Another Word? The Lure of Libertas in the Seventies
Competitive Authoritarianism on the Eve of Empire: Pompeius’s New Republic of 52 BCE
Caesar and the Tribunes of the Plebs: Process and Events
Who Counts as the Roman People? Caesar’s recensus and Discriminatory Populism
Part 4: From the End of the Roman Republic to the Modern World
Augustus’ Res Gestae as a Revolutionary’s Manual
With a Bang or a Whimper? Reflections on the Fall of the Venetian Republic
A New Catilina or a New Cromwell? Napoleon Bonaparte and the Death of the First French Republic, 1794–1804
Part 5: The Roman Republic and the Modern World
From Caesarism to Populism: An Intellectual History
Dealing with Uncertainty: Cicero, Victor Klemperer and How to Cope with the Present in Moments of Crisis
The Civil War in Spain (1936–1939) and the Civil Wars in Late-republican Rome as Cases of Political and Ideological Polarisation
The Death of Democratic Republics in the 1930s: Germany, Austria, Spain
How Republics Die: The Corrosive Effects of Election ‘Conspiracism’
Afterword: Lessons from the Graveyard
Index