Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty et Christopher J. Dart (éd.), How Republics Die. Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond, Leyde-Boston, 2025.

Éditeur : De Gruyter
Collection : Studies in Ancient Civil Wars, 4
556 pages
ISBN : 9783111705446
99,95 €
Open Access

Authoritarianism is everywhere on the advance; democracies seem fragile and threatened. We console ourselves that where rule by the people has long established itself, it has never collapsed from internal causes. Except it did, once: in Rome.
This book gathers together Roman historians with political scientists and scholars of other periods of authoritarian takeover to explore how open and democratic political systems have historically fallen prey to autocrats. The Late Roman Republic is the main focus, with a mix of large-scale thematic and analytical chapters paired with more detailed case studies, from some of the leading scholars in the field. Other chapters widen the scope, analysing comparable cases from ancient Athens to Napoleon to Hitler's Germany and Franco's Spain.
The book as a whole draws on contemporary political science scholarship on democratic decay and competitive authoritarianism. It shows that these concepts are not only applicable to modern states, but that we can properly use them to study past democratic collapses as well. This provides the tools for a more historically-informed understanding of how republics die, as part of a renewed conversation between historians and political scientists.


Table of contents
Part 1: The Death of the Roman Republic – Concepts
Christopher J. Dart, David Rafferty and Frederik Juliaan Vervaet : New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old Perspectives on New Problems
Matt Simonton: How Did Ancient Greek Democracies Die? Not (Normally) by Demagoguery
Amy Russell: 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
Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, Christopher J. Dart and David Rafferty: Reform Unwillingness and the Death of the Roman Republic
James Tan: The Role of the Economy in the Fall of the Roman Republic
Tom Hillard and J. Lea Beness: Alternative Visions and Fractured Allegiances: The Role of Disillusion, Alienation and Disengagement in the Late Roman Republic
Kit Morrell: Enabling Laws, Rule of Law, and the Transformation of the Roman Republic
Tim Elliott: Dominari illi volunt, vos liberi esse – Populist Reason and Rhetoric in Sallust

Part 3: The Death of the Roman Republic – Effect
Nicholas George: The View from the Periphery: Local Elites, Roman Elites, and the Western Provinces during Rome's Crisis of the 80s BCE
Christian Hjorth Bagger: In the Wake of Autocrats: The Plight of Matronae in the Late Republic
Jeff Tatum: Just Another Word? The Lure of Libertas in the Seventies
David Rafferty, Frederik Juliaan Vervaet and Christopher J. Dart: Competitive Authoritarianism on the Eve of Empire: Pompeius's New Republic of 52 BCE
Thibaud Lanfranchi: Caesar and the Tribunes of the Plebs: Process and Events
Tonya Rushmer: 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
Ronald T. Ridley: Augustus' Res Gestae as a Revolutionary's Manual
Catherine Kovesi: With a Bang or a Whimper? Reflections on the Fall of the Venetian Republic
Peter McPhee: 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
Annelien de Dijn: From Caesarism to Populism: An Intellectual History
Cristina Rosillo-López: Dealing with Uncertainty: Cicero, Victor Klemperer and How to Cope with the Present in Moments of Crisis
Francisco Pina Polo: The Civil War in Spain (1936–1939) and the Civil Wars in Late-republican Rome as Cases of Political and Ideological Polarisation
Ángel Alcalde: The Death of Democratic Republics in the 1930s: Germany, Austria, Spain
Lisa Hill: How Republics Die: The Corrosive Effects of Election ‘Conspiracism'
Federica Carugati: Afterword: Lessons from the Graveyard

Source : De Gruyter