How Republics Die
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Edited by:
Frederik Juliaan Vervaet
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Reviews
"The collected essays demonstrate how much historians of the ancient world can gain from political science and comparative history. [...] It is fantastic that this book is freely available online: it represents an important retort to some modern public figures who use a distorted or excessively eulogistic narrative of the ancient (usually Roman) world to justify their actions."
Timothy Smith, in: The Classical Review (2025), published online: 1–3 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009840X25101984)
Topics
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Frontmatter
I -
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Editorial Statement
V -
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Preface and Acknowledgements
VII -
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Contents
IX -
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Contributors
XIII - Part 1: The Death of the Roman Republic – Concepts
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New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old Perspectives on New Problems
1 -
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How Did Ancient Greek Democracies Die? Not (Normally) by Demagoguery
25 -
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Consensus Breakdown: Or, How Cicero Was Wrong About Rome, and We Might Be Wrong About America
39 - Part 2: The Death of the Roman Republic – Causation
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Reform Unwillingness and the Death of the Roman Republic
71 -
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The Role of the Economy in the Fall of the Roman Republic
123 -
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Alternative Visions and Fractured Allegiances: The Role of Disillusion, Alienation and Disengagement in the Late Roman Republic
151 -
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Enabling Laws, Rule of Law, and the Transformation of the Roman Republic
195 -
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Dominari illi volunt, vos liberi esse – Populist Reason and Rhetoric in Sallust
227 - Part 3: The Death of the Roman Republic – Effect
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The View from the Periphery: Local Elites, Roman Elites, and the Western Provinces during Rome’s Crisis of the 80s BCE
249 -
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In the Wake of Autocrats: The Plight of Matronae in the Late Republic
269 -
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Just Another Word? The Lure of Libertas in the Seventies
289 -
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Competitive Authoritarianism on the Eve of Empire: Pompeius’s New Republic of 52 BCE
307 -
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Caesar and the Tribunes of the Plebs: Process and Events
331 -
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Who Counts as the Roman People? Caesar’s recensus and Discriminatory Populism
363 - Part 4: From the End of the Roman Republic to the Modern World
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Augustus’ Res Gestae as a Revolutionary’s Manual
389 -
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With a Bang or a Whimper? Reflections on the Fall of the Venetian Republic
409 -
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A New Catilina or a New Cromwell? Napoleon Bonaparte and the Death of the First French Republic, 1794–1804
423 - Part 5: The Roman Republic and the Modern World
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From Caesarism to Populism: An Intellectual History
441 -
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Dealing with Uncertainty: Cicero, Victor Klemperer and How to Cope with the Present in Moments of Crisis
457 -
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The Civil War in Spain (1936–1939) and the Civil Wars in Late-republican Rome as Cases of Political and Ideological Polarisation
475 -
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The Death of Democratic Republics in the 1930s: Germany, Austria, Spain
493 -
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How Republics Die: The Corrosive Effects of Election ‘Conspiracism’
511 -
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Afterword: Lessons from the Graveyard
529 -
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Index
535
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