Bismarck and the Crisis of German Politics: Max Weber and His Contemporaries I

This chapter is concerned to unravel Max Weber's notions of Caesarism as they appear in his analysis of Bismarck, the American and British parliamentary system, and the potential position of a German Reich president. It begins with some observations on Weber's intellectual background: specifically the interest in antiquity he shared with many other major European thinkers, and that provided one conduit to the Caesarism debate of his day. First, Weber employs the term Caesarism in his early correspondence, his political journalism, and his public lectures to attack systematically the legacy of Otto von Bismarck, the great architect of the German Second Empire. A liberal who welcomed German unification, but who became a staunch critic of Bismarck's authoritarian domestic policy, Theodor Mommsen combined the strongest admiration for Julius Caesar with the deepest suspicion of all would-be modern imitators. Caesar represented the combination of passion and realism, of leadership and democratic conviction, that Germany so sorely needed.