Search results for "Caesarism"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Days of the Cavemen? : Adorno, Spengler, and the Anatomy of Caesarism
2021
Abstract This article addresses the controversial question of Theodor W. Adorno’s debt to right-wing Zivilisationskritik by a close reading of his essay “Spengler after the Decline” (1950). The article shows that despite Adorno’s harsh polemics against Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918, 1922), he sought to make Spengler’s analysis of Weimar Germany’s undemocratic tendencies—“Caesarism”—serve progressive ends. However, Adorno’s essay was not just an effort at “coming to terms with the past” in Adenauerian West Germany. Reading the essay’s original 1941 version together with Adorno’s correspondence with Max Horkheimer sheds light on Spengler as an overlooked key (next to Max Weber, …
Gioacchino Ventura e Napoleone III: la résurrection de l’Empire comme celle du jour de Pâques
2019
Starting from the observation of Luigi Sturzo who interpreted Gioacchino Ventura’s French period as a phase of involution of his political thought, this essay examines Ventura’s reflections on the 2 December coup d’état. In order to understand the reasons that pushed the Sicilian Theatine to exalt, after the enthusiastic adherence to the ideals of ‘48, the Second Empire as a consecration of a divine plan aimed to preserving the sovereignty, to support the Church, and to reject the advance of a democracy opened to socialist demands, the analysis will focus on the political judgments expressed in the preaches of 1857 held in the imperial chapel of the Tuileries.