The Coming Caesars

An exceedingly good book by French polymath scholar Amaury de Riencourt. Riencourt must certainly be in the running with Toynbee for producing the most-prescient Post-Spenglerian account of history. His “spiral” formulation of the path of history deftly accounts for the cyclical evolution of culture to civilization to moribund tyranny and the slow, but real progression and advancement of world civilization as it journeys nomadically from empire to empire.

In this, his most well known work (first published in 1952), he argues that only an abnormally high civilizational self-awareness coupled with supreme effort can stem the historical tide of America's process of turning from a republic to a world empire led by an autocratic Caesar. Not only because the USA purposefully modelled itself on the Roman republic, but because the Western European culture that is the heritage of American culture, is itself the result of this cyclical process, the logic of social organization from loose confederation, to united republic, to world empire is, one might say, “baked in.”

The Caesars are coming, and it will not be a partisan dispute, as just like in Rome: there will be Caesars from both parties. Some might even argue, they are already here.