The Onset of Empire

Few indeed among today’s military historians and analysts have earned a higher reputation for original thinking and clear-cut exposition than J.F.C. Fuller. His foresight did much to develop the armored fighting vehicles which were the key to the ground campaigns of World War II, and would have come into useful application in World War I much earlier and at vast savings of human life had Fuller been listened to. His understanding of the basic relation between the military and the political object in war has occasioned comparisons between Fuller and Clausewitz, the Prussian military savant: but for today’s purposes this reviewer has consistently found Fuller far more useful than Clausewitz because his ideas are not hidden in turgid prose and a thicket of abstractions.

Yet somehow in this survey of Julius Caesar as “man, soldier and tyrant” your reviewer cannot quite feel that Fuller has made his point. He presents his book as “a study of the power politics of an extraordinary man, who first as a demagogue of reckless ambition won over the rabble of Rome, and then as a soldier who looked upon war as a political instrument, with matchless boldness made himself tyrant of the Roman world: a world which in classical times denoted the irregular way in which political power was gained— whether by fraud or force—rather than the way in which it was exercised. Today it is called ‘Caesarism,’ and once again it is troubling the world.” There is a contradiction here which is confusing, for Caesarism in its modern application is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the system of absolute government founded by Caesar”—in other words, precisely as the way power is exercised rather than the way it was gained.

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George Fielding Eliot

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Few indeed among today’s military historians and analysts have earned a higher reputation for original thinking and clear-cut exposition than J.F.C. Fuller. His foresight did much to develop the armored fighting vehicles which were the key to the ground campaigns of World War II, and would have come into useful application in World War I much earlier and at vast savings of human life had Fuller been listened to. His understanding of the basic relation between the military and the political object in war has occasioned comparisons between Fuller and Clausewitz, the Prussian military savant: but for today’s purposes this reviewer has consistently found Fuller far more useful than Clausewitz because his ideas are not hidden in turgid prose and a thicket of abstractions.

Yet somehow in this survey of Julius Caesar as “man, soldier and tyrant” your reviewer cannot quite feel that Fuller has made his point. He presents his book as “a study of the power politics of an extraordinary man, who first as a demagogue of reckless ambition won over the rabble of Rome, and then as a soldier who looked upon war as a political instrument, with matchless boldness made himself tyrant of the Roman world: a world which in classical times denoted the irregular way in which political power was gained— whether by fraud or force—rather than the way in which it was exercised. Today it is called ‘Caesarism,’ and once again it is troubling the world.” There is a contradiction here which is confusing, for Caesarism in its modern application is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the system of absolute government founded by Caesar”—in other words, precisely as the way power is exercised rather than the way it was gained.