A distinguished group of historians and political theorists examine the complex relationship between nineteenth-century democracy, nationalism, and authoritarianism, paying especial attention to the careers of Napoleon I and III, and of Bismarck. An important contribution of the book is to consider not only the momentous episodes of coup d etat, revolution, and imperial foundation which the Napoleonic era heralded, but also the contested political language with which these events were described and assessed. Political thinkers were faced with a battery of new terms - Bonapartism , Caesarism , and Imperialism among them - with which to make sense of their era. As well as documenting the political history of a revolutionary age, the book examines a series of thinkers - Tocqueville, Marx, Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt - who articulated and helped to reshare our sense of the political.
