"On Cæsarism" by Joseph Mazzini

HISTORIC GRADATIONS.     

At any rate, these personifications of a whole people in an individual, these living summaries of entire epoch, are things of the past. The future will, from the very nature of things, proceed by a different course. Genius, will continue, as before, to reflect the thought of one epoch or initiate that, of another, but in the sphere of ideas alone. In the sphere of fact, of action, all great manifestations and intimations of thought will be collective.       

If the youth of Italy, emancipating themselves from the influence of recent French and German theories will study history synthetically, I am very sure they will find therein conformation of the ideas I sketched forth in a little work (" Fol et Avenir") thirty years ago, though without having time to give them their full development, and which, summarily, are as follows:—                   

The first epoch—represented by the Oriental world, founding its life principally, almost exclusively, upon the Idea God—a gigantic pantheistic conception, of which the timid, hesitating, quasi-jesuitical Pantheism of the modern French and German schools is but a feeble reflection—ruled in absolute dominion, crushing alike the individual, human liberty, and progress. Society was petrified by the fatalism of caste. The sole progress shadowed forth or hoped for by the individual was the annihilation of the Ego.
  A second epoch—represented by the Polytheistic and  Christian words—added to the term God the term Individual. As the individual possesses a dual life, subjective, and objective, internal and external, personal and relative, so that second epoch was subdivided into two grand periods. The Greco-Roman period elaborated the subjective internal life of the individual, and achieved—it matters little, that it was limited to one sole class of citizens—the Idea liberty. The Christian period defined the external, objective life of the individual, and achieved the idea Equality.

This second epoch was concluded by the French Revolution, which summed up and gave to the world, in its Declaration of Rights, the political formula of the life of the individual. And as the law of logic required that the nature of the instrument should be proportioned and adapted to the aim to be achieved, the different periods of the epoch of human emancipation were personified and summed up by the powerful individualities by which they were concluded ; the Greek period by Alexander, the Roman by Cæsar, the French Revolution by Napoleon.

At the present day it is enough to affirm it for the signs thereof are already too abundant to be denied by any who earnestly study the times—a third epoch is dawning upon us, the epoch of Collective Life, of Association. The highest interpreters of this epoch will be collective beings, peoples whom the consciousness of the new aim has constituted nations. 

If this historic synthesis God ; God and the Individual ; God, the Individual, and Humanity—be true, as l believe, Cæsarism is a doctrine not only condemned by the Moral Law, but inapplicable to our epoch.

Cæsarism, Monarchy, and Papacy are all of them, manifestations—varying according to their sphere of action—of one sole principle : the religious principle which declares that the salvation of all is to be wrought out by one alone.             

From the first utterance of the holy word Progress, from the time we began to comprehend the collective life of Humanity, from the time when the doctrine was revealed to us that none can be saved otherwise than by labouring with all for the salvation of all—those three formulæ of the former principle were condemned. The Pagans of our epoch may do what they will to uphold them : life is elsewhere. Even as those corpses which stood erect and perfect so long as they were shut in by lava on every side; and crumbled into dust so soon as they were reached by light and air, they will fall for ever at the first breath of a people arising not in that name of mere negations, but guided by an Idea of Free Faith vaster and more sublime than that which gave life to those forms in ages past. 

At the present day, Cæsarism and Papacy quarrel between themselves like accomplices shut up in the same prison ; but they recognise a common origin and interest, and in the face of any serious peril they will renew the compact of Charles V. and Clement VII. But as rarely as there is truth in philosophy, power in liberty, and holiness in our religion of progress, they will perish, and, that ere long, in the same battle.

I have spoken of Cæsarism, not of the writer of the "Life of Caesar." Let him do what he will, he is extraneous to the question treated of in these pages. Even if the doctrines of Caesarism were accepted they could avail him nothing —Article : "On Cæsarism" by Joseph Mazzini.

—Macmillan's Magazine.

 Empire September 1865,