Dictatorship, Bonapartism, Caesarism: On Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire”

This chapter aims to offer an interpretation of Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and, on this basis, to provide the reader with some useful material to reflect on the connection between the categories of Caesarism, Bonapartism and dictatorship. I would argue that Marx’s historical masterpiece is a precious case study in the framework of the nineteenth-century European discourse on the Caesarist-Bonapartist model. Far from being entirely external, it reassesses from an original point of view the issues at the basis of this debate, by highlighting the specific modern features of this political regime.