Gerhard Casper, President Emeritus, Stanford University, delivers 2007 Robert G. Wesson Lecture: "Caesarism in Democratic Politics - Reflections on Max Weber"

The concept of "caesarism" was of considerable importance to Max Weber and, in reading Weber, one cannot help but be struck by the relevance, to our own historical situation. His arguments about what nowadays, we would call "governance" are anything but theoretical as we encounter caesarist tendencies in contemporary politics.