Guglielmo Ferrero

Guglielmo Ferrero was an Italian historian, journalist, novelist, and political thinker whose international reputation grew from his interpretation of ancient Rome. Born near Naples in 1871, he studied law and collaborated with criminologist Cesare Lombroso before turning toward history and public affairs. The Greatness and Decline of Rome, issued in five volumes, traced the late Republic and the rise of Augustus while emphasizing economic interests, social change, and the limits of political power. An American lecture tour helped produce Characters And Events Of Roman History, a collection ranging from Caesar to Nero. Ferrero later used comparisons between societies in Ancient Rome and Modern America, considering how wealth, democracy, urban life, and ideas of progress differed across the two worlds. An opponent of dictatorship, he was placed under house arrest under Italian Fascism and eventually became a professor at Geneva’s Graduate Institute. His later writing on legitimacy and authority extended the central concern of his Roman histories: how governments earn obedience and why political orders lose it.