The Origins of Autocracy

The remarkable variety of political forms characteristic of the Greek polis was historically short-lived. And it was by no means re­placed by the ideal Utopian polity of which Aristotle dreamed, nor even by the republic of Plato, but by monarchy, which became the dominant form of political organization for centuries to come and, as Aristotle had predicted, constantly strove to "deviate" in the direction of tyranny, or even—as it seemed to its contemporaries—in the direc­tion of barbarian despotism; that is, permanent tyranny.

Proceeding from the same Aristotelian tradition, European politi­cal thought has for centuries made extraordinary efforts to restrain monarchy—at least in theory—from this fateful "deviation." We can find the traces of this dramatic effort as early as the work of the En­glish jurist of the first parliamentary period, Bracton, in the thir­teenth century; in the Praise of English Laws of John Fortescue in the fifteenth century; in Jean Bodin, Andrei Kurbskii, and Du Plessy Mornay in the sixteenth century; Iurii Krizhanich in the seventeenth century; and Mikhail Shcherbatov and Mercier de la Riviere in the eighteenth. And finally, when tyranny had apparently become an ir­reversible fact in France, the lessons of this theoretical struggle were summarized by Charles de Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws.

Montesquieu was a pessimist and a conservative. He was convinced that the days of "moderate government" (as he called European abso­lute monarchy) were numbered, that the age-old struggle was ap­proaching its political finale—its catastrophe. "As the rivers run to lose themselves in the sea, monarchies strive to dissolve themselves in despotism," he wrote.[19] The only one of all the wealth of "regular" po­litical forms listed by Aristotle, the last heir of civilization—European absolute monarchy—was receding into the external darkness of polit­ical nonexistence, never to return.

If we do not forget that Montesquieu was the founder, so to speak, of the geographical approach in history, and that for him "moderate government" (as the result of a temperate climate) was identified with Europe, and despotism with Asia, we can see that we stand here at the sources of the bipolar model of political classification which has domi­nated the minds of modern historians.

Montesquieu was reproached by his contemporaries with not hav­ing been able to give an adequate political description of despotism, limiting himself to a brief aphorism: "When the savages of Louisiana wish to obtain fruit, they cut down the tree at the root and obtain it— here is the whole of despotic government."⁵ But this reproach is only partially justified. In fact, Montesquieu drew an important theoreti­cal conclusion—second only to that of Aristotle—concerning the na­ture of despotism: its total inefficiency, the incapacity for political dyna­mism which conditioned its permanent stagnation.

Despite Montesquieu's pessimism, Europe, as we know, survived the eighteenth century. Moreover, it countered the threat of "devia­tion" toward despotism with the invention of modern democracy, which made possible the continued existence of civilization. And only in the middle of the twentieth century, when the total onslaught of despotism seemed fated to recur, was the third and decisive theoreti­cal step in the description of this political phenomenon taken.

I do not at all mean to say by this that the phenomenon of despo­tism disappeared from the field of vision of European thinkers in the interim between Montesquieu and Wittfogel. John Stuart Mill intro­duced the term "Eastern society" to describe it, and Richard Jones that of "Asiatic society," not to mention the well-known comments by Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, from which we shall have occasion to quote. Unfortunately, the ideas of the remarkable seventeenth century Russian thinker Iurii Krizhanich have for vari­ous reasons (we shall speak of them later) not entered into universal despotology, though his conception of "moderate aristocracy" as the main bastion against despotism preceded the analogous observations of David Hume and Alexis de Tocqueville.

It should be noted that there have been times in the history of Eu­rope when despotology has ceased to be mere academic theorizing, and become a weapon in an immediate and urgent political and ideo­logical struggle. We can count at least four such occasions. The first was the attempt by despotic Persia to conquer Athens in the fifth cen­tury b.c. (giving rise, in particular, to Aristotle's speculations con­cerning the existence of "hereditary and despotic royal power among the barbarians"). The second, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,

5. Ibid.