The Origins of Autocracy

[15] Robert Crummey, "The Seventeenth-Century Moscow Service Elite in Com­parative Perspective," p. 1.

[16] Aristotle, Politika, p. 136; quoted from the Russian edition.

[17] Cited in Donald W. Treadgold, ed., The Develoment of the USSR, p. 202.

[18] Aristotle, p. 112.

[19] C. de Montesquieu, О duhhe zakonov, p. 27; quoted from the Russian edition.

[20] Cf. Wittfogel: "The men of the apparatus state are a ruling class in the most une­quivocal sense of the term; and the rest of the population constitutes the second major class, the ruled" (p. 303).

[21] Cf. Hegel: "In China we have the realm of absolute equality, and all the dif­ferences that exist are possible only in connection with the administration, and by vir­tue of the worth which a person may acquire, enabling him to fill a high post in the government. Since equality prevails in China, but without any freedom, despotism is necessarily the mode of government. . . . The emperor is the center, around which ev­erything turns; consequently, the well-being of the country and people depends on him. . . . There is no other legal power or institution extant, but the superintendance and oversight of the emperor. ... In China the distinction between slavery and free­dom is necessarily not great, since all are equal before the emperor—that is, all alike degraded. . . . And though there is no distinction conferred by birth, and everyone can attain the highest dignity, this very equality testifies to no triumphant assertion of the worth of the inner man, but a servile consciousness" (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, pp. 130, 133-4, 137, 145).

[22] To the best of my knowledge, this subject was first discussed on a theoretical level by Iurii Krizhanich in the seventeenth century. A Croatian by nationality and a gradu-