The Origins of Autocracy

The reverse side of this political uniformity of the class of the gov­erned is the equally absolute atomization and instability of the class of the governors—that is, a completely chaotic process of vertical mo­bility. The selection of top administrative personnel is carried out without regard to corporate membership, to privileges of estate, to wealth, or to ability. Despotism does not know what might be called the category of "political death." Members of the governing class, re­gardless of rank, pay for mistakes, as a rule, not only with the loss of the privileges connected with rank and the wealth they have accumu­lated, but with their heads as well. A mistake is equivalent to death. Thus the atomized, unstable elite of despotism, wandering their whole lives in the minefield of the despot's caprices, can never be transformed into an aristocracy—that is, into an elite which is heredi­tary and therefore independent of the regime, able to compel the sys­tem to take into consideration its goals and even to subject the system to these goals. In the absence of stable privileges, the possibility of even the primary form of social limitations on power disappears.[22] In other words, the independence of the despot, not only from the class of the governed but also from that of the governors, is absolute. This confirms Aristotle's view of despotism as a permanent tyranny, under which the system is subordinated to "the interests of the ruler alone."

It was Montesquieu who pointed to the role of a different category of latent limitations on power—the ideological ones. He directly con­nected the degree of stability—or, as he put it, the "susceptibility to corruption"—of political systems, with their observance of the domi­nating "principle" of each. Whereas he considered the principle of monarchy to be the "feeling of honor," he assumed that the principle of despotism was exclusively that of fear. "Moderate government," Montesquieu wrote, generalizing from the political experience of his time, "can relax the reins as much as it likes, and without danger to itself. . . . But if, under a despotic government, the sovereign drops his hands even for a moment, so that he cannot immediately destroy

ate of the Catholic college in Rome, Krizhanich had dreamed of Moscow all through his youth. Finally getting there in the 1660s, he lived in Moscow for only sixteen months and paid for his liberty of thought with sixteen years of Siberian exile. In the second half of the 1670s, during the brief "thaw" following the death of Aleksei Mikhailovich, he in desperation obtained permission to go abroad, where he immediately died in Vienna. To this day his works await complete translation into Russian (they were writ­ten in Old Slavonic). We know that, in the period of the "thaw" just mentioned, his book Politika was extremely popular in the "upper reaches" of the Muscovite government of that time.

Like Montesquieu, Krizhanich was concerned primarily with the problem of guar­anties against despotism. Whereas Persia under the rule of the shahanshah served as the starting-point for Montesquieu's reflections, for Krizhanich this starting point was Tur­key under the sultan. "The Turks," he reasoned,