The Origins of Autocracy

Considering that permanent economic stagnation placed the sys­tem in complete dependence on natural catastrophes and hostile in­vasions, and that the absence of any limitations on power created a situation of political unpredictability and chaos, in which everyone from the despot himself to his least servant was constantly balancing between life and death, we may say that despotism was subject to the play of elemental forces to such a degree that it is more reminiscent of a phenomenon of nature than of a political commonwealth. And in this sense, by refusing it the status of a political phenomenon, Aristotle would seem to have been right once again. If something which is the polar opposite of civilization can exist, that something is despotism.[24]

Thus, despite the many great empires in which it prevailed—the Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese, Persian, Mongol, Byzantine, Turkish, and more—despotism has proved to be a political dead end. For all the variety of palace coups, mutinies, putsches, Praetorian conspir­acies, and janissary rebellions, it reproduced itself without interrup­tion over the course of centuries in all of its lifeless integrity. This was a closed system, the parameters of which were rigidly laid down in pre-Christian millennia. Its world was an isolated one, like a plane­tary orbit, exempt from the laws of probability, deprived of choice and real movement. It knew no political alternative. In this sense, it was a spectre. It existed outside history. Of course, like everything else in the cosmos, it moved. But after all, the planets also move: only their orbits are fixed.

4. Absolutism

As the reader may now guess, what I intend to suggest for the classi­fication of authoritarian political structures (and, concretely, for dis­tinguishing absolutism from despotism) will be the conception of latent limitations on power which we have just constructed, sum­marizing the observations of Aristotle, Krizhanich, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Wittfogel.

In juridical terms, all medieval authoritarian structures are indis­tinguishable from one another. That is, the source of sovereignty in them is the person of the ruler, to whom God has directly delegated the functions of administration, thus freeing the ruler from any con­trol whatever by the system. All of them openly declared their free­dom from any limitations, and all of them claimed this freedom to an equal degree.

Nevertheless, John Fortescue distinguished "royal government" from "political." For Jean Bodin, the distinction between monarchy and "seignorial government" was of prime importance. Mercier de la Riviere made a profound distinction between "arbitrary" and "legal" despotism. And Montesquieu, as we have seen, predicted that politi­cal catastrophe would ensue from the transformation of absolute monarchy into despotism. In other words, despite the formal identity of all monarchical structures, their contemporaries felt and saw, and furthermore considered vitally important, not their similarity but the dif­ferences between them. If we summarize all of their attempts, we can say that they stubbornly tried to create some kind of typology of au­thoritarian structures capable of serving as a kind of basis for political recommendations and prognoses. This was a typology which, if it were to remain within the limits of reality, had to be based on some­thing other than juridical definitions (which no self-respecting abso­lute monarch would have agreed to recognize). But in that case, what would have been its basis?[25]

Absolutism, as distinct from despotism, did not possess supreme sovereignty over the entire national product, because it was com­pelled to tolerate economic limitations on power. Although the most extreme of its apologists proclaimed the right of kings to the property of their subjects, this was never taken as an axiom and was always dis­puted, both in theory and in practice.[26]