The Origins of Autocracy

The rapid horizontal mobility in absolutist structures was logically accompanied by well-ordered vertical mobility, based on social limita­tions of power. In practical terms, this meant that the elevation of the new bureaucratic elite of absolutism brought with it not the dissolu­tion of the hereditary aristocracy in universal service, but a competi­tive struggle between old and new elites. This constitutes one of the most dramatic differences between absolutism and despotism. De­spite the multiplicity of conflicts and the constant, sometimes bloody and cruel struggle of the elites, absolutism agreed to coexist with aris­tocracy, while despotism did not allow it to come into existence.

This not only assured the members of the absolutist elite of the right to "political death" (and thereby deprived their struggle of the char­acter of a brutal fight for physical survival), but also created the very possibility of a political struggle, and therefore the mechanism for cor­recting mistakes in administration, not to speak of powerful sources of independent thought and behavior.

At this point, we may perhaps express a cautious hypothesis: just as the existence of the middle class, being a function of economic lim­itations, created the possibility of transforming absolutism into de­mocracy, so the existence of the aristocracy, being a function of social limitations, prevented the transformation of absolutist structures into despotism. In other words, just as democracy is impossible without a middle class, so absolutism is impossible without an aristocracy.

For despotism, as we have seen, ideological robbery was the other side of robbery of property. The political practice of absolutism gives us the opportunity to prove this theorem, as the mathematicians say, from the inverse. Namely: the absence of robbery of property should lead to the absence of ideological robbery. And, in fact, not being sub­ject to permanent corruption—in other words, not fearing the de­struction of its power at any moment—absolutism did not see a mor­tal threat in the multiplicity of ideas. It therefore spared not only the material potential of the country, but also its intellectual potential, and made no attempt at an ideological monopoly. That is, along with administrative and political functions, it did not also perform an ideological one.

Recognizing the latent limitations on power, absolutism thereby in­voluntarily promoted the coming into being of a political opposi­tion—that is, the working out of alternative models of political or­ganization. The existence of reformist potential and of alternative models, in turn, made qualitative change in the system possible. It de­veloped out of its own resources.

This excluded terror as a universal means of administration. In Eu­rope, as Herzen once said, there was also terror, but it did not occur to anyone to flog Spinoza or to induct Lessing into the army. Even in Spain, which "deviated" in the direction of tyranny more than other European countries, a place was found for Cervantes and Lope de Vega. England knew the heavy hand of Henry VIII and the horrors of Bloody Mary, but for all that, the Utopia of Thomas More and the Novum Organum of Bacon were written there. France, which saw the massacre of the Huguenots by the Catholics, also found room for Rabelais and Montaigne.

This, of course, does not mean that in the despotic states, during the times of individual "enlightened despots," there were not court astronomers and poets who sometimes achieved great successes in the politically insensitive areas of art and science. The culture of despo­tism tolerated good poetry and medicine, preserved the works of Ar­istotle, and created great religious philosophies—which, however, preached not the transformation of reality but escape from it as from an embodiment of chaos. It was a politically mute culture.