The Origins of Autocracy

Naturally, a certain degree of divergence between the goals of the administration and those of the system is characteristic of all au­thoritarian structures without exception. Partly for this reason, abso­lutist governments always found themselves under financial stress, owed gigantic debts, and were never able to achieve a normal balance of income and expenditures. A financial cul-de-sac occasioned the calling of the Long Parliament which ended by sending King Charles I to the block, and the same is true of the Estates General which ended by guillotining Louis XVI. The Austrian constitutional bodies also owed their origin to a financial collapse combined with a military defeat. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the interest on the British national debt was equal to the entire expenditures on the army and navy, and the debt of Austria exceeded its annual income three-and-a-half times, while in France the national debt was eigh­teen times the annual revenues of the state. Such was the disordered financial system of absolutism, which originated for the most part in ruinous wars, unskilled management, and vestiges of medieval orga­nization in the economy, which obviously contradicted the goals of the system.

Despotism did not know any of this. It did not live on credit, since no one would have extended a penny's worth of credit to it. It lived by constant robbery of its own people. And thus, it was not only parasitic on the body of the system, as was absolutism, but systematically disor­ganized the system, not allowing it to stand on its feet.

If the reader gets the impression that I am writing an apologia for absolutism, this is only because it is being compared with despotism. Absolutism was a cruel, often bloody and tyrannical authoritarian structure, striving, insofar as this was possible for it, to trample un­derfoot not only the political, but also the civil rights of its subjects. Louis XI was not a whit better than Shah Abbas, and Henry VIII was no more pleasant than Suleiman the Magnificent. Any authoritarian structure strives to deviate toward despotism, as a compass needle to­ward the north. Despotism is its ideal, its dream, its crown. But for absolutism it was an unattainable dream—for even in "deviating" to­ward tyranny, it could never make this tyranny permanent. And it could not do this because the latent limitations on power which it had had to endure did not permit it to disorganize the system to the de­gree of chronic stagnation.

5. The Historical Function of Absolutism

I understand that the reader may, for these last few pages, have been haunted by the feeling that I am retailing copybook maxims, some of which were known even to the students of Aristotle. In fact, what have we gotten from all of these elementary comparisons? We have examined two equally authoritarian political structures, between which it is impossible to discover any formal juridical difference, and which—on the level of political organization—resemble each other like twins. In one type of state, the government commits violence against its own people; in the other, they are also hanged and en­slaved. In the first type, the kings proclaim the unlimited nature of their power, as they also do in the second. In the first type, wars or conquests are waged, rebels slaughtered, and the oppressed peasant­ry robbed—and so, too, in the second type.

Does this not give us the right to say that there existed—in ancient times and in the Middle Ages, in the East and in the West—simply a certain continuum of authoritarian structures (or traditional—i.e., "unmodernized"—political bodies), a continuum within which we can calmly call absolutism an unrealized despotism, and despotism a real­ized absolutism? We have yet to see how many experts, both in the East and in the West, do precisely this. And I would have no objection in principle, if the proclamation of such a continuum were not in­tended to obscure the most essential result of our comparisons. Namely, that the poles of this "continuum" are not only different, but also the very antithesis of each other. Their opposition consists in the fact that, by virtue of all the reasons set forth above, one of them was destined for self-development, and the other was incapable even of self-destruction. It consists in the fact that absolutism declared the un­limited nature of its power, while despotism practiced it.