The Origins of Autocracy

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a classic study of the conflict between two types of political culture brought face to face with each other. The Yankee is astonished that he has ended up "in a country where the right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonor­able, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become a stock­holder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal."[27]

The stock-market terminology applied to the analysis of authori­tarian structures only seems comic. In fact, it describes the state of affairs with extreme precision. The democratic common sense of our Yankee rebels precisely because he evaluates the situation from the point of view of a political culture inherited from his Puritan fore­bears, who wrote it into the constitution of the state of Connecticut that "all political power is inherent in the people, and . . . they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such manner as they may think expedient.'"[28]

Let us assume for a moment, however, that our Yankee had visited not the kingdom of King Arthur, but the land of Pharaoh Rameses or Sultan Bajazet. Far from waxing indignant over what the "irreplace­able six" would reply to a proposal that "the form of government be changed," he would be struck by the fact that the thought would not enter anyone's mind. To drown the sultan is an excellent idea, and to strangle the tax-collector or the wazir is still better. But to change the form of government? Unthinkable!

In order for this to become not only conceivable, but necessary, a cultural tradition, independent means of subsistence, sophisticated political thought, inherited aristocratic privileges, and a political op­position are all needed—in short, everything which gives rise to la­tent limitations on power. And this is the essence of the political cul­ture generated by absolutism.

Of course, the presence of these limitations is not sufficient in itself immediately to bring about a new deal. The constitution which determines the Connecticut Yankee's Weltanschauung did not fall from heaven. It was won in the mud and blood of revolution and reac­tion, religious revolts, terror and desperation, trade, slavery, and wars. As such, it is a certificate of the maturity of the political culture of its creators—testimony to successful completion of the elementary school of political history and their ability to transform latent limi­tations on power into open political control of the system over the administration.

Just as an individual becomes a personality only when he is able to choose his own fate autonomously, so a human collectivity becomes a people only when it learns to limit the authority of the administration and thereby to affect the fate of its country. From this moment, the people may begin to realize that not only the sultan or the pharaoh, but the "form of government" itself does not suit them particularly well. And does this not mean, perhaps, that neither pharaohs nor sul­tans nor chairmen of people's republics nor general secretaries of parties are needed?

It is precisely in this—the gradual accumulation of limitations on power transformed into a cultural tradition—that political progress consists, in my opinion. And political progress itself, from the view­point being offered here, can be interpreted as the history of the birth, maturation, and stabilization of latent limitations on power— of their transformation into political limitations. It was the historical function of absolutism to be the cultural school of mankind. Only by passing through this school was humanity capable of producing a Yankee who, although he might completely forget the path traversed by his ancestors, would be able, in case of need, to reshuffle the cards and deal them again.

6. Russian Autocracy

Let us now see whether either of our "ideal constructions" describes Russian political history.[29]