Dictatorships

A dictatorship is government by a single ruler or ruling clique whose power is neither limited by law nor accountable to any authority outside itself. The word began as the name of a Roman constitutional office — an emergency magistracy capped at six months — and became, in the twentieth century, the term for regimes that made emergency permanent.

Conservative thought treats dictatorship as the standing refutation of political utopianism: proof that power unchecked by constitution, custom, and countervailing institutions ends in the same place whatever ideals it announces on arrival.

Key Takeaways

• Rome’s dictatura was legal and temporary — Cincinnatus held it briefly in 458 BC before returning to his farm; Caesar’s assumption of it in perpetuity destroyed the office and the Republic together.
• Twentieth-century analysis distinguishes authoritarian regimes, which demand obedience, from totalitarian ones, which demand belief and rebuild every institution to manufacture it.
• Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards” (1979) built a decade of American foreign policy on that distinction.¹
• In the conservative account running back to Burke, despotism does not overthrow healthy constitutional orders; it fills the vacuum left where inherited institutions have been dismantled.⁴

History And Context

The Roman dictatorship was a constitutional device: in emergencies a single magistrate received supreme command, bounded by a six-month term and the expectation of prompt resignation. Cincinnatus, summoned from his plough in 458 BC and back at it within weeks, fixed the office’s ideal; Sulla’s proscriptions and Caesar’s appointment as dictator in perpetuity in 44 BC fixed its corruption, and the office was abolished after Caesar’s assassination. The word’s modern career runs through the French Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety and the plebiscitary empires of the two Napoleons, in which mass votes ratified accomplished seizures of power — the pattern later writers called Bonapartism. The twentieth century industrialized the form: Lenin’s party-state, Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, Hitler’s Enabling Act of March 1933 — by which a parliament voted its own irrelevance — and the police states of Stalin and Mao, which surveilled and killed on a scale no earlier tyranny could organize. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)² and Friedrich and Brzezinski’s Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956) gave the century its analytical vocabulary: official ideology, single party, terror, monopoly of communications, command economy.³ Juan Linz later mapped the middle ground, describing authoritarian regimes as marked by limited pluralism and rule through mentality rather than ideology.

The Conservative Position

The conservative account of dictatorship begins with Burke, who warned in 1790 — with Napoleon still an obscure artillery officer — that the French Revolution’s destruction of every intermediate institution would end with some popular general mastering the republic.⁴ The prediction identifies the mechanism conservatives still cite: despotism is not the conquest of a healthy constitutional order but the occupation of a cleared site — cleared by revolution, by permanent emergency, or by the slow surrender of legislative power to executives and administrators. The safeguards are therefore structural and inherited: divided powers, independent courts, private property, free churches and associations, and the habits of lawfulness that no decree can conjure on demand.

The totalitarian–authoritarian distinction is this tradition’s twentieth-century refinement. Kirkpatrick argued that traditional autocracies, whatever their brutality, leave society’s older institutions — family, market, church — standing, and have at times evolved toward liberty, whereas totalitarian states, which liquidate those institutions, had at the date of her writing never done so.¹ Spain, Portugal, Taiwan, South Korea, and Chile after 1990 supplied the confirming cases. The policy consequence — resisting communist expansion while pressing gradual reform on allied autocrats — defined the Reagan administration she served as ambassador to the United Nations.

Differing Positions

Critics reply that the Kirkpatrick doctrine functioned in practice as licence: Washington underwrote Pinochet’s torture chambers and Central American militaries whose conduct disgraced the democracies that armed them, and the later liberalization of some autocracies owed more to domestic movements than to patient allies. The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 weakened the claim that totalitarian regimes never reform from within. Structural explanations also compete with constitutional ones: political scientists point to oil rents, poverty, weak states, and arbitrary borders as the soil of dictatorship, and observe that private property and markets have coexisted comfortably with dictatorship — Chile under Pinochet, China since 1978 — evidence, on this view, that capitalism is no automatic safeguard. Defenders of the conservative account answer that the cases confirm it: wherever dictatorship arose, the missing element was the same — institutions independent and confident enough to say no.

References

1. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Commentary 68, no. 5 (November 1979).
2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951).
3. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956).
4. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790).