AUTOCRACY. - The nominal definition defines the concept of a., which, deriving from αὐτός and κράτος, includes the idea of a force free from any moral and juridical limit. A. is therefore that form of government in which social authority is exercised by a subject, called an autocrat, whose will constitutes itself the supreme law, subject to no dependence either transcendent or of positive origin, nor submitted to the control of the organs of the State. It entails neither the existence of superior binding norms nor divine dominion, and it excludes both the obligation that derives from the immanent ends of collective life and from natural law, and that of positive law, which does not bind the autocrat legibus solutus.
A. is thus reduced to a regime of force, exercised without any limit by an arbitrary and absolute will, which gathers in itself all powers and does not admit the participation of the people or of their representatives in the government of public affairs. It has many points of contact with absolutism (v.), with which it is often confused: it is distinguished from it, however, in that the absolute monarch of the 16th and 18th centuries admitted the superiority of the divine will, to whose law he felt bound, and the modern absolute State conceives of itself as at least bound by its own law; just as it is also distinguished from tyranny, in the classical sense, which presupposes the illegality of power. Examples of a. occurred in the regimes of the Hellenistic age, in the decadent Roman empire, in tsarist Russia, and are still found among the less evolved peoples of the East.
The origin of authority from God, to whose will whoever exercises it is subject, the existence of a transcendent moral law and of an objective rational right, the division of powers in the civil and religious sphere, the concept that the State is at the service of the human person, render a. irreconcilable with Christian civilization. Western thought is also contrary to it, inasmuch as it upholds the participation of the people in power through the regime of representation and tends to subject authority to law and to the control of the organs of the State. Nevertheless, the religious and moral agnosticism of the last century, with the theory of absolute sovereignty, could give rise to new forms of a.
Bibliography3 works
Antonio Messineo