AUTOCRACY. — The nominal definition defines the concept of a., which, deriving from the Greek *autokrateia* “power,” includes the idea of force free from any moral or juridical limit. Autocracy is therefore that form of government in which social authority is exercised by a single subject, called the autocrat, whose will constitutes the supreme law, subject to no dependence—whether transcendent or of positive origin—and not subject to control by the organs of the State. It does not entail the existence of superior obligatory norms or divine rule, and it excludes both the obligation that derives from the immanent ends of collective life and natural law, and that of positive law, which does not bind the autocrat *legibus solutus*.
Autocracy thus reduces to a regime of force, exercised without any limit by an arbitrary and absolute will that concentrates all powers in itself and does not admit the participation of the people or their representatives in the government of public affairs. It has many points of contact with absolutism (v.), with which it is often confused; it differs from it, however, in that the absolute monarch of the 16th and 18th centuries admitted the supremacy of the divine will, to whose law he felt himself bound, and the modern absolute State conceives itself at least as bound by its own law; it also differs from tyranny in the classical sense, which presupposes the illegality of power. Examples of autocracy occurred in the regimes of the Hellenistic era, in the declining Roman Empire, in tsarist Russia, and still exist among less evolved peoples of the East.
The derivation of authority from God, to whose will the one exercising 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 spheres, and the concept that the State exists for the service of the human person, render autocracy incompatible with Christian civilization. Western thought is also opposed to it, insofar as it upholds the participation of the people in power through representative government 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 past century, together with the theory of absolute sovereignty, could give rise to new forms of autocracy.