AUTOCRACY. – The nominal definition defines the concept of a., which, deriving from αὐτός and κράτος, includes the idea of force free from any moral or juridical limitation. A. is therefore that form of government in which social authority is exercised by a subject, called the autocrat, whose will becomes the supreme law, subject to no dependence, whether transcendent or of positive origin, and not submitted to the control of the organs of the State. It entails neither the existence of binding superior norms nor divine rule, and excludes both the obligation deriving 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. thus reduces itself to a regime of force, exercised without any limitation by an arbitrary and absolute will, which gathers all powers into itself and does not allow the participation of the people or their representatives in the government of public affairs. It has absolutism (v.), with which it is often confused; it differs from it, however, in that the absolute monarch of the 16th and 18th centuries acknowledged the superiority of the divine will, by whose law he felt himself bound, whereas 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 a. were found in the regimes of the Hellenistic period, in the declining Roman Empire, and in tsarist Russia, and are still found among less developed peoples of the East.
The origin of authority from God, to whose will those who exercise it are 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 conception that the State is at the service of the human person render a. irreconcilable with Christian civilization. Western thought is likewise 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 last century, together with the theory of absolute sovereignty, could give rise to new forms of a.