DESPOTISM. — In contemporary political science, the term has a pejorative meaning and serves to signify an absolute authority that governs above and outside every law, taking only its own will as its criterion. Despotism is therefore not a form of regime, as Montesquieu seems to have understood it, but an aberrant practice, a vice of sovereignty, which drives the absoluteness of power to its ultimate extreme. Its essence consists in unrestrained subjectivism and extreme voluntarism, which recognizes no fixed norm outside the act of the will, with which it makes whatever it pleases into law.
From this concept the features that characterize it may be deduced. Despotism denies the existence of a necessary social end immanent in the political organism itself; it rejects every natural or positive, divine or human law; it tolerates no limitation whatsoever on power and suppresses every protective guarantee of the individual, whom it recognizes as possessing no subjective right; it denies the transcendent value of the human person or of his function within the community; it excludes every participation by citizens or by lesser organizations in the management of public affairs. Once law has been disregarded, the principle upon which it rests, as Montesquieu rightly saw, is the fear generated by violence, through which it reduces its subjects to slavery. The despot has no concern for the common good, nor does he care about the civic education of individuals, whom he instead encloses in a dense network of espionage and police surveillance, in order to reduce them to a thoughtless herd without initiative of its own.
As a vice of sovereignty, despotism may be established under any form of regime. It is not necessarily connected with the rule of one man, as Montesquieu maintained, since both monarchical and democratic forms, both aristocratic and popular ones, may degenerate in this way. The French Revolution left the example of an assembly despotism no less extensive than that of the Eastern emperors. It must nevertheless be admitted with s. Tommaso that the rule of one man may more easily become despotic, owing to the sum of powers granted to him, which is not always matched by the virtue necessary to exercise them properly.
Generically, despotism resembles both tyranny and absolutism, since all are vices of sovereignty. With the former, it is difficult to establish a specific element that clearly distinguishes them. According to the concept of Aristotle, adopted by s. Tommaso, tyranny exists when the monarch governs not with a view to the common good but with a view to his own private good. Tyranny therefore presupposes an inversion in the ends of power, a deviation from the good of the community toward selfish private good, to which it subordinates public life. By developing this concept, one may deduce from it all the elements that characterize despotism, with which it broadly coincides.
This is not so, however, with absolutism, which refers to that form of regime in which all powers are gathered in the hands of the monarch, who exercises them independently as his own property. In its ancient form, expressed by the well-known sentence of the Digest, quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem, it more closely resembles despotism; in its more modern form, condensed in Louis XIV’s formula, Etat c'est moi, it departs from it, insofar as the absolute prince acknowledged the binding force of a natural and divine law that obliged him in conscience. In practice, however, the distinction is not so marked: absolutism often slips into despotism.
Various opinions have been held concerning the essential characteristic of despotism. For Guizot, it consisted in egoism. He is not consistent, however, since he classifies as despots monarchs such as Charlemagne and Peter the Great, to whom he attributes disinterested aims. Egoism, the source of various deviations in human conduct, cannot constitute the essence of any one of them. It may be a motive of despotism, but not the only one, since many other causes may contribute to making the exercise of power degenerate: ignorance, pride, fanaticism, and political hatred. According to Benjamin Constant, the distinguishing characteristic of despotism would be arbitrariness, insofar as power is exercised at discretion. But discretionary use of power does not always coincide with arbitrariness. In doubtful cases, where the law does not decide the matter, its resolution is left to the discretion of the judge ad arbitrium iudicis, who, in pronouncing judgment, proceeds according to other similar norms (the law of analogy), or according to the norms of equity. Moreover, not every particular case of sovereign arbitrariness can be designated as an act of despotic government. Such are measures dictated by urgent necessity, and such are the commands of authority in a nascent society in which, since no body of fixed laws yet exists, the sovereign will dictates them and enforces their observance. Constant’s opinion derives from a confusion between arbitrariness and discretion, which are often used interchangeably but do not have the same meaning.
Finally, others have believed that the essential characteristic of despotism lies in force. Montesquieu seems inclined toward this opinion, insofar as he emphasized fear as the intrinsic principle of despotic government. Undoubtedly, the means used by the despot to bend and render other people’s wills docile is force, which generates servile fear; but the means must not be confused with the end, from which it remains distinct. Moreover, the use of force is not in itself a vice if sovereignty employs it in support of right: it becomes a vice, instead, if it tramples upon and oppresses right. The essence of despotism therefore lies in the manner in which force is employed, that is, in the continued violation of justice by one who has no regard for its laws.
In Greek antiquity, despotism rested upon a religious conception that raised the monarch to the level of divinity and accorded him divine worship, attributing to his will the force of absolute law. To indicate the absolute power enjoyed by Eastern princes, they were given the name despot, which was also used to signify the supreme authority of the head of a household over slaves. The conception of the divine monarch, together with the worship associated with him, passed to Rome, and here too his authority acquired unlimited scope, as is attested by the rule of the Digest cited above and by the prevailing conception of the prince as legibus solutus.
Once this apotheosis of man had fallen with the triumph of Christianity, which lowered power to the human sphere and proclaimed the transcendent value of the person and his essential freedom, a democratic conception of power prevailed uncontested throughout the Middle Ages. Power was limited in its attributions not only by natural law, a reflection of divine law, but also by the will of the people, the original subject of authority, expressed in a tacit or explicit contract (the charters of allegiance) with the sovereign. This conception continued almost into modern times. Even the theorists of absolute monarchy felt its influence, as, for example, Bodin, who, although he defined sovereignty as legibus salutis, nevertheless did not fail to subject it to natural, divine, and international law.
Machiavelli breaks with the medieval and Christian tradition, describing in his Principe a true despot. Hobbes and Rousseau follow him at some distance: both, although proceeding from different principles, end by configuring public power as absolute and sovereign will as released from every law, indeed as a law unto itself. The most modern conception of the State, as the autonomous source of all law, both objective and subjective, and of absolute sovereignty that recognizes no juridical limit except in the very act of its own will—with its subjectivism and voluntarism unrestrained by any objective and transcendent law—approaches despotism, offering it its theoretical foundations. Upon these foundations, with various theoretical modifications, the most modern experiments in despotic government have been constructed, among which must be counted, besides the now-defunct German National Socialism, Russian communism.