DESPOTISM. - In contemporary political science the term has a pejorative sense and serves to signify an absolute authority that governs above and outside every law, taking as its sole criterion its own will. 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 limit. Its essence consists in an unbridled subjectivism and an extreme voluntarism, which recognizes no fixed norm outside the act of the will, by which it makes caprice into law.
From this concept are deduced the marks that distinguish it. Despotism disregards the existence of a necessary social end immanent in the political organism itself; it rejects any natural or positive law, divine or human; it tolerates no limit whatsoever on power and suppresses any guarantee protecting the individual, to whom it recognizes no subjective right; it denies the transcendent value of the human person or of his function within the community; it excludes any participation by citizens or lesser organizations in the management of public affairs. Once law is disregarded, the principle on which it rests, as Montesquieu rightly saw, is the fear generated by violence, with which it reduces its subjects to slavery. The despot has in view neither the common good nor does he concern himself with the civil education of individuals, whom he rather encloses in a dense web of espionage and police, in order to reduce them to a herd without thought or initiative of its own.
As a vice of sovereignty, despotism can be established under any form of regime. It is not necessarily connected with the government of one man, as Montesquieu maintained, since the monarchical form can degenerate as well as the democratic, the aristocratic as well as the popular. The French Revolution left the example of an assembly despotism no less extensive than that of the Oriental emperors. It must nevertheless be admitted, with St. Thomas, that the regime of one man can more easily become despotic, on account of the sum of powers granted to him, to which the virtue necessary to exercise them fittingly does not always correspond.
Generally, despotism resembles tyranny as much as absolutism, all being vices of sovereignty. With the former it is difficult to establish a specific element that clearly distinguishes them. According to Aristotle's concept, adopted by St. Thomas, there is tyranny 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 to the egoistic private good, to which it subordinates public life. Developing this concept, one can deduce from it all the elements that distinguish despotism, with which it comes in principle to coincide.
Not so, however, with absolutism, which refers to that form of regime in which all powers are gathered into the hands of the monarch, who exercises them independently as his own affair. In its ancient form, expressed by the well-known sentence of the Digest quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem, it resembles despotism more markedly; in its more modern form, condensed in Louis XIV's formula l'Etat c'est moi, it moves away from it, inasmuch as the absolute prince admitted the bond of a natural and divine law that bound him in conscience. In practice, however, the distinction is not so perceptible: absolutism often slides into despotism.
Opinions have varied concerning the essential mark of despotism. For Guizot it would consist in egoism. He is not consistent, however, since he classifies among despots monarchs such as Charlemagne and Peter the Great, to whom he acknowledges disinterested aims. Egoism, the origin of several deviations in human conduct, cannot constitute the essence of any of them. It can be a motive of despotism, but not the only one, because many other causes can contribute to making the use of power degenerate: ignorance, pride, fanaticism, political hatred. According to Benjamin Constant the characteristic mark of despotism would be arbitrariness, inasmuch as power is exercised discretionally. But the discretionary use of power does not always coincide with arbitrariness. In doubtful cases, in which the law does not decide the question, its solution is left to the discretion of the judge ad arbitrium iudicis, who in pronouncing sentence is guided by other similar norms (law of analogy), or by the norms of equity. Moreover, not all particular cases of sovereign arbitrariness can be designated as acts of a despotic government. Such are measures of urgent necessity, such are the impositions of authority in a nascent society, in which, no body of already fixed laws existing, the sovereign will dictates them and urges their observance. Constant's opinion derives from the confusion between arbitrariness and discretion, which are often used interchangeably but do not have the same meaning.
Others, finally, have believed they found the essential mark of despotism in force. Montesquieu seems inclined to this opinion, inasmuch as he placed the accent on fear as the intrinsic principle of despotic government. Undoubtedly the means that the despot uses to bend and render docile the wills of others is the force that 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 the law: it becomes, on the contrary, a vice if it tramples upon and oppresses the law. The essence of despotism lies, then, in the manner in which force is employed, that is, in the continued violation of justice committed by one who does not concern himself with its laws.
In Greek antiquity despotism rested on a religious conception that raised the monarch to the rank of divinity and paid him divine worship, attributing to his will the value of absolute law. To indicate the absolute power enjoyed by Oriental princes, the name of despot was given to them, also used to signify the supreme authority of the father of the family over slaves. The conception of the divine monarch with its related cult passed to Rome, and here too his authority had an unlimited extension, as the norm of the Digest cited above and the current conception of the prince as legibus solutus attest.
Once this apotheosis of man fell with the ascendancy of Christianity, which lowered power to the human sphere and proclaimed the transcendent value of the person and his essential liberty, throughout the Middle Ages there dominated unchallenged a democratic conception of power, limited in its attributions not only by natural law, the reflection of divine law, but also by the popular will, the original subject of authority, expressed in a tacit or explicit contract (the charters of subjection) with the sovereign. This conception persisted almost into modern times. Even the theorists of royal absolutism felt its influence, as, for example, Bodin, who, although he defined sovereignty as legibus soluta, nevertheless did not fail to subject it to natural, divine and international law.
Machiavelli broke with the medieval and Christian tradition, describing in his Prince a true despot. Hobbes and Rousseau follow him at some distance: both, although starting from different principles, arrive at configuring public power as absolute and the sovereign will as released from any 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 as absolute sovereignty that recognizes no juridical limit except in the very act of its will, with its subjectivism and voluntarism without any restraint of objective and transcendent law, approaches despotism, offering it its theoretical foundations. Upon these, with theoretical variations, the most modern experiments in despotic government have been built, among which must be counted, besides the now-superseded German National Socialism, Russian communism.
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Antonio Messinco