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Autocracy and Democracy are mutually antagonistic. A dictatorship, whether that of the proletariat or one established by a totalitarian state, is a menace to popular government. We have all seen in the recent past how it has shown itself a foe to liberty; to freedom of the person, freedom of opinion and speech, freedom of the press, and hostile to religious toleration. Autocracy, relying upon force, is necessarily militaristic and readily assumes an aggressive attitude towards other forms of government.

Having made some general observations on the aspirations and obstacles of fascist ideology in democratic countries, we shall now attempt to weigh the actual possibilities of a further spread of autocratic rule in the principal states of Europe. Herein we cannot abstain from a certain amount of prophecy, with all the hazards of statements not entirely based on undisputable fact; but we shall try to keep the forecast within reasonable bounds and to fortify it by reference to actual experience in the different countries under survey. Instead of travelling rather haphazardly over Europe, we should prefer a systematic grouping of the different countries which have not yet adopted autocracy. However, we shall find it rather difficult to discover a reasonable line of division; and accordingly we shall deal with each state separately and determine in the course of our journey whether some synoptical conclusions are permissible.

Looking over the political scene of contemporary Europe, we observe that the European states are aligned in two fundamentally antagonistic camps of political institutions and ideals. Democracy and liberal institutions are still in force in Great Britain, the Irish Free State, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, in Switzerland, and in Czechoslovakia; while autocracies at present embrace Russia, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary; also among the Baltic states, at least Latvia and Estonia may be so classified. As for Spain and Greece, notwithstanding that democratic constitutions are nominally still in existence, it is at least open to doubt whether or not they at the present moment should be classified as democracies. By far the greater part of European territory and of European population is under dictatorial rule of one type or another. It might seem, therefore, appropriate to weigh the possibilities of a further expansion of the systems of government which, loosely but rather adequately, are termed dictatorships or autocracies.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgment / Spearman, Diana -- Introduction -- I The Rise of Dictators -- II The Psychological Background -- III The Psychological Background and the Theory of Autocracy in European Political Thought -- IV Authoritarian Tendencies in Democracy -- V The Problems of Autocratic Government -- VI Dictatorial Economics -- VII Is Modern Dictatorship Successful? -- Index

The first requisite for a clear grasp of the tragic situation in India today is the need of distinguishing between two trends, the political one of conflict between autocracy and democracy, and the nationalistic one of conflict between White and Brown. Failure to distinguish can lead to such astonishing ideas as that Gandhi fights for Democracy or that "British" is synonymous with "imperialist."

Ever since 1889, when the Emperor Meiji granted his people a constitution, Japan may be called a constitutional monarchy. But these simple words do not tell the whole story. The designation used by the Almanach de Gotha in referring to Czarist Russia—a "constitutional autocracy"—may be as appropriately applied to modern Japan. Japan has a constitution and a monarch, but in the eyes of both the people and the statesmen of the Restoration Period, the monarch comes before the constitution.

The executive powers of the Emperor include: (1) appointments and general administration, (2) pardons, (3) organization of the army and navy, (4) declaration of war, (5) conclusion of peace and treaty-making, and (6) establishment of martial law.Article X of the constitution defines the appointing power of the Emperor. His competence is not confined to mere selection of officials, since the constitution provides that "the Emperor determines the organization of the different branches of the administration, and the salaries of all civil and military officers, and appoints and dismisses the same." Clearly, the appointing power of the Emperor is unlimited. There is no necessity for securing the consent of any confirming body. The Emperor is thus unhampered by the restrictions that bind the president of the United States. This prerogative also extends to the power of dismissal—a potent instrument for the promotion of executive efficiency as well as autocracy.

Since there exists philosophy, there exists the attempt to bring it in relation with politics; and this attempt has succeeded in so far as it is today recognized to the degree of a truism that political theory and that part of philosophy we call ethics are closely connected with each other. But it seems strange to assume—and this essay tries to verify this assumption—that there exists an external parallelism, and perhaps also an inner relationship, between politics and other parts of philosophy such as epistemology, that is, theory of knowledge, and theory of values. It is just within these two theories that the antagonism between philosophical absolutism and relativism has its seat; and this antagonism seems to be in many respects analogous to the fundamental opposition between autocracy and democracy as the representatives of political absolutism on the one hand and political relativism on the other.IPhilosophical absolutism is the metaphysical view that there is an absolute reality, i.e., a reality that exists independently of human knowledge. Hence its existence is objective and unlimited in, or beyond, space and time, to which human knowledge is restricted. Philosophical relativism, on the other hand, advocates the empirical doctrine that reality exists only within human knowledge, and that, as the object of knowledge, reality is relative to the knowing subject. The absolute, the thing in itself, is beyond human experience; it is inaccessible to human knowledge and therefore unknowable.To the assumption of absolute existence corresponds the possibility of absolute truth and absolute values, denied by philosophical relativism, which recognizes only relative truth and relative values.

Constitutionalism, in Austria, is not a new slogan. It was a phrase to conjure with during the entire lifetime of Francis Joseph, though in practice the whole history of the country down to the revolution of 1918 was its virtual negation. Only in the latter days of the monarchy, when the scepter passed from the hands of Francis Joseph to the inexperienced young emperor Karl, was a modicum of popular expression allowed to supplant the personal autocracy of the sovereign. The old Austria passed out of existence in 1918 without the successful implantation of a régime of liberal legality in any of its parts.The young Austrian Republic, coming into existence in the hour of the Empire's dissolution, thus inherited a legacy of unconstitutional government, and only the solidity of socialist and clerical party organization, bred of the stress and strain of clashing conceptions of the social order, gave support to the government in the days when social revolution swept almost to the doors of Vienna. It was under such circumstances that Austria entered, in 1918, upon the way of constitutionalism and sought, through her provisional instruments of government, to avoid the autocratic excesses of the past and avert the impending perils of a proletarian dictatorship.In a series of revolutionary pronouncements and decisions of her provisional assembly, she discarded, under socialist leadership, the arbitrary régime attendant on the monarchy, and, establishing a unitary democratic republic with far-reaching local self-government as a stepping-stone toward union with Germany, inaugurated a régime of unquestioned parliamentary supremacy, strict ministerial responsibility, virtual executive impotence, and extensive socialization.

From 1905, when Saskatchewan was made a province, to 1911, the Liberal party in Saskatchewan controlled both the federal and the provincial patronage. These six years gave it an enviable opportunity for laying firm foundations for a political organization. During the next ten years the federal patronage was in the hands of a Conservative or a Union party but the more important provincial patronage remained with the Liberals. Then in their last eight years of uninterrupted power, the Saskatchewan Liberals once more had the support of a federal Liberal government. Thus for twenty-four years after the formation of the province the Liberal rule over Saskatchewan was uninterrupted, and for fourteen of those years the Liberals also ruled over the Dominion. Until a few years before its defeat in 1929, it seemed as if the longer the party remained in power the stronger grew the party organization. It is this long period of development under favourable conditions which makes the Liberal organization in Saskatchewan worthy of close study.The Liberal party in Saskatchewan, like Liberal and Conservative parties in the other provinces, had two sides to its organization—one formal and ineffective, the other informal and effective. In its formal aspect it resembled party organization elsewhere. The Liberals in each polling sub-division elected one or two representatives. These met to elect a constituency executive. Each constituency executive had one representative on the central council of the provincial party, on which there also sat the executive elected at a party convention. This formal organization, which paid so strict a homage to democratic theory in its pyramidical structure based upon the people's will, was unimportant. The constituency organization, for example, did very little; it met, perhaps, once a year. The formal organization constituted a democratic façade which hid from the common gaze the naked autocracy of effective party management. In the effective party organization which did the work, won the elections, and consequently possessed the reality of political power, appointments were from the top down.