On Authoritarian Theory

Advocates for political authoritarianism, a retvrn to tradition

Précis/TL;DR: in which we discuss theorists and theories of political authoritarianism. I suggest that ‘authoritarian theory’ is 1) often underestimated as a set of traditions in political thought, especially by modern political scientists; 2) has a long intellectual pedigree that offers a deep background of past thinkers upon which to draw, as well as growing cohorts of the authoritarian-curious today and; 3) can be categorized in multiple ways that may help us group such theorists into differing camps and schools of thought. This all matters because authoritarian theory is back, whether we like it or not, and likely to be so for the foreseeable future. The newsletter concludes with a short list of recent publications, as usual.

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What Is Authoritarian Theory?

‘Authoritarian theory’ is a phrase I have increasingly used to generically describe the set of intellectual frameworks, causal arguments, policy proposals, and ideological visions that make the case explicitly, positively, and substantively that a given country should have an authoritarian government. Authoritarianism here means any political regime that is not an electoral democracy. An authoritarian regime can thus be a monarchy, a military junta, a personalist dictatorship, a party-state, a restricted oligarchy or a closed aristocracy (among other options).

If one thinks any subset of the above are Good Things, then one is at least are aligned with or has a working, if implicit, ‘authoritarian theory’ of politics in one’s head. Although we will show examples of why this is relevant further below, in short, it is because more and more thinkers in the West are starting to (implicitly or explicitly) play with authoritarian theory, and there is a small but growing crop of writers who are 100% authoritarian theorists proper. And the potential audience for such views increases daily. So it may be reasonably important for us to better grasp what it is exactly. I certainly think so. Alright, but what does that mean?

To be an authoritarian ‘theorist’ is to be relatively sophisticated, detailed, and clear in this sort of advocacy for open authoritarian rule. A political activist, an intellectual, or an (unusually thoughtful) political leader in most cases. The ‘explicit, positive, and substantive’ phrasing is meant to exclude actors who end up pushing a country towards non-democratic governance through their actions alone, or continue to justify their de facto authoritarian politics on democratic grounds, or those that just don’t think abstractly about it at all. There are many scenarios of authoritarian takeover which don’t really have a firm theory of the case, but act only out of emergency exigency, or believe that their side truly is the democratic one, or simply don’t justify it in regime terms at all - it just is what it is. That’s not really an ‘authoritarian theory’ or ‘theorist.’

So, for example, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán are not authoritarian theorists. Despite the fact that they both rule different sorts of authoritarian regimes. Indeed, their public pronouncements still give lip-service to democracy and popular legitimacy, even if we as listeners are not under any obligation to believe them. If an authoritarian leader doesn’t say authoritarianism is Good and describe why, then he’s just an authoritarian leader, not an authoritarian theorist. On the other hand, some authoritarian leaders certainly were ‘theorists’ in this sense, including fascists such as Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler, Communists like Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin, and many others. And this is especially true if they ruled before WWII and had an activist-ideological or intellectual bent.

Similarly, all non-constitutional monarchs hold to at least an implicit authoritarian theory for their reign, and monarchism itself is a form of authoritarian theory. Of course, political leaders are often less explicit about their theories of regime than intellectuals proper. Thus there are many authoritarian theorists who never ruled as such, but rather argued for it. Nikita Khrushchev never thought particularly hard about the detailed justifications for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as expressed through the Vanguard Party and its formal, leading guidance of the State (the main authoritarian theory of Soviet Communism), but other Communists certainly did.

To be a real authoritarian theorist one must justify authoritarian rule openly and with clear intention. There can be no claims that the regime is actually an electoral democracy or that the action is extremely short-term and temporary, for example. In essence, an authoritarian theorist is a thinker who believes authoritarianism is Good and Advisable. And the substance of an authoritarian theory is that theorist’s view on exactly what sort of non-democracy is better, why, and how it should be constructed. The more detailed the vision, the more truly the person is an authoritarian theorist properly speaking.

The content of authoritarian theoretical arguments can vary, from instrumental ones (e.g., ‘monarchy is better because our country is otherwise too big or divided to govern’ or ‘we need a single leader to ensure decisive government’) to those based in value-claims (e.g., ‘our government is justified by God/History/Progress/Merit’ or ‘only closed rule by this group can ensure human flourishing’ or ‘so-called democratic regimes are merely facades hiding malign domination by worse people than my alternative’ or just ‘democracy is evil, my vision is better’). A narrow understanding of authoritarian theory would limit assigning the term to those who provide detailed arguments for their preferred vision of a desired authoritarian future. Something like an authoritarian philosopher, intellectual, or scholar (think Carl Schmitt or Vladimir Lenin, for example). A broader version would be more inclusive of thinkers coming from literary, journalistic, or cultural-critical approaches who may be otherwise fairly vague about exactly what kind of authoritarian rule is preferred - but they know they want it generally (say, Julius Evola or Sayyid Qutb).

As Americans, or otherwise modern citizens in the West, we are not used to writers, intellectuals, and political figures making such explicit claims that authoritarian regimes are better, superior, or at all necessary. But these sorts of arguments were indeed quite common until relatively recently. Certain ideologies, such as monarchism, Communism, and fascism, naturally lend themselves to a proclivity for authoritarian theory. Others, such as nationalism, conservatism, anarchism, liberalism, socialism, progressivism, imperialism, and anti-colonialism all have proponents throughout history who could be put into the authoritarian theory camp as well. Although we should note that many of these also fit well (or more troublesomely) within clearly democratic views of appropriate governance.

What is interesting is the degree to which positive arguments for political authoritarianism read as absolutely alien to contemporary political scientists. There is, indeed, very little modern research on authoritarian theory as authoritarian theory. At least not since the end of Sovietology, which did require an understanding of the authoritarian Other and their thoughts on government. This lack of bothering to understand or even acknowledge authoritarian theory is partially a (reasonable!) function of the unique circumstances of the post-Cold War era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other Eastern Bloc states, the reputation of Communism (a comprehensive ideology that has a clear and explicit authoritarian theory component) was ruined. There has been no other globe-spanning ideology in recent memory that has claimed political authoritarianism as a Good unto itself.

Of course, there have been many authoritarian regimes since that time, but they have rarely framed their own political systems in authoritarian terms. Indeed, the vast majority of authoritarian regimes justify their political legitimacy with reference to winning elections, maintaining high popularity, and claiming to represent the nation - all ‘democratic’ kinds of claims on political sovereignty. The exceptions - China, Vietnam, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and a few others - mostly prove the rule. None have been known for proselytizing their vision either, at least not since the 1980s. The Caliphate of Islamist dreams comes closest, but similarly remains exceedingly alien to Westerners and more so than Communism (which once successfully captured the minds of many impressionable academics, journalists, and students of our parents and grandparents’ days).

But while Communism is in the past, and Islamism is not really a competitive argument found in the West, authoritarian theory is nevertheless back and quite close to home. In truth, it never quite left, but we’ve mostly ignored it (and as an American you really needed to get deep into libertarian thought to have come across it until very recently). The global picture is more diverse. There are several major authoritarian theorists working abroad, such as China’s Wang Huning and Tongdong Bai or Russia’s Aleksandr Dugin and Vladislav Surkov, who have been important for some time. Nevertheless, the field is now growing at a quick pace and in English (!), so it’s worth keeping a close eye on developments.

What Are Some Examples of Authoritarian Theorists?

Almost every political theorist and political philosopher before the early modern period could be tagged as an authoritarian theorist hypothetically, which makes the term analytically meaningless when strictly looking at thinkers prior to ~1600. It is true that Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and others who wrote on political order all advocated non-democracy. That’s useful, insofar as contemporary thinkers rely on them for justifications or intellectual inspiration, but it means little otherwise. Authoritarian theory gets more defined once something like representative government, and then proper electoral democracy, emerges in history.

One of the earlier thinkers that truly fits the bill is Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha was a defense of absolute monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings - and explicitly in contrast to the growing social-contract theorists of the era, who were developing the philosophical frameworks which would ultimately inform our overall conceptions of representative government (very generically stated) in the English-speaking world. Once the Age of Absolutism hits in the 18th century, we will get a growing number of authoritarian theorists opposing these Enlightenment ideas, the vast majority of the monarchist persuasion. And that number will increase exponentially after the French Revolution, unsurprisingly. We don’t need to go through all that, however. Authoritarian theory is very old and well established. We’ll just skip ahead and refer to more recent cases of highly influential authoritarian theorists whose ideologies are (at least in some ways, and for now) more legible to us living in the 21st century.

So for example, some of the most important Communist leaders, such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, were all authoritarian theorists. Communism is a major authoritarian theory in itself, and some of its deadliest practitioners were also some of its most important theorizers. Influential German legal theorists of the pre-WWII period, such as the decisionist-authoritarian Carl Schmitt or his socialist enemy the republican Hermann Heller, are critical sources outlining authoritarian theory in its normative dimensions during the Interwar period. The entire crop of ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’ of that era, such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Edgar Jung, Hermann Rauschning, Oswald Spengler, and Ernst Jünger all sit within this approach, to varying degrees of specificity. Even intellectuals of whom we usually think of as more democratic or liberal figures, such as the sociologist Max Weber (also Germany), were far more open to authoritarian theory than is generally acknowledged today.

Of course, some monarchists matter quite a lot, and seem to be having a bit of a renaissance in authoritarian theory today. A few notable mentions include various 18th and 19th century ‘Reactionary’ figures, such as Juan Donoso Cortés (Spain), Joseph de Maistre (France), François-René de Chateaubriand (France), Louis de Bonald (France), Nikolai Karamzin (Russia), and others, who all stand as important and influential authoritarian theorists. Anglo-American writers, thinkers, and political actors like Henry Sumner Maine, Thomas Carlyle, and Jefferson Davis are also notables from later on in the century. There is a crop of thinkers that start poking around at the idea of Caesarism in the first half of the 19th century that will get turbo-charged after Napoleon III comes to power in France, as well. Caesarism is big today, so that’s worth tracking as well.

In Spanish and Portuguese, we can find quite a number of authoritarian theorists writing well into the 20th century, such as Nicolas Gómez Dávila (Colombia), Antonio Goicoechea (Spain), Ramiro de Maeztu (Spain), José Pemartín Sanjuán (Spain), Laureano Vallenilla Lanz (Venezuela), José Gil Fortoul (Venezuela), Plínio Salgado (Brazil), and many, many more. Many were journalists or highly-educated, elite politicians, and not just philosophers. We do have to remember that Latin America until recently has long been a hotbed of republican (that is, not a monarchy) authoritarianism and theories justifying it. There’s much to learn from this experience, and a good amount has never been translated or synthesized well in English. Moving east during a similar time period, we can find elitist and corporatist thinkers like Italy’s Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels as well as Austria’s Othmar Spann and Engelbert Dollfuß. And in later postcolonial contexts, Senegal’s Léopold Senghor, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, and Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew are three prominent examples of political leaders with strong proclivities to relatively detailed expressions of authoritarian theory.

You will notice the partial dearth of mid-century figures of influence. There are fewer authoritarian theorists in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s than there had been in the 1920s and 30s. Not completely (sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are good places to look), but the influence in the West especially was much, much smaller. And then the we get the end of the Cold War, unipolarity, and democracy-promotion. A curious and unusual era with very little demand for authoritarian theory. The one real exception in the American context, which I mentioned above, is in libertarian and so-called ‘anarcho-capitalist’ thought, which feared the democratic masses would vote for statism, profligate social spending, and the unfreedom of bureaucracy. The key read here is Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s 2001 book, Democracy: The God That Failed, which partly argues for monarchy (“privately-owned government”) but really for little self-governing libertarian mini-states. Anyway, that’s a topic for another time.

All of this is to say there has long been a great richness of authoritarian theory, that we have grown up in the one point in history where that has not been the case, and that we are returning to an older and longstanding intellectual tradition. Indeed, the 2020s seem to be the decade where democracy-skepticism has really taken a very public turn. If the 1990s is the absolute nadir of authoritarian theory in human history, it has inflected back up since then, and has been accelerating in recent years.

One exciting case in point is the ongoing evolution of the new El Salvadorian regime of Nayib Bukele, who has begun musing quite publicly about the nature of political authority. I also know that he and those who surround him are well aware of other authoritarian theorists and reads them. You don’t need to ask me - the American tech-monarchist Curtis Yarvin himself devoted an entire, rather condescending essay on how to rule El Salvador last autumn. It was, in some sense, a very cringe-worthy, 21st century version of Voltaire writing to Frederick the Great.

Nayib Bukele doing a little authoritarian theory on Twitter/X

Funnily enough, and from an extremely different perspective, a sneaky version of authoritarian theory has also graced the pages of the very establishment and mainstream American Political Science Review. The political scientist Ross Mittiga published a paper in 2022 which justified progressive, technocratic authoritarianism as politically legitimate given the threat of COVID-19 and climate change. I’m sure Dr. Mittiga would not appreciate being called an authoritarian theorist, nor put in the same company as the figures above. But he is refreshingly honest that his vision is indeed authoritarian. He has a book coming out next month in which he seems to be doubling-down on this argument. I look forward to reading it.

Area political scientist casually arguing for technocratic authoritarianism in the APSR.

I bring up Bukele and Mittiga - certainly very different figures - because I think my claim that we should expect more authoritarian theorizing in the coming years and decades is obvious and uncontroversial. But it is of course anything but to the average reader. It is a tremendous shock to the system to wrap one’s head around the idea that someone might actually hate democracy. Or perhaps even worse, to think that it just does not work. As good readers of this Substack know, I do not share these beliefs. But I also do not pretend they do not exist, nor think that they are baseless.

Democracy itself is not the baseline standard political regime for humanity (that’s monarchy), and the sub-type of democracy in which we in the West live currently is perhaps seventy years old in most places, at best, and in many countries far newer. I often talk about ‘electoral democracy’ because that system at least has a history covering the last two hundred years (in the United States). And something with a family resemblance to what you might learn in a history textbook as ‘representative government’ can go back a bit further (think the British parliament). But what we term ‘liberal democracy’ is at best measured in a single human lifetime in most parts of the world. Yes, even in Europe.

That’s all to say that we live in an extraordinarily weird sliver of governance in human history, and an even weirder and narrower span of that sliver in which no one has said it should be otherwise. But of course, as the discussion above suggests, that’s a misleading characterization. Over the years plenty have said it should be otherwise. And a new generation are saying so now, or are increasingly listening to those who do. And we as Americans have been unusually blessed. We just happened to live in that one small (but very influential) part of the world during a few, precious, post-Cold War decades where dreaming of authoritarian alternatives to democracy was really too unpopular to say directly. We are leaving that time now, and I doubt it will return in my lifetime.

How Might We Categorize Authoritarian Theories?

That’s all great and sobering, but where do we go from here? This section is short because I’m still thinking it through, but there is a fairly easy case to be made that we can group authoritarian theorists across multiple dimensions, each bringing out a different element or way to think about their authoritarian vision. Consider this an attempt to build out a schema of authoritarian theoretical families.

The first is ideology, which is quite straightforward. Communism, Reactionary Monarchism, Corporatism, Fascism, National-Socialism, Technocracy, and so on are all ideological flavors that can be used to divide across authoritarian theories. These justify authoritarian rule in part through worldview, rather than just instrumental utility. The Proletariat’s leading group is at the forefront of history; the King is divinely chosen; our organic society and the economy must be divided into harmonious sectors; the State is the apogee of history and is owed your total devotion; the race must be lead by a Leader-Figure to rebirth; the merited experts must have final say on political decisions, etc. This, I feel, is intuitive to many people. It also maps onto left-right or values-based ways to divide the political spectrum. Which people enjoy and can conceptualize easily.

The second would be the structures of government that are promoted. Sometimes these structures amount to “one man runs everything.” Fascism, Monarchism, and Caesarism all share this. But others are different. Communists and many nationalists view the political party as the key vehicle and structure through which governance happens, and should happen. Parties are also critical instrumentally in the fascist experience, but sometimes less justified theoretically (this one depends though - sometimes Interwar fascism looked a lot like elements of Interwar Communism in practice, and vice-versa). Corporatists see interlocking segments of society integrated in an hierarchical whole through state institutions, usually headed by sectoral councils of interests. Catholic corporatists historically saw similarly, but often with a more ‘neomedieval’ (read: guild, local subsidiary communities, estates, and the Church) slant. Some Monarchists are quite ok with considerable representative institutions (the Cortes, the Parliament, a Diet, even quasi-cabinet government) but with an unaccountable head with political authority to balance factions. So structure probably is useful to parse out in detail - and this is a major motivating point for some contemporary authoritarian theorists too, I should add.

I’ll leave you with a third way to group, which I’m still playing with. But that would be something like “degree of plausibility.” This one is pretty subjective, but it comes out of my experience researching the contemporary crop of American authoritarian theorists. If you haven’t read the working paper, it’s here. I came away from that project with a very strong sense that only one of the three authoritarian theorists I surveyed had any kind of realistic sense of what Actually Existing Authoritarian Regimes have looked like and how they were historically built. The other two were implausible or even a bit silly, albeit in very different ways. If you read the paper, you can guess which ones, I think.

Now one must be careful. If I’d been writing this in 1905, I don’t think I’d say very kind things about the idea of a Vanguard Party successfully overthrowing a monarchy, killing millions in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and then inventing the governance technology of the authoritarian party-state twenty years later. So never say never, and humility is an important virtue. Nevertheless, a ‘plausibility’ account of authoritarian theory is something analytically useful if you can be rigorous about it. And it has an interesting interaction with time, culture, and historical conditions. An authoritarian theory that makes perfect sense in one era might falter in the next. Monarchism, for example, was a perfectly legitimate theory of governance through most of the 19th century, even after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. See, for example, the Bourbon Restoration or the July Monarchy just in France alone, or long and successful arguments for the Habsburg throne as a guarantor of political stability after the Revolutions of 1848. But by the 20th, it was a joke - the closest Spanish monarchists came to power was playing nicely with Franco and collecting salaries from sitting in his mostly rubber-stamp parliament for the trouble.

So that leaves us with the happy question of what authoritarian theories are plausible in 2024 and the coming decades? Caesarism, Bonapartism, and various forms of personalist rule seem perfectly viable. My academic colleagues would call this “authoritarian-populism,” although I mean it much more comprehensively than they do. Technocracy (rule by experts) also seems to be prepped for a bull market, not least if you take Dr. Mittiga’s concerns above about climate change seriously from his position in progressive academia. I’m not particularly convinced by Yarvin’s tech-monarchy or Hoppe’s autocratic hyper-libertarianism as a structure of authoritarian governance, but it could prove to be a partial inspiration for either of the first two variants above. And do keep an eye out for innovative authoritarian leaders like Bukele, or people making “China model” arguments. Perhaps there is nothing new under the sun, but in an era where we forgot about all of this, much is easily recovered.

As a final recapitulation, an authoritarian regime does not require a theory to exist. Military juntas are more popular than in a long time, but these are almost always justified as temporary emergencies in the name of the people/nation. And most authoritarian regimes today really are ‘electoral authoritarian,’ which means they just say they’re democracies and then worry about the business of staying in power forever. No theory needed there. So never forget you can always end up in an authoritarian regime without ever reading someone calling for it. It can just happen. What’s interesting about today is that there are people actually willing to say it.

And we’ll leave it there for now.

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Further Reading

For those uninterested in authoritarian theory, I have other items that might be of interest.

• First, a new article at The National Interest from last month: “Putin’s Wartime Dictatorship Enters a New Year.” I provide an overview of Russia’s current political order and some thoughts on its potential future in the short- to medium-term. It’s good! You should read it.

• Second, well actually everything else is in one or another stage of limbo. I have something like five journal articles under review in various places, two book chapters waiting to get published, and more in-progress. Which is a stupid amount of work. But when the writing bug hits, it hits… In any case, feel free to take a look at the list of publications from last year, which I posted earlier this month.

And as a truly final note: I am not teaching this semester, which means I’m taking some time to toy around with the idea of starting up a book project. I’ll be using this Substack platform to explore some of those ideas. This authoritarian theory essay is one such trial, as was the illiberalism explainer from late last year. There’s always the chance I take the time to rejigger my dissertation on authoritarian parliaments into a coherent academic monograph as well. Or just write something on Russia and the war today, which may make for a more popular and less academic read. So dear readers, I’m very open to thoughts on what might be most interesting (or underexplored), as well as suggestions on how to think about ‘thinking about writing a book.’

-Julian