Once the totalitarian regime is established, various disasters are bound to recur. A totalitarian state is diagonally opposite to liberal democracy, which is characterized by prevalence of horizontal connections, the sum total of which constitute a social contract. An ideal totalitarian structure, to the contrary, is like a zero-impedance conductor: orders flow from the top to the lowest level all without any obstacle. It was this totalitarian system that enabled Mao, the charismatic leader, to use his overwhelming social support to overthrow his political rivals within the system when his authority was weakened. Like a courtly struggle, the Cultural Revolution was for the sake of Mao’s personal power, but the cost of social destruction was incomparably greater.

Chapter 10 explores democracy versus autocracy. It offers a frequency-based fitness analysis of the political regimes in the world, demonstrating the superior fitness of democracy, represented by the United States in time and place, but also revealing the resilience of non-democratic forms of government, represented by China. Countering the larger historical trend, democracy has retreated and autocracy has gained in recent years. It is difficult to tell whether this is a temporary setback for democracy or the start of a longer trend. Evolution does not assume constant progress, so the chapter dives deeper into the performance criterion for competing political regimes by peeling off the labels and examining different components of a political regime. In addition, the chapter offers a discussion of how East Asians have lived with the liberal international order, which most current American and Western leaders view as central to their fight against autocracy.

This chapter offers an investigation of what Socrates may have meant when, in his infamous appearance before a jury at Athens in 399 BCE, he referred to himself as a myōps – typically translated as a gadfly. The chapter illustrates that the natural world does not just serve to naturalize (and thus normalize) collective political systems that are already firmly in place. As in the case of Socrates, it can also serve as a potent strategy to seek to naturalize (and thus normalize) the individual political stance outside of the collective. The chapter shows that, by carving out a space for dissent, Socrates defined a form of citizenship that resonates far beyond the ancient world. It, for example, helps to explain the ambivalence surrounding modern dissenting voices (such as those of Julian Assange, Michael Moore, and Edward Snowden). The chapter ultimately traces the buzzing of the Socratic gadfly into Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy and illustrates the important tole that this peculiar ancient creature plays in her critique of the perils of modernity.

Chapter five analyses the period between 1914 and 1989. Several sociological theories frame this period as one of rational planning, certain knowledge and control. Such beliefs were certainly prominent but they were related to uncertainty: The First World War ended in the fall of empires and social upheaval. Intellectual and political reactions were threefold: art emphasized a fractured world, social sciences accommodated uncertainty and political ideologies claimed to banish uncertainty and offered total control. Totalitarian states blended promises of certainty and determinism with a world of omnipresent threats and dangers. The Second World War was heavily influenced by their conviction that they had uncovered the hidden laws of history. After 1945, the advent of thermonuclear weapons caused widespread existential uncertainty. I interpret the strategy of deterrence as a pragmatic expression of minimal communication in an unpredictable world. The experience of insecurity and a breakdown of international society also spurred scientific ontologies of certainty. Modernization theory and Marxism dominated post-war social science and created the strategies that reaped tragedy in Vietnam.

When the German national parliament, the Bundestag, held a ceremony to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War on 8 May 2015, the historian Heinrich August Winkler was asked to deliver the main address. In his speech, Winkler confirmed the central role of National Socialism and the Holocaust for German national identity. Germany’s responsibility for genocide and war meant, seventy years after the events, a special responsibility toward Israel, and for the states of east-central and eastern Europe, which had suffered most terribly under German occupation, and for the European Union project as a project of peace and reconciliation in a continent where German hypernationalism had brought destruction on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

The transatlantic intellectual movement today called “the Enlightenment” took particular forms in British North America during the American Revolution. This essay explores four interlocking Enlightenment concepts as used by eighteenth-century Americans to describe their political revolt against British monarchical rule: nature, progress, reason, and revolution. Americans appealed to nature to delegitimize claims to authority that rested on history, custom, divine access, and lineage. Dispensing with cyclical ideas of history and decline narratives from the Bible, they invented the new idea of progress as a way to describe social and political improvements resulting from human reason. They described reason, in turn, as a distinct mode of knowledge resulting from sensory data, opposing it to knowledge resting on belief or the passions alone. Finally, they described their own break with Britain as a revolution because it seemed to show the reality of progress toward a better world of reason, natural rights, and government by the people. The essay also surveys the historiography on “the American Enlightenment,” a term invented by Americans during the Cold War era amid fears of Soviet-style totalitarianism. Eighteenth-century people themselves spoke of “enlightenment” as a never-ending process rather than a finished project.

The content of separation of powers is neither defined in constitutions, which usually do not explicitly guarantee this principle, nor in other legal texts. Its content cannot be circumscribed with precision. Several influential authors have dealt extensively with separation of powers. However, few of them were constitutional and economic thinkers. After careful analysis, but without claiming to be exhaustive, two major names stand out. The connection between reflections by Montesquieu and Hayek on the concentration of state power on one hand, and on economic concentration on the other hand, is illuminating and fascinating, but has never before been established. Aron also deserves a special mention in this regard, as he notably dealt with democracy and totalitarianism as well as competition in the same breath throughout some major parts of his work.

This essay presents congruities between Sebald’s juvenilia and his major works of prose fiction to reveal a portrait of a budding artist who never wandered far from his personal and literary origins and yet learned his lessons from these youthful ventures into writing. It introduces selections from his unpublished and fragmentary literary writings from the 1960s, which are housed in his literary estate at the DLA. These include the short narratives ‘Wartend’ (‘Waiting’) and the untitled story about Herr G. (Mr G.), along with the six-page play Der Traum ein Leben oder die Geschichte des Fr. v. Sch. (The Dream A Life, Or The Story of Fr. v. Sch.), and the two versions of his untitled novel. In these texts, one finds Sebald’s early critiques of capitalism and consumer culture, his interest in the uncanny, the agency of material objects, the crisis of the artist, the horrors of the past, the influence and violence of the totalitarian personality, the power of images, and the destruction wrought by nature. Sebald’s juvenilia make clear that they foreshadow the philosophical, historical, and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction.

Chapter 1 is dedicated to the explanandum of the book. In a first step, the chapter asks how to conceptualize autocratic rule and how to delineate it from rivalling concepts like authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but also sultanism, tyranny, despotism, and dictatorship. In a second step, the chapter clarifies different understandings of stability: persistence vs. continuity. In a third step, the chapter establishes the rationale behind the two logics of autocratic rule. Drawing on a Schmittian conception of the political, over-politicization is portrayed as the process of ideologically inflating a (political, social, religious, ethnic, etc.) difference, thereby defining an absolute foe (hostis), thus justifying the usage of hard repression and relying on formal ways of co-optation. In contrast, de-politicization is the reverse process of neutralizing contested issues, pulling conflictive issues out of the political arena by emphasizing performance legitimation, shying away from hard, but using soft repression and by being indifferent in its forms of co-optation.

The chapter provides an overview of the burgeoning historiography of the People’s Republic of China, especially of the early period between 1949 and 1978, and suggests how we might integrate this new work into narratives of the Chinese past and present. In working through the research of the past thirty years the findings not only help us identify new areas of research, bur also rephrase some of the initial questions. The chapter highlights areas in which reconsidering PRC history seems especially necessary: transnational flows, violence and social transformation.

Why do ordinary citizens believe in an autocratic ideology? Why do people follow their autocratic leader? How can autocrats win the hearts and minds of their people, securing their support? This chapter seeks to absorb the manifold responses that have been given to these questions in the last decades. It theorizes the role of ordinary citizens in autocratic regimes, illuminating the legitimacy claims of autocratic rulers on the one hand and the popular beliefs in these legitimacy claims on the other hand. Drawing on a rich repository of previous research, it highlights the two strategies of autocracies to deal with their people. Autocracies might either overwhelm their citizens through mass-level political indoctrination or systematically underwhelm them, keeping them satisfied and apolitical. While the former relies on ideational legitimation, the latter refers to socioeconomic performance and a managerial, technocratic style of rule. Both strategies share the goal of thwarting the risk of public protest.

This chapter is concerned about the role of elites in autocratic regimes. It focuses mainly on business and military elites and asks how autocracies can bind these actors to their inner sanctum. It reviews previous decades of research, highlighting the recent institutionalist turn in comparative authoritarianism, but also traces back debates about neo-patrimonialism, clientelism, patronage, and corruption. The chapter introduces the conceptual distinction between co-optation in formalized arenas like political parties and parliaments as well as in the shadowland of informality. It argues that intra-elite cohesion can be secured via reactive and preventive measures as well as by absorbing new members (widening) or by interweaving interests and instilling a feeling of reciprocity (deepening) among the elite members. The chapter ends by explicating concrete operationalization advice for empirical research.

The Introduction outlines the main arguments of the book. While democracies can be aptly characterized as systems of “ruled open-endedness, or organized uncertainty” (Przeworski), autocratic rule attempts to do the opposite by trying to square the circle and organize certainty. Autocracies fear surprises and do everything they can to rule out chance. They want to control what the people think, and they want to repress dissent and co-opt potentially deviant elites. Yet, they face trade-offs and hard budget constraints. Against this backdrop, the two-logics theory is introduced. The theory argues that certain configurations of forms of legitimation, repression, and co-optation go together better than others, resulting in an ove-rpoliticizing or a de-politicization logic. While the former aims at mobilization, the latter aims at political apathy. The Introduction also familiarizes the reader with the empirical material that the book draws upon. It analyzes forty-five autocratic regime episodes in East Asia, ranging from 1945 to 2008.

This chapter is dedicated to the role of the potential opposition in autocracies. It deals with the various forms of repressing dissent and how autocratic incumbents keep the opposition at bay. Like the previous and the subsequent chapters, it condenses in a first step our current knowledge about the topic, carving out the lessons learned for the conceptualization of the over-politicizing and de-politicizing logics. It introduces the broad distinction between soft and hard forms of repression. While the former violates civil liberties and political rights, the latter infringes upon the person’s integrity rights. It is argued that over-politicizing autocracies seek to justify even the usage of hard repression by inflating a friend-foe distinction and declaring an internal foe. In contrast, de-politicizing regimes avoid using this type of repression, as it risks breaking the silent autocratic contract between the passivated people and the regime that is supposed to materially deliver.