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On the Government of the Living , by Michel Foucault . Graham Burchell , trans., Arnold I. Davidson , ed. (New York : Picador , 2014), xviii + 365 pp.
Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime Change , by Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman (Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2016), xxii + 396 pp.
The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation) , by Alexandre Kojève (New York : Verso , 2014), xxxiv + 107 pp.
The Politics of Authoritarian Rule , by Milan Svolik (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2012), xviii + 228 pp.
Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 , by Volker Ullrich (New York : Alfred A. Knopf , 2016), x + 1008 pp.
I wish to thank David Akin for his careful editing of this essay and Geneviève Zubrzycki for suggesting that I write a review essay on authoritarianism.
A product of the nineteenth-century age of "isms," authoritarianism describes a worldview that promotes the establishment of a hierarchical relation whereby one person or group dominates and governs another without recourse to either physical force or persuasion. Authoritarianism is the advocacy of authority as a source or origin that compels voluntary obedience without question. A person has authority if he or she can command someone to do something without having to do anything other than issue a command; which is to say that the person who obeys recognizes the authority of the person who commands as legitimate or correct.1The word authority comes from the Latin, auctoritas, which Cicero employs to characterize the distinctive influence of the Senate in ancient Rome: "Power is with the people, authority with the Senate."2Whereas power (potestas) is political and relies on force or persuasion to command obedience, authority enjoys unequivocal obedience as a source beyond the contested realm of politics.
If not through force or persuasion, how does authority command obedience? Wherein lies the basis of authority? One answer can be found in Fyodor Dostoevsky's famed chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor," which appears in part II of his novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Dostoevsky suggests that the authority of the Grand Inquisitor consists in the noble lie or narrative he...