Authoritarianism, rather like totalitarianism, is perhaps more of a technical term in political science than one in ordinary political usage. An authoritarian system need not, strictly speaking, be a dictatorship, and may well not be totalitarian. The essential element is that it is one in which stern and forceful control is exercised over the population, with no particular concern for their preferences or for public opinion. The justification for the rule may come from any one of a number of ideologies, but it will not be a democratic ideology, and ideas of natural rights or civil liberties will be rejected in favour of the government’s right to rule by command, backed by all the force it needs. It is very much tied to the idea of command and obedience, of inflexible rule, and a denial of the legitimacy of opposition or even counter-argument.
Because it is such a broad term, it is, in a way, ‘value-free’: it is equally sensible to talk of left and right, of communist, capitalist, even religiouslybased, authoritarian governments. (This is also true of totalitarianism.) Neither is it limited to describing political systems or faiths. One of the most influential works ever written on the subject was in social psychology by Theodor Adorno et al., entitled TheAuthoritarian Personality.
It is an attempt to discover the personality traits encouraged by, and found among, those who most readily fit into an authoritarian system. The stress here tends to be on characteristics such as a perfect willingness to obey orders from above, combined with a ruthless intolerance of disobedience from those below, an unquestioning attitude to the justifying ideology, and associated psychological attributes such as ‘a low tolerance for ambiguity’. It is unsurprising that psychologists have usually found the personality profile of authoritarianism among the military, though any highly structured profession or society is likely to demonstrate it. The real opposition to authoritarianism is liberalism, or even pluralism. The term can also be used as an epithet not only to political creeds, but of a particular politician’s assumed character or aims. Like all the most useful terms of political analysis, it can be applied to micro politics as well as macro—thus it can be useful to describe certain industrial managements as more or less authoritarian in nature, or indeed methods of organizing classroom behaviour in a primary school, though clearly it would make little sense to see a voluntary organization in such terms.
Authoritarianism as a characteristic of actual modern political regimes is frequently tied to religious fundamentalism, and has been apparent in such states as Taliban Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where Islamic theology has a major impact on political thought. Some of the new East European democracies (see democratic transition), especially the less well-developed economically, like Bulgaria and Romania, are sometimes considered to be vulnerable to a resurgence of populist authoritarianism partly because the older population seek comfort from the stresses of capitalist development in the authoritarianism they were accustomed to during the communist period.
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