Dictatorship is a form of government in which one person has sole and complete political power. In antiquity, a temporary dictator was often appointed as an emergency measure by states which were normally organized in some other fashion. The Roman Republic appointed dictators during military crises (the term actually originates from this practice), and the ancient Greek city states sometimes gave supreme law-making powers to individuals, for example Solon in 594–93 BC, when civic unity was seriously threatened.
In the modern world many dictators have come to power as leaders of mass movements, and have ruled through their control of such movements or through political parties that have acquired a monopoly of power. Dictators also frequently emerge from the armed forces when a military junta takes over after a coup d’état.
An important distinction should be made between the dictator who exercises personal power based on their own popularity or control of coercive institutions, and the apparently dictatorial leader who is in reality largely a figure-head or no more than the ‘first among equals’ within a ruling clique. Often the term is used in a debased way to describe someone who does have enormous personal influence, even though they are acting within the legal restrictions of a democracy. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were real dictators, whereas more recent leaders of the Soviet Union, who have owed their eminence to their position within the party hierarchy and have had to contend with the rest of the politburo, have probably not managed to become dictators. Of other modern leaders, General Franco was certainly a powerful ruler in his own right to the end of his life, while General de Gaulle came close to being a popularly-appointed ‘crisis’ dictator on the Roman model. Populist leaders ruling through parliaments completely controlled by their parties, which have often practised electoral fraud, have been common in some parts of the former Soviet Union since its fragmentation; many of these have come close to being dictators, at least for short periods.
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