What is the political system in which a few individuals usually military leaders rule the masses?

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini

While royal rule, as legitimized by blood descent, had almost vanished as an effective principle of government in the modern world, monocracy—a term that comprehends the rule of non-Western royal absolutists, of generals and strongmen in Latin America and Asia, of a number of leaders in postcolonial Africa, and of the totalitarian heads of communist states—still flourished. Indeed, the 20th century, which witnessed the careers of Atatürk, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco, Mao Tse-tung, Juan Perón, Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sukarno, Kwame Nkrumah, and Charles de Gaulle, could appear in history as the age of plebiscitary dictatorship.

In many of the states of Africa and Asia, for example, dictators quickly established themselves on the ruins of constitutional arrangements inherited from Western colonial powers. In some of these countries, presidents and prime ministers captured personal power by banning opposition parties and building replicas of the one-party systems of the communist world. In other new countries, the armies seized power, and military dictatorships were established. Whether as presidential dictatorships or as military dictatorships, the regimes that came into being appear to have had common roots in the social and economic problems of the new state. The constitutional systems inherited from the colonial powers proved unworkable in the absence of a strong middle class; local traditions of autocratic rule retained a powerful influence; the army, one of the few organized forces in society, was also often the only force capable of maintaining order; and a tiny intellectual class was impatient for economic progress, frustrated by the lack of opportunity, and deeply influenced by the example of authoritarianism in other countries. The dictatorships that resulted proved highly unstable, and few of the individual dictators were able to satisfy for long the demands of the different groups that supported their bids for power.

Although similar in some respects to the dictatorships of the new countries, the caudillos of 19th- and 20th-century Latin America represented a very different type of monocratic rule. In its 19th-century form, caudillismo was the result of the breakdown of central authority. After a brief period of constitutional rule, each of the former Spanish colonies in the Americas experienced a collapse of effective national government. A self-proclaimed leader, usually an army officer, heading a private army typically formed from the peasantry with the support of provincial landowners, established his control over one or more provinces, and then marched upon the national capital. The famous 19th-century caudillos—Antonio López de Santa Anna of Mexico or Juan Manuel de Rosas of Argentina, for example—were thus essentially provincial leaders who seized control of the national government to maintain the social and economic power of provincial groups. The 20th-century dictatorships in Latin American countries had different aims. The modern caudillo proved to be less a provincial leader than a national one. The Perón regime, for example, was established by nationalistic army officers committed to a program of national reform and ideological goals. Often, too, 20th-century dictators in Latin America allied themselves with a particular social class, attempting either to maintain the interests of established economic groupings or to press social reforms.

Dictatorship in the technologically advanced totalitarian regimes of modern fascism and communism was distinctively different from the authoritarian regimes of either Latin America or the postcolonial states of Africa and Asia. Nazi Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin are the leading examples of modern totalitarian dictatorships. The crucial elements of both were the identification of the state with the single mass party and of the party with its charismatic leader, the use of an official ideology to legitimize and maintain the regime, the employment of a terroristic police force and a controlled press, and the application of all the means of modern science and technology to control the economy and individual behaviour. The two systems, however, may be distinguished in several ways. Fascism, in its National Socialist form, was primarily a counterrevolutionary movement that mobilized middle- and lower middle-class groups to pursue nationalistic and militaristic goals and whose sole principle of organization was obedience to the Führer. By contrast, Soviet communism grew out of a revolutionary theory of society, pursued the goal of revolutionary overthrow of capitalist systems internationally, and employed the complex bureaucratic structures of the Communist Party as mechanisms of governmental organization.

Western constitutional democracies have provided examples of another type of contemporary dictatorship. At various points in the 20th and 21st centuries, during periods of domestic or foreign crisis, most constitutional regimes conferred emergency powers on the executive, suspending constitutional guarantees of individual rights or liberties or declaring some form of martial law. Indeed, the constitutions of some Western democracies explicitly provide for the grant of emergency powers to the executive in a time of crisis to protect the constitutional order. In many cases, of course, such provisions have been the instruments with which dictators have overthrown the regime. Thus, the proclamation of emergency rule was the beginning of the dictatorships of Mussolini in Italy, of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, of Józef Piłsudski in Poland, of António de Olveira Salazar in Portugal, of Franz von Papen and Hitler in Germany, and of Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg in Austria. In other democracies, however, constitutional arrangements have survived quite lengthy periods of crisis government. After World War II, for example, in both the United States and Britain, the use of extraordinary powers by the executive came to a halt with the end of the wartime emergency. Similarly, although the 1958 constitution of the Fifth Republic of France contained far-reaching emergency powers conferred on the president—“when the institutions of the Republic, the independence of the nation, the integrity of its territory or the fulfillment of its international obligations are threatened with immediate and grave danger, and when the regular functioning of the constitutional authority is interrupted”—their implicit threat to the constitutional order has not been realized.

Many forces at work in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have appeared to lend impetus to the rise of monocratic forms of rule. In nearly all political systems, the powers of chief executives have increased in response to the demanding social, economic, and military crises of the age. The complex decisions required of governments in a technological era, the perfectionist impulses of the great bureaucratic structures that have developed in all industrialized societies, and the imperatives of national survival in a nuclear world continue to add to the process of executive aggrandizement. The question for many constitutional regimes is whether the limitation and balance of power that are at the heart of constitutional government can survive the growing enlargement of executive power.

In the Aristotelian classification of government, there were two forms of rule by the few: aristocracy and its debased form, oligarchy. Although the term oligarchy is rarely used to refer to contemporary political systems, the phenomenon of irresponsible rule by small groups has not vanished from the world.

Many of the classical conditions of oligarchic rule were found until the 20th century in those parts of Asia in which governing elites were recruited exclusively from a ruling caste—a hereditary social grouping set apart from the rest of society by religion, kinship, economic status, prestige, and even language. In the contemporary world, in some countries that have not experienced the full impact of industrialization, governing elites are still often recruited from a ruling class—a stratum of society that monopolizes the chief social and economic functions in the system. Such elites have typically exercised power to maintain the economic and political status quo.

The simple forms of oligarchic rule associated with pre-industrial societies are, of course, rapidly disappearing. Industrialization produces new, differentiated elites that replace the small leadership groupings that once controlled social, economic, and political power in the society. The demands of industrialization compel recruitment on the basis of skill, merit, and achievement rather than on the basis of inherited social position and wealth. New forms of oligarchic rule have also made their appearance in many advanced industrial societies. Although governing elites in these societies are no longer recruited from a single class, they are often not subjected to effective restraints on the exercise of their power. Indeed, in some circumstances, the new elites may use their power to convert themselves into a governing class whose interests are protected by every agency of the state.

Oligarchic tendencies of a lesser degree have been detected in all the great bureaucratic structures of advanced political systems. The growing complexity of modern society and its government thrusts ever greater power into the hands of administrators and committees of experts. Even in constitutional regimes, no fully satisfactory answer has been found to the question of how these bureaucratic decision makers can be held accountable and their powers effectively restrained without, at the same time, jeopardizing the efficiency and rationality of the policy-making process.