Why Dictators?
Why Dictators? The Causes and Forms of Tyrannical Rule Since 600 B.C.
by George W. F. Hallgarten.
MacMillan. 379 pp. $5.50.
Although Dr. Hallgarten raises a fascinating question, he fails to answer it—because of a pseudo-scientific, mechanical habit of mind, typical enough of our time to be worth some extended criticism. “We shall prove,” he says in his introduction, “that there were typical situations—both economic and social—in which certain kinds of dictatorships arose, and were, indeed, bound to do so whenever the basic situation repeated itself. Seen from this angle, the emergence of the individual strong men will lose some of its miraculous luster and will appear natural and understandable. Standard sociological types of dictatorship, if properly devised, not only explain the cases of tyrannical rule in the past, but also illustrate the nature of present and even of future regimes of this kind, just as the rules of astronomy apply to yet unknown and unseen stars. Without such comparative social diagnosis, neither prophylaxis nor therapeutics of dictatorship is thinkable, though the dictator’s record in terrorizing modern humanity calls for prompt action and relief.”
While we would all like to be able to apply “prophylaxis and therapeutics” to dictatorships, we cannot help doubting the intellectual delicacy, not to mention sense of humor, of an author who can use such words in such a connection. To lump together diverse figures like Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, and Hitler as a kind of single bacillus of which the world ought indubitably to have been cured, is to show a lack of feeling for the complexities of history. Who can say whether the world would have been better off without at any rate the first three? The question is, after all, less one of therapeutic know-how than of moral choice. Given again the historical situations out of which these dictators arose, would people be ready to apply “prophylaxis and therapeutics” even if they knew how?
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The book’s main contribution is to be found in its classification of dictatorships, from the earliest Greek Tyrannies to Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Malenkov, and Mao, into three types: “classical,” “ultra-revolutionary,” and “counterand pseudo-revolutionary” dictatorships. The author distinguishes between dictators and legitimate autocrats (a distinction I wish he had gone on to discuss, because it would be interesting to know what the practical differences are between the rule of dictators and absolute monarchs), and therefore holds that all dictatorships stem from revolutionary situations.
The classical dictator (so called because he is the type of the Greek Tyrants as well as of Caesar, Cromwell, and Napoleon) emerges from what the Marxists call the first stage of a revolution—when an alliance of city capitalists together with landless peasants and city proletariat wrests control from the landed aristocracy. Often a military leader, the classical dictator takes over political power after the revolution has been won, as his price for protecting the capitalists, partly against the counter-revolutionary activities of the dispossessed aristocracy, but mainly against the efforts of the proletariat to push the revolution a step further in their own interest.
The ultra-revolutionary dictator—Savonarola, Robespierre, Lenin—leads the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the second stage of the revolution. He is the only kind of dictator in whose disinterestedness the author believes. He sees him as a beleaguered idealist using terror as the only means of saving the revolution from what the author calls—using an epithet surprising for one purporting to be scientific—the “pernicious money powers.” He quotes Robespierre: “During a revolution the sources of governmental power are virtue and terror. Virtue without terror would be a disaster, and terror without virtue is powerless. But terror is nothing more nor less than swift, severe and indomitable justice.”
The counter-revolutionary dictator, unlike the classical dictator, does not have a revolutionary following. He quite openly represents the ruling class, with the job of suppressing revolution. Examples are Admiral Horthy in Hungary before the last war, and most Hispanic dictators, including Salazar in Portugal and, despite his fascist or pseudo-revolutionary trappings, Franco in Spain.
The pseudo-revolutionary dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, give the masses the illusion of participating in a revolution in order to divert them from real revolution and exploit them for the benefit of the rich (though like the classical dictator, the pseudo-revolutionary dictator exploits for his own benefit the class he is supposed to be protecting). Dr. Hallgarten takes pains to show how the big capitalists and landowners benefited from Nazism and Fascism; and to show the difference between pseudo- and ultra-revolution, he tells us that Hitler’s laws protecting property “distinguished his regime most strongly from the principles of the Soviet Union, which annihilated the kulaks.”
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So far so good—though one wonders whether a historical analysis based on the recurrent conflict between land, money, and labor is equally relevant to all periods; or whether the annihilation of the kulaks is not a sign of pseudo-rather than ultra-revolution. Biased as he is in favor of revolution, Dr. Hallgarten prefers not to call Nazism revolutionary. Yet if genuine benefit to the lowest strata of society is the criterion, one wonders whether the Bolshevik has not turned out to be as “pseudo” as the Nazi revolution, or whether for that matter all social revolutions do not—if we retain Dr. Hallgarten’s criteria—turn out in practice to be “pseudo,” since the power wrested from the former rulers must always, it seems, be turned against the people by the revolutionary leaders, in order to “save the revolution.”
It is not easy to understand what the author’s viewpoint is toward the Communist regime in Russia. While he fully admits its brutality, he can repeat the by now discredited saw that “Western observers usually overrate the negative effects of such unpopular measures on the psychology of Russia’s common man. The vast masses in the USSR have never known any other regime.” He can, in a section called in quotes “Benevolent Terrorism,” make a case for the kulak slaughter as an unpleasant necessity which “exercised an enormous strain on Stalin’s nerves”; and he can cite the bloody purges of Soviet bureaucrats as evidence that there is no entrenched ruling class in Russia. All this might pass for scientific impartiality were it not that the tone is so different when the author inveighs with indignation against the “moneybags,” or Hider.
The term “imperialism,” we are told, does not apply to Russian expansion, which the author likens to the expansion of the French Revolution and prefers to call “a system of revolutionary expansion with predatory traits. . . . One may even say, without exaggeration, that the USSR foreign policy fell heir to that of the French Revolution and occupied all geographical spaces its predecessor had failed to penetrate. In all regions not covered by the older movement, the peasant problem had remained unsolved, thus providing an excellent breeding ground for USSR political propaganda. As the land problem is the main vehicle that fostered USSR expansion, the Russians will most likely be stopped wherever they reach the boundaries of such potential revolutionary spaces.” There is enough truth in this to convince, until we remember Czechoslovakia and the fact that peasants seemed to have formed the most stubborn opposition to the Communists in Eastern Europe; and until we find the author saying that “Even the North Koreans’ move into South Korea in 1950 was prompted by the existence of an unsolved land problem which seemed to make that territory a natural domain of Soviet influence.” One hadn’t been aware of any call for Communism from within South Korea.
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But these are objections to certain of the author’s assumptions and opinions, not to his ability to manipulate his political discussion. It is when, suspecting that his subject has also its intangible side, he tries to probe this side that he shows himself too mechanical, too lacking in tact and suppleness. Here, for example, is the quality of his discussion of Wagner, Nietzsche, and D’Annunzio as intellectual forerunners of fascism:
“In the same way as King Gunther and even the god Wotan require the help of Siegfried, and King Amfortas that of Parsifal, King Ludwig of Bavaria longed for comfort from Wagner, the collapsed imperial Germany after 1918 for assistance from Corporal Hitler, and the Italy of King Victor Emmanuel for the services of . . . Mussolini.” Or, “As Wagner grasped the big orchestra from the hands of Halevy and Meyerbeer, Mussolini and Hitler seized the instrument of mass propaganda and mass leadership from their enemies-Jews and Marxists.” Such analogies are absurdly forced because they reduce the infinitely complex to incongruous simplicity.
The author is especially mechanical when he manipulates psychology in an attempt to establish for each kind of dictator a corresponding neurotic pattern. He tells us that the classical dictator is inspired by love-hatred of the aristocracy, while the ultra-revolutionary dictator is inspired by pure hatred of it, and the pseudo-revolutionary dictator by pure love for ft. And we wonder where he can have found evidence enough to justify so intimate an analysis? Our suspicions are strengthened when we find him attributing Savonarola’s career to pathological hatred of the upper classes awakened in him when he was snubbed as suitor by a girl of noble family; or when Pierre Laval’s career is explained by his exotic Moorish appearance which made him pathologically desirous of the approval of the upper classes. But we begin to suspect more than Dr. Hallgarten’s probity as a scientist, we begin to doubt his common sense when he writes: “Victim of a prenatal neurosis which later was aggravated by a leg injury that grew worse during service in World War I, [Sir Oswald] Mosley became a political buccaneer.”
Touches like the “prenatal neurosis” make us doubt the author’s reliability elsewhere. He asserts confidently, without offering the slightest evidence, that Beria was of Jewish extraction, and that the Rosenbergs became Communists because they were “blinded by the regime’s original reputation as liberator of the Russian Jews.” (In general, Jews are a little too much on Dr. Hallgarten’s mind.) Worst of all, the author falls prey to the main danger of the psychologizing and sociologizing method; he deprives ideas of any validity of their own. Psychology tells us less about Savonarola’s career than does the fact that he led an inevitable Christian reaction against the paganizing tendencies of Renaissance culture; and Cromwell’s belief in his personal mission is to be attributed less to his “queer psychology” than to his belief in a set of ideas which in fact transformed England. His faith in his personal mission was, after all, justified by the events and ought to serve as at least one sign that he was something more than a tool of the capitalists.
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Because of this disrespect for ideas, Dr. Hallgarten fails to answer in the end the question posed by his book’s title—why dictators? In the end, we do not find out—except that there are always neurotics and class conflicts. Indeed, the question we find ourselves asking after reading this long account of political gangsterism, is—why not dictators? How, one wonders, has good government, how have culture and progress, ever been possible with society a mere battleground of selfish interests? It is not political analysis alone, with its emphasis on the things that divide the classes, that can answer this question—but only politics in the context of culture, of that complex of ideas, illusions, and acts of faith which hold society together by causing men to transcend self-interest. We have, first of all, to maintain a historical sense, we have to talk politics in the context of cultural evolution, to consider for each period the practical and theoretical alternatives to dictatorship as well as the changing ideas of the good state, if the very word “dictatorship” is to have meaning. And we have to see politics in perspective, we have to understand its unimportance as well as its importance, in order to understand how Rome under Caesar, Florence under the Medicis, England under Cromwell, and France under Napoleon, could achieve distinction both because of and in spite of their dictators.
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