despotism

1. Rule by or as if by a despot; absolute power or authority.
2. The actions of a despot; tyranny.
3. 1. A government or political system in which the ruler exercises absolute power: "Kerensky has a place in history, of a brief interlude between despotisms" (William Safire).
   2. A state so ruled.

noun

1. A government in which a single leader or party exercises absolute control over all citizens and every aspect of their lives: absolutism, autarchy, autocracy, dictatorship, monocracy, tyranny. See over/under, politics.
2. A political doctrine advocating the principle of absolute rule: absolutism, authoritarianism, autocracy, dictatorship, totalitarianism. See over/under, politics.
3. Absolute power, especially when exercised unjustly or cruelly: autocracy, dictatorship, totalitarianism, tyranny. See over/under, politics.

Definition: tyranny
Antonyms: democracy

Autocratic rule by one person. Thus in its original Greek sense a ‘despot’ was the lord or ruler of an unfree state. The Byzantine emperor was routinely referred to as a despot, the title was transferred to Christian rulers in provinces of the Turkish Empire, and remains in modern Greek as an old-fashioned word for a bishop, Thespotis.

Aristotle began an important Western tradition of thought by distinguishing Persian ‘despotism’ from Greek tyranny. Tyranny was usurped, unstable power, wielded coercively, while despotism was persistent and stable, depending on the acquiescence of the people, often the only authority they knew and therefore essentially legal. It was thus an oriental phenomenon because free, Greek peoples would not tolerate it for long. The category of oriental despotism is almost universal in Western political thought. Most notably, Montesquieu developed the category in his L'Esprit des lois, published in 1748. Even the most absolute of Western monarchies was not a despotism, he argued, because the monarch was bound by law whose legitimacy was justified by the same reasoning as was his authority. He did, though, note a tendency for the French monarchy to degenerate towards despotism, as did several of his contemporaries, and after the revolution of 1789 it became customary to refer to the ancien régime as a despotism.

Western theorists have used despotism as a limiting case, a reductio ad absurdum of the concentration of power. To Burke it was ‘the simplest form of government’, the domination of the will of a single man. To Bentham it was an evil form, the inverse of the evil of anarchy. Their shared assumptions about the actual working of the Ottoman, Chinese, Persian, and Moghul Empires can be said to be oversimplified where not actually wrong, and the use of the term has degenerated into a mere political boo-word, not really distinguishable from ‘tyranny’, ‘dictatorship’, or ‘absolutism’.

— Lincoln Allison

Unlimited political rule by one person.

Quotes:

"Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things." - Oscar Wilde

"There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People." - Oscar Wilde

"The real stumbling-block of totalitarian r?gimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth." - Simone Weil

"Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man." - Joseph De Maistre

"Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant." - Victor Hugo

"The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid." - Denis Diderot

See more famous quotes about Despotism

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - despotisme, despoti, tyranni

Nederlands (Dutch)
despotisme (tirannie)

Français (French)
n. - despotisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Despotie, Despotismus, Willkürherrschaft

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - δεσποτισμός, τυραννικότητα

Italiano (Italian)
dispotismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - despotismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
деспотизм

Español (Spanish)
n. - despotismo, tiranía, autocracia, país gobernado por un déspota

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - despotism

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
独裁, 专制政治, 专制

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 獨裁, 專制政治, 專制

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 전제 정치, 전제 정부, 독재 정치

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 専制, 暴政, 専制君主国, 圧制, 専制政治, 横暴, 独裁

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الحكم المطلق, الحكم الاستبدادي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮עריצות, רודנות‬

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