12. "In contrast to the independent writers who, under Western absolutism, challenged not only the excesses but the foundation of the despotic order, the critics of hydraulic society have in almost every case complained only of the misdeeds of individual officials or of the evils of specific governmental acts. Apart from mystics who teach total withdrawal from the world, these critics aim ultimately at regenerating a system of total power, whose fundamental desirability they do not doubt . . . the embittered subject . . . may defeat the government's men in arms. They may even overthrow a tottering dynasty. But eventually they will only revive—and rejuvenate—the agromanagerial despotism whose incompetent representatives they eliminated. The heroes of China's famous bandit novel, the Shui-hu-Ch'uan, could think of nothing better to do than to set up on their rebel island a miniature version of the very bureaucratic hierarchy which they were so fiercely combatting" (K. Wittfogel, pp. 134-35).
For this reason, it is not so much the safety of the system as his personal safety which is the point of the despot's political activity. The sole means of securing this safety proves to be permanent, universal, and fruitless terror'3—fruitless because, being a terrorist structure par excellence, despotism nevertheless begins and ends as a structure with an unstable leadership. During the thousand years of Byzantium's existence, for example, some fifty of its emperors were drowned, blinded, or strangled—an average of one every twenty years.
Naturally, some despots give more attention to the economic functions of the state (manifesting, as Wittfogel has it, "the maximum rationality of the ruler"), and others to wars and conquests. Some succeed, and others suffer defeat. As a result of this, the state experiences fluctuations, periods of expansion and decline. However, no predictability is observed in the alternation of these periods. They are as chaotic as the selection of leadership personnel, as the "purges of the elite," as the rise and fall of the wazirs, ministers, and favorites of the despots, or of the despots themselves. In despotic systems, only unpredictability is predictable.'4
Considering that permanent economic stagnation placed the system in complete dependence on natural catastrophes and hostile invasions, and that the absence of any limitations on power created a situation of political unpredictability and chaos, in which everyone from the despot himself to his least servant was constantly balancing between life and death, we may say that despotism was subject to the play of elemental forces to such a degree that it is more reminiscent of a phenomenon of nature than of a political commonwealth. And in this sense, by refusing it the status of a political phenomenon, Aristotle would seem to have been right once again. If something which is the polar opposite of civilization can exist, that something is despotism.[24]
Thus, despite the many great empires in which it prevailed—the Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese, Persian, Mongol, Byzantine, Turkish, and more—despotism has proved to be a political dead end. For all the variety of palace coups, mutinies, putsches, Praetorian conspiracies, and janissary rebellions, it reproduced itself without interruption over the course of centuries in all of its lifeless integrity. This was a closed system, the parameters of which were rigidly laid down in pre-Christian millennia. Its world was an isolated one, like a planetary orbit, exempt from the laws of probability, deprived of choice and real movement. It knew no political alternative. In this sense, it was a spectre. It existed outside history. Of course, like everything else in the cosmos, it moved. But after all, the planets also move: only their orbits are fixed.
4. Absolutism
As the reader may now guess, what I intend to suggest for the classification of authoritarian political structures (and, concretely, for distinguishing absolutism from despotism) will be the conception of latent limitations on power which we have just constructed, summarizing the observations of Aristotle, Krizhanich, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Wittfogel.
In juridical terms, all medieval authoritarian structures are indistinguishable from one another. That is, the source of sovereignty in them is the person of the ruler, to whom God has directly delegated the functions of administration, thus freeing the ruler from any control whatever by the system. All of them openly declared their freedom from any limitations, and all of them claimed this freedom to an equal degree.
Nevertheless, John Fortescue distinguished "royal government" from "political." For Jean Bodin, the distinction between monarchy and "seignorial government" was of prime importance. Mercier de la Riviere made a profound distinction between "arbitrary" and "legal" despotism. And Montesquieu, as we have seen, predicted that political catastrophe would ensue from the transformation of absolute monarchy into despotism. In other words, despite the formal identity of all monarchical structures, their contemporaries felt and saw, and furthermore considered vitally important, not their similarity but the differences between them. If we summarize all of their attempts, we can say that they stubbornly tried to create some kind of typology of authoritarian structures capable of serving as a kind of basis for political recommendations and prognoses. This was a typology which, if it were to remain within the limits of reality, had to be based on something other than juridical definitions (which no self-respecting absolute monarch would have agreed to recognize). But in that case, what would have been its basis?[25]
Absolutism, as distinct from despotism, did not possess supreme sovereignty over the entire national product, because it was compelled to tolerate economic limitations on power. Although the most extreme of its apologists proclaimed the right of kings to the property of their subjects, this was never taken as an axiom and was always disputed, both in theory and in practice.[26]
In practice, the attempts to implement this right ran up against the resistance of the system, often ending tragically for the absolute mon- archs. In theory, it was precisely on economic limitations to power that the distinction between monarchy and its potential "deviations" was based. Jean Bodin—a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible's and the author of a classic apologia for absolutism which exercised colossal influence on the entire ideological tradition of this structure— appeared in his The Commonwealth to be no less radical, at first glance, than Ivan the Terrible in his letters to Kurbskii. He, too, assumed that "on earth there is nothing higher after God than sovereign princes, established by Him as His lieutenants for the governing of people," and that he who "withholds his respect from a sovereign prince, also withholds respect from God, whose image on earth the prince is.'"8 Furthermore, Bodin, as distinct from the Aristotelian tradition, considered the essential mark of the citizen to be, not participation in courts and councils, but just the reverse—unconditional submission to the unlimited power of the monarch. But, for all this, Bodin regarded the property of citizens as their inalienable possession, in the disposition of which they were no less sovereign than was the monarch in ruling his people. To tax citizens of a part of their inalienable property without their voluntary consent was, from Bodin's point of view, ordinary robbery.
Ivan the Terrible, with his sharply polemical temperament, would undoubtedly have seen a logical contradiction in Bodin's conception. And he would have been right. But the essence of the phenomenon of absolutism was contained in this logical contradiction. Absolutism actually was a paradox, albeit a living paradox which lasted for centuries.