If the reader gets the impression that I am writing an apologia for absolutism, this is only because it is being compared with despotism. Absolutism was a cruel, often bloody and tyrannical authoritarian structure, striving, insofar as this was possible for it, to trample underfoot not only the political, but also the civil rights of its subjects. Louis XI was not a whit better than Shah Abbas, and Henry VIII was no more pleasant than Suleiman the Magnificent. Any authoritarian structure strives to deviate toward despotism, as a compass needle toward the north. Despotism is its ideal, its dream, its crown. But for absolutism it was an unattainable dream—for even in "deviating" toward tyranny, it could never make this tyranny permanent. And it could not do this because the latent limitations on power which it had had to endure did not permit it to disorganize the system to the degree of chronic stagnation.
5. The Historical Function of Absolutism
I understand that the reader may, for these last few pages, have been haunted by the feeling that I am retailing copybook maxims, some of which were known even to the students of Aristotle. In fact, what have we gotten from all of these elementary comparisons? We have examined two equally authoritarian political structures, between which it is impossible to discover any formal juridical difference, and which—on the level of political organization—resemble each other like twins. In one type of state, the government commits violence against its own people; in the other, they are also hanged and enslaved. In the first type, the kings proclaim the unlimited nature of their power, as they also do in the second. In the first type, wars or conquests are waged, rebels slaughtered, and the oppressed peasantry robbed—and so, too, in the second type.
Does this not give us the right to say that there existed—in ancient times and in the Middle Ages, in the East and in the West—simply a certain continuum of authoritarian structures (or traditional—i.e., "unmodernized"—political bodies), a continuum within which we can calmly call absolutism an unrealized despotism, and despotism a realized absolutism? We have yet to see how many experts, both in the East and in the West, do precisely this. And I would have no objection in principle, if the proclamation of such a continuum were not intended to obscure the most essential result of our comparisons. Namely, that the poles of this "continuum" are not only different, but also the very antithesis of each other. Their opposition consists in the fact that, by virtue of all the reasons set forth above, one of them was destined for self-development, and the other was incapable even of self-destruction. It consists in the fact that absolutism declared the unlimited nature of its power, while despotism practiced it.
The use of the terms "despotism" and absolutism" as synonyms is what hinders our analysis of these political structures. Citing the cruelty, aggressiveness, and authoritarian methods of both, we confuse the "deviation" of absolute monarchies toward tyranny under Louis XI and Henry VIII with the despotism of Shah Abbas and Suleiman the Magnificent. Failure to perceive their antithetical nature—whether by placing them within the limits of a "continuum" or of a conception of "traditional" society—renders our theorizing sterile. Civilization was able to continue precisely because there existed authoritarian structures which, by virtue of certain historical causes, were compelled to tolerate latent limitations on power. We can now formulate this as follows: the degree of divergence between the goals of the system and those of the administration in authoritarian structures is inversely proportional to the number of latent limitations which they are compelled to tolerate.
In addition to the three types of latent limitations which have already been mentioned, and which are more or less obvious, there also exists a fourth, whose stratum lies deepest, and which is hardest to grasp, but on which, as their foundation, all the others rest.
Let us assume that in some country the powers that be perceive a political problem—mutiny and opposition—in the hairstyle of their subjects, in the length of their clothes, and in their habit of smoking tobacco. Let us suppose that they consider it their duty to regulate these intimate details by means of police measures and administrative decrees. It is difficult to imagine that even such obvious tyrants as Henry VIII or Louis XIV would have claimed the sole right to determine the width of the farthingale worn by court ladies, or the length of gentlemen's sleeves. For this purpose there existed more subtle mechanisms, in the shape of public decencies or fashions. But in Russia the powers that be knew best how many fingers people should cross themselves with, and how long their beards should be, and whether they should smoke tobacco, drink vodka, and desire or not desire their neighbors' wives. Tsar Aleksei did furious battle against shaving, while Peter the Great, on the other hand, looked on the beards of his subjects as an offense and an act of rebellion, and agreed to tolerate them only as a special item in the revenue. Tsar Mikhail strictly forbade the use of tobacco, and Peter, in turn, sold to the Marquis de Carmartin the sole right to poison the lungs of the Russians with nicotine. In 1692 a decree was issued forbidding civil servants to dress well, since "it is known that those service people who wear such expensive clothing make their fortunes not from their just earnings but by stealing from the treasury of our great sovereign." In other words, it was obvious to the authorities that one does not earn stone palaces by just labor, that even those who had not been caught before were to be considered thieves and their "earnings" themselves evidence of crime and sufficient grounds for punishment.
These details, however, are not the point, which is that people recognized, the right of the authorities to interfere in the details of their private lives. Not only was a man's home not his castle, even his beard was not considered his property. People's very thoughts and tastes did not belong to them. The cultural tradition had not worked out defensive mechanisms which would have made such interference by the state impossible. Only the opposition—"the people on the right" (the Old Believers) and "the people on the left" (the intelligentsia)—were able to resist such interference in autocratic Russia.
Here we approach directly the phenomenon of political culture. In the context of our discussion, this can most conveniently be defined as the totality of limitations on power, reflected in automatic, everyday activity, and inherited from previous generations as a tradition.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a classic study of the conflict between two types of political culture brought face to face with each other. The Yankee is astonished that he has ended up "in a country where the right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal."[27]
The stock-market terminology applied to the analysis of authoritarian structures only seems comic. In fact, it describes the state of affairs with extreme precision. The democratic common sense of our Yankee rebels precisely because he evaluates the situation from the point of view of a political culture inherited from his Puritan forebears, who wrote it into the constitution of the state of Connecticut that "all political power is inherent in the people, and . . . they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such manner as they may think expedient.'"[28]