Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is a concept largely found in liberal political science. Authoritarian is said to include governments which do not afford their citizens civil or political freedoms, maintain free and fair elections, and where political power is concentrated in the hands of a single person (autocrat) or small grouping of people (oligarchy).

Usage

While the term "authoritarianism" is most often used to conflate socialist and fascist states and contrast them with bourgeois democracies, all class societies maintain some form of authoritarianism; it is simply a matter of which class it is directed against.

In capitalist states, the ruling class is authoritarian towards the proletariat. Political and economic freedoms supposedly given to the entire population are most often only able to be fully enjoyed by a small ruling class and therefore are of little practical meaning to the majority of the population.

Authority in general

Authority in a broader sense is used by all societies in some way. For instance, authority is used to maintain all relationships of subordinated and subordinator which is needed for basic socioeconomic tasks, such as production.

"Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it, whether — given the conditions of present-day society — we could not create another social system, in which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear."

—Friedrich Engels, On Authority

See also

• Totalitarianism
• Dictatorship
• Horseshoe theory