...Despite the Lusitanian pretext, the essay is true to its word: It is very much about the idea of dictatorship. The idea, that is, that we outside observers might form of such a regime, the abstract, Platonic idea of it, but also the more tangible idea in the minds of citizens and rulers alike that makes it politically possible. Society moves toward dictatorship, Valéry observes, when government dysfunction grows to the point where it impinges on private lives and it “becomes impossible for the majority of people to mind their individual affairs without encountering some difficulty imputable to the vices of the State.”5 The resulting shift in popular opinion is a natural one: “The image of a dictatorship is the mind’s inevitable (and as if instinctive) response when it no longer recognizes, in the running of affairs, the authority, the continuity, and the unity that are the signs of deliberate will and the realm of organized knowledge.” (This does not mean, of course, that “it does not contain great illusions as to the extent and depth of the efficacy of political power.”6)
The mind’s response is to project its own ideal of understanding and action on the ruling body. “In sum, as soon as the mind no longer recognizes itself—or no longer recognizes its essential traits, its mode of reasoned activity, its horror of chaos and the waste of its energy—in the fluctuations and failures of a political system, it necessarily imagines, it instinctively hopes for the promptest intervention of the authority of a single head, for it is only in a single head that the clear correspondence of perceptions, notions, reactions, and decisions is conceivable, can be organized and try to impose on things intelligible conditions and arrangements.”7 While all governments aspire to transform society in some way, while all politics presuppose some view of people as objects in a larger theory of social organization, only a dictatorship can truly aspire to this ideal of mind acting intelligibly on inert society and material reality itself, as if they were simple political ideas....
...But this abstraction of means, this political idea acting directly on the social body, implies a second term of the equation: the mind that conceives the idea. That second term, that self-conscious political will brought to its highest power, is by definition the dictator....
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Originally Posted by MMC
