Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

FOR A POLITICAL SYSTEM THAT affects the lives of so many, authoritarianism remains a surprisingly fuzzy concept. We still lack a common language to speak about the governments of twenty-first century authoritarian rulers who repress civil liberties but use elections to keep themselves in power. Orbán celebrates his transformation of Hungary into an “illiberal democracy,” using the term Fareed Zakaria coined in a landmark 1997 article in Foreign Affairs. More recently, labels like “hybrid regimes,” “electoral autocracies,” or “new authoritarianism” (the term used here) proliferate as scholars seek to classify this new wave of antidemocratic rule.13 A long view of the authoritarian style of governance, which highlights baseline features that recur in different historical circumstances, as well as what changes over time, can help us to understand authoritarianism as it manifests today. From Mussolini through Putin, all of the strongmen featured in this book establish forms of personalist rule, which concentrates enormous power in one individual whose own political and financial interests prevail