![]() ![]() This is accompanied by the removal of checks and balances, of individual liberties, and of citizens' equal rights, including their political rights. Since the Russian October Revolution, dictatorship increasingly developed into the antithesis of liberal-democratic democracy and is now used to refer to the often revolutionary, unlimited rule of an individual or small group carried out by means of force and not restrained by law. Rarely nowadays is dictatorship used to describe a constitutional state of emergency. The twentieth century witnessed a rebirth of the term and a shift in meaning that now makes its classic sense seem antiquated. Thus, ever since antiquity dictatorship was understood as an instrument to defend the law. The aim of dictatorship in Rome was preserving or restoring the republican constitution by means of a state of emergency. ![]() The term dictatorship comes from Roman constitutional law, where it referred to the temporary rule of a dictator granted powers above the law for the sake of defending the republic. The Classic Meaning of Dictatorship and a Rough Outline of its Conceptual History This article reconstructs the history of the concept of dictatorship in the twentieth century with a focus on the Russian and German cases, ending with a look at contemporary history and the hybrid regimes of the present. Dictatorship and democracy in modern-day political usage are diametric opposites, or "asymmetric counter-concepts" as Reinhart Koselleck put it. ![]() In contemporary history, dictatorship has served as a collective term for varied forms of domination, from authoritarian to total rule, that are predicated on force, that forego certain features of a parliamentary state based on the rule of law such as free elections and a system of checks and balances, and in which a dictator perpetuus exercises power unrestrained by law. Its "saddle period" was the epoch of Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. The modern concept of dictatorship has been used as both a self-descriptor as well as a label employed by others to describe communist, fascist and Nazi rule. ![]() Dictatorship became an ambiguous term whose range of meanings could encompass positive expectations as well as moral condemnation. This classic meaning was reshaped in various ways during the twentieth century. In times of emergency the senate would temporarily grant a dictator extraordinary powers to defend and restore state order. In the Roman Republic, a dictatorship ( dictatura in Latin) referred to an institution of constitutional law. ![]()
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