Democracy and Totalitarianism by Raymond Aron

Author:Raymond Aron [Aron, Raymond]
Language: por
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Scanned Document, Scan2Net, s2n
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

To end, I should like to say a few words about the passage from corruption to revolution.

A corrupted regime is not necessarily on the brink of destruction. It can last for a long time. I would even go further; it is possible, in some cases, for a corrupted regime to be the less bad solution to a given problem or the best answer in the circumstances. Let me return to the Germany of the thirties. Given the division of the German masses, the fanaticism of the extremists, the totalitarianism of the parties, the Weimar Republic was a corrupted regime. But the best solution would perhaps have been to have helped this corrupted republic to last for as long as possible. It is dangerous to say that because a regime is corrupted, it must be destroyed. Corruption can be independent of the will of the people; it can reflect the economic and social situation or a deep division in public opinion. In such circumstances, the only choice is to prolong the corrupted regime or to give to one man or to a group of men or to a party the discretionary right to impose its will on all. Sometimes it is better to give absolute power to a group rather than to remain in the paralysed anarchy of parties at loggerheads with each other, but in the long run, absolute power may finally exact a higher price than paralysing anarchy.

How do we pass from a constitutional-pluralistic regime to another kind of regime? There are, in fact, three modalities of this transition.

The first is the coup d'état. The South American republics offer many examples of the transition from a constitutional-pluralistic regime to a more or less dictatorial one. The passage is defined by the violation of constitutional legality, a group of armed men seizing the state. In general, in the South American republics, it is the army or a party of the army which makes or favours the coup d'état.

The second modality of transition is the legal or semi-legal accession to power and, in the last phase, revolutionary upheaval. Hitler came to power, the President of the Republic called him to the post of Chancellor; then, once master of power, Hitler made a coup d'état. The same thing happened in our history. Napoleon III began by being a constitutional president, he prolonged his term as president by a coup d'état, which made him Emperor.

The third modality of transition to another kind of regime is military defeat, invasion from abroad or at least action from abroad. In his Politics, Aristotle recalls that internal regimes change under external pressure. When Athens took a city, it put democrats in power. When a city fell into Sparta's zone of influence, oligarchs were installed. Many constitutional-pluralistic regimes, in our century, have given way to authoritarian regimes of one kind or another under external pressure.

We have not, hitherto, evoked revolution properly speaking, on the model of the revolution of 1830 or 1848, but it is difficult to conceive of a revolution of this type against a regime, founded on constitutional or electoral machinery.

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