Common Sense Philosophy/Chapter 11
Chapter 11: Authoritarianism -- The Permanent Temptation
The Recurring Dream
Every generation rediscovers the appeal of the strong leader. Every generation finds its own reasons to believe that this time, the concentration of power in a single person or party will produce order, prosperity, and national greatness. And every generation eventually learns -- though sometimes too late, and always at catastrophic cost -- that the strong leader promises what he cannot deliver and delivers what he did not promise.
The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history, and its bloodiest episodes were overwhelmingly the work of authoritarian regimes. Hitler's Third Reich killed approximately 12 million in the Holocaust alone, plus the tens of millions who died in the war he launched. Stalin's Soviet Union killed an estimated 6 to 20 million through deliberate famine, forced collectivization, purges, and the gulag system.[1] Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward killed an estimated 30 to 45 million people through famine that was the direct result of ideologically driven policy imposed by absolute political authority.[2] Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge killed approximately 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians -- roughly one-quarter of the population. These are not outliers. They are the predictable consequences of systems in which power is concentrated, dissent is suppressed, and accountability is nonexistent.
And yet, despite this record -- a record written in the blood of hundreds of millions -- authoritarianism remains popular. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that significant percentages of people in nearly every country surveyed expressed support for some form of authoritarian governance. In many countries, support for "rule by a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections" exceeds 50 percent. In several, it has been growing steadily for years.
How can this be? How can a system with such a catastrophic record retain its appeal? The answer lies not in the rationality of authoritarianism but in its psychology -- in the deep human needs that authoritarian systems exploit and the cognitive vulnerabilities they target.
The Psychology of Authoritarianism
The psychological study of authoritarianism began in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when a group of researchers led by Theodor Adorno at the Frankfurt School attempted to understand how an advanced, educated, cultured society could have surrendered to fascism. Their 1950 study, The Authoritarian Personality, identified a syndrome characterized by rigid adherence to conventional values, submission to authority figures, aggression toward those perceived as different or deviant, and a tendency to think in rigid, black-and-white categories.[3]
Adorno's work was flawed -- its methodology was controversial, its psychoanalytic framework has not aged well, and it focused too narrowly on right-wing authoritarianism while ignoring the left-wing variety. But its central insight was sound: some individuals are psychologically predisposed to authoritarian beliefs and behaviors, and this predisposition can be measured and studied.
Bob Altemeyer, working at the University of Manitoba from the 1970s through the 2000s, refined Adorno's work into a more methodologically rigorous framework. Altemeyer's concept of "Right-Wing Authoritarianism" (RWA) identified three key attitudinal clusters: authoritarian submission (a strong desire to submit to established authorities), authoritarian aggression (a willingness to aggress against targets sanctioned by those authorities), and conventionalism (a rigid commitment to social norms perceived as endorsed by established authorities).[4]
Altemeyer found that individuals high in RWA tended to be more prejudiced against outgroups, more punitive toward perceived norm violators, more trusting of authority figures, more resistant to evidence that contradicts their beliefs, and more susceptible to logical fallacies and self-contradictions. They tended to see the world as a dangerous, threatening place in which strong leadership was necessary to maintain order. They were especially responsive to fear-based messaging and to leaders who framed political issues in terms of "us versus them."
Karen Stenner, in her 2005 book The Authoritarian Dynamic, added a crucial insight: authoritarianism is not merely a personality trait but a response to perceived threat. Stenner distinguished between individuals with an authoritarian predisposition -- a relatively stable personality characteristic -- and the activation of that predisposition by environmental conditions. When people feel that their group's values, status, or cohesion are threatened, the authoritarian predisposition is activated, producing demands for strong leadership, conformity, and the punishment of those perceived as different.[5]
This dynamic model helps explain why authoritarianism surges in periods of social change, economic disruption, and cultural anxiety. It is not that populations suddenly become more authoritarian in their personality structure. It is that conditions arise -- immigration, economic inequality, cultural diversification, perceived loss of traditional values -- that activate latent authoritarian predispositions in a significant portion of the population. The authoritarian leader does not create the fear. He exploits it.
The Strongman's Playbook
Authoritarian leaders throughout history have employed a remarkably consistent set of strategies for gaining and maintaining power. The consistency is so striking that it suggests these strategies are not individually invented but structurally determined -- they are the moves that work, given the psychological vulnerabilities of human populations and the institutional weaknesses of democratic systems.
Strategy 1: Manufacture crisis. The authoritarian leader requires a sense of emergency, because emergency justifies the concentration of power. If a genuine crisis is not available, one must be manufactured. Hitler used the Reichstag fire. Putin used the apartment bombings of 1999. Erdogan used the failed coup of 2016. Trump used the "American carnage" of a country that was, by most objective measures, safer and more prosperous than at almost any point in its history. The manufactured crisis need not be entirely fictional -- real problems are amplified, exaggerated, and framed as existential threats requiring extraordinary measures. The key is the gap between the reality of the threat and the response it is used to justify.
Strategy 2: Identify enemies. Authoritarian leaders need enemies -- specific, identifiable groups that can be blamed for the nation's problems and against whom the population's anger can be directed. The enemies must be simultaneously threatening and contemptible, powerful enough to constitute a danger but weak enough to be defeated. Jews in Nazi Germany, kulaks in Stalin's Russia, intellectuals in Mao's China, Muslims in Modi's India, immigrants in Orban's Hungary -- the specific enemy varies, but the function is always the same: to create an "us versus them" dynamic that binds the population to the leader and justifies the suppression of dissent as a form of collective self-defense.
Strategy 3: Delegitimize institutions. Democratic societies are protected from authoritarianism by institutions: independent courts, a free press, an opposition party, a professional civil service, military subordination to civilian authority. The authoritarian leader must weaken or destroy these institutions before he can consolidate power. The assault typically begins with the press, which is denounced as biased, corrupt, or treasonous ("enemy of the people," "fake news," "lugenpresse"). It proceeds to the judiciary, which is packed, intimidated, or defied. It extends to the opposition, which is criminalized, harassed, or co-opted. And it targets the civil service and the military, where loyalists replace professionals.[6]
Strategy 4: Simplify reality. Complex problems require complex solutions, and complex solutions are hard to sell. Authoritarian leaders offer the electorate simple explanations and simple solutions: the economy is bad because of immigrants; crime is rising because of moral decay; the nation is declining because of a corrupt elite. These explanations are almost always wrong -- the real causes of economic hardship, crime, and national decline are structural and multifactorial -- but they are emotionally satisfying because they provide clear villains and clear remedies. The remedy is always the same: give me power, and I will fix it.
Strategy 5: Create an alternative reality. Authoritarian regimes require the control of information because their legitimacy depends on beliefs that do not survive contact with facts. The Soviet Union maintained an elaborate apparatus of censorship and propaganda because the reality of Soviet economic performance, political repression, and social conditions would have been devastating to the regime's claims. Modern authoritarian regimes achieve the same goal through different means: state-controlled media, social media manipulation, the flooding of the information environment with contradictory narratives ("firehose of falsehood"), and the systematic promotion of the idea that all information is biased and no source can be trusted. If citizens can be persuaded that there is no such thing as truth, they cannot be informed, and they cannot hold their leaders accountable.
Strategy 6: Personalize power. Authoritarian leaders systematically transfer institutional authority to personal authority. Decisions that should be made by parliaments are made by the leader. Policies that should be developed by experts are developed by the leader's inner circle. Officials owe their positions not to competence or democratic mandate but to personal loyalty to the leader. The result is a system in which the leader becomes indispensable -- the only person who can make things work, the only person who understands the situation, the only person the nation can trust. This personalization makes the system brittle: it cannot survive the leader's death, incapacitation, or removal, because there is no institutional structure capable of independent function.
Case Studies: The Authoritarian Record
The strategies described above are not abstractions. They have been deployed repeatedly across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and their consequences are etched into the historical record with devastating clarity.
Fascism and Nazism. The fascist movements of interwar Europe represent the authoritarian playbook in its purest and most destructive form. Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany both rose to power through democratic processes that they then systematically dismantled. Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933; by July 1933, every political party except the Nazi Party had been banned, the free press had been destroyed, trade unions had been dissolved, and the Reichstag had passed the Enabling Act that gave Hitler the power to rule by decree. The speed of the consolidation was breathtaking -- and it was possible only because democratic institutions had been weakened by economic crisis, political polarization, and the failure of democratic leaders to recognize the threat until it was too late. The result was the most destructive war in human history and the systematic murder of six million Jews, along with millions of Roma, disabled people, homosexuals, political prisoners, and others deemed unfit for the racial utopia the regime promised.
Stalinism. The Soviet Union under Stalin illustrates a different pathology: the authoritarian system that eliminates not merely political opponents but the very capacity for independent thought. The Great Purges of 1936-1938 killed an estimated 750,000 people and sent millions more to the gulag. But the purges were only the most visible manifestation of a system in which every institution -- the Communist Party itself, the military, the scientific establishment, the arts, the universities -- was subordinated to the will of a single man whose judgments, however catastrophic, could not be questioned. When Stalin endorsed Lysenko's fraudulent agricultural theories, Soviet agriculture was crippled for decades. When Stalin decided that genetics was a "bourgeois pseudoscience," Soviet biology fell a generation behind the West. The human cost was measured not only in the millions who died in famines and labor camps but in the decades of scientific, cultural, and economic stagnation that resulted from the suppression of independent thought.
Contemporary democratic backsliding. The twenty-first century has produced a new wave of authoritarian leaders who have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Rather than seizing power through military coups or revolutionary violence, they win elections and then gradually dismantle the institutional constraints on their power. Viktor Orban in Hungary has systematically captured the judiciary, the media, the electoral system, and the economy, transforming a functioning European democracy into what he himself calls an "illiberal democracy." Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey has followed a similar path, using a failed coup attempt in 2016 as the pretext for a massive purge of the military, judiciary, media, and civil service, and a constitutional referendum that concentrated power in the presidency. In each case, the formal structures of democracy -- elections, parliaments, constitutions -- are maintained while their substance is hollowed out. The result is what political scientists call "competitive authoritarianism": a system that looks democratic from the outside but functions as a one-party state from the inside.[7]
These case studies -- fascist, communist, and contemporary -- share a common pattern: the concentration of power produces not the order and prosperity that the authoritarian leader promises but corruption, misgovernance, and the systematic destruction of the institutional capacities that any complex society requires. The pattern is not accidental. It is structural. Concentrated power produces concentrated error, because the feedback mechanisms that would correct mistakes have been destroyed.
The "Authoritarian Efficiency" Myth
The most sophisticated defense of authoritarianism is the argument from efficiency. Democracies, the argument goes, are slow, messy, and gridlocked. They cannot make difficult decisions because politicians are beholden to short-term public opinion. They cannot implement long-term plans because governments change every few years. They cannot undertake ambitious projects because every constituency has a veto. Authoritarian systems, by contrast, can act quickly, think long-term, and impose necessary but unpopular decisions without worrying about the next election.
This argument has a certain surface plausibility. The speed with which authoritarian China built its high-speed rail network, for example, is often contrasted favorably with the decades-long inability of democratic California to build a single high-speed rail line. Singapore's transformation from a postcolonial backwater into a gleaming, efficient city-state under Lee Kuan Yew's semi-authoritarian rule is cited as evidence that authoritarianism can produce economic miracles.
But the efficiency argument collapses under empirical scrutiny.
First, the "success stories" of authoritarian development are highly selective. For every Singapore there are dozens of authoritarian developmental failures: North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Belarus, Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea. The handful of authoritarian success stories are remembered precisely because they are exceptional. The many authoritarian failures are forgotten because failure in authoritarian systems is quiet -- there is no free press to report it, no opposition to protest it, no independent judiciary to investigate it.
Second, the economic record of authoritarian versus democratic systems, examined systematically, does not favor authoritarianism. The economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, in their monumental Why Nations Fail, demonstrate that the key determinant of long-term economic prosperity is not the concentration or diffusion of political power per se, but the presence of "inclusive institutions" -- economic institutions that allow broad participation in economic activity and political institutions that distribute power broadly and subject it to constraint. Authoritarian "extractive institutions" may produce short-term growth by mobilizing resources efficiently, but they consistently fail to produce sustained innovation and prosperity because they concentrate benefits in the hands of the elite and suppress the creative destruction that drives long-term economic growth.[8]
Third, authoritarian systems are catastrophically prone to large-scale policy errors because they lack the feedback mechanisms -- free press, independent expertise, political opposition, public debate -- that democratic systems use to identify and correct mistakes. The Great Leap Forward is the most devastating example: Mao's agricultural policies were based on pseudoscientific theories promoted by Trofim Lysenko, implemented by officials too frightened to report their failure, and continued long after it became clear that they were producing mass famine -- because no one in the system had the authority or the courage to tell the supreme leader that his policies were killing millions of people. Democratic systems make mistakes too, but they make them at smaller scale and correct them faster, because the mechanisms of accountability -- elections, courts, free media -- force errors into the open.
Fourth, the efficiency argument ignores the costs of authoritarian rule that do not appear in GDP statistics. The suppression of dissent, the imprisonment of political opponents, the surveillance of citizens, the control of information, the destruction of civil society, the corruption that inevitably accompanies unaccountable power -- these are not incidental costs of authoritarian governance. They are its essential features. An authoritarian system that did not suppress dissent, control information, and concentrate power would not be authoritarian. The "efficiency" of authoritarianism is achieved precisely by imposing costs -- on individual freedom, on human dignity, on truth itself -- that the efficiency argument conveniently ignores.
The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen observed that no functioning democracy with a free press has ever experienced a famine.[9] This is not because democratic leaders are morally superior to authoritarian leaders. It is because democratic systems contain feedback mechanisms -- elections, media scrutiny, political opposition -- that make it politically impossible for leaders to ignore mass starvation. In authoritarian systems, by contrast, millions can die of famine while the regime reports record harvests. Information flows upward, but only information that the leader wants to hear. The result is not efficiency but catastrophic misgovernance concealed behind a facade of order.
The Democracy Advantage
The case for democracy does not rest on the claim that democratic systems are perfect or even consistently good. Democracy is, as Churchill famously observed, the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. The case for democracy rests on three arguments that are both principled and empirical.
The principled argument is that democracy respects human dignity in a way that authoritarianism cannot. Authoritarian systems treat citizens as subjects -- objects of governance rather than agents of self-governance. The authoritarian leader decides what is good for the people; the people's role is to comply. Democratic systems, at their best, treat citizens as adults capable of making their own decisions about how they wish to be governed. This is not merely a political arrangement. It is a recognition of human agency, and its absence is a form of infantilization that degrades the governed regardless of how competent or benevolent the governor may be.
The epistemic argument is that democratic systems make better decisions over time because they harness the distributed knowledge of the entire population rather than relying on the limited knowledge of a leader and his inner circle. Friedrich Hayek -- hardly a radical democrat -- made this argument forcefully in his critique of central planning: the knowledge needed to run a complex society is dispersed among millions of individuals and cannot be concentrated in any central authority.[10] Democratic systems, with their free markets, free press, free debate, and competitive elections, aggregate this dispersed knowledge more effectively than any authoritarian system can.
The accountability argument is that democratic systems are self-correcting in a way that authoritarian systems are not. When a democratic government makes a catastrophic mistake, it can be voted out of office, investigated by independent courts, and held accountable by a free press. When an authoritarian government makes a catastrophic mistake, there is no mechanism for correction other than the leader's own willingness to admit error -- which, given the psychology of authoritarian leaders, is approximately zero. Democratic accountability does not prevent all mistakes. But it prevents mistakes from becoming permanent and prevents bad leaders from remaining in power until they have done irreparable damage.
The empirical evidence supports these arguments. Democratic countries are, on average, wealthier, healthier, better educated, less corrupt, more innovative, and more peaceful than authoritarian countries.[11] Democratic countries almost never go to war with each other -- the "democratic peace" is one of the most robust findings in political science. Democratic countries are better at providing public goods, protecting minority rights, and adapting to changing circumstances. None of these correlations is perfect, and the direction of causation is debatable. But the overall pattern is clear: democracy, for all its flaws, produces better outcomes for more people than any alternative system that has been tried.
The Role of Institutions
Democracy is not merely a matter of holding elections. Elections without institutions are meaningless -- as the many "electoral autocracies" of the contemporary world demonstrate. Russia holds elections. Iran holds elections. North Korea holds elections. None of these countries is a democracy in any meaningful sense, because elections without independent institutions are merely rituals of legitimation, not mechanisms of accountability.
The institutions that make democracy real include:
An independent judiciary that can constrain the executive, protect individual rights, and enforce the rule of law. Judicial independence requires that judges be appointed through processes that are not controlled by the executive, that they serve terms long enough to insulate them from political pressure, and that their decisions are enforced even when they are politically inconvenient.
A free press that can investigate government action, inform citizens, and hold officials accountable. Press freedom requires legal protection for journalists, economic models that sustain independent journalism, and a cultural commitment to the distinction between news and propaganda.
A professional civil service that implements policy on the basis of expertise rather than political loyalty. The bureaucratic state, for all its frustrations, is one of the great inventions of modern governance -- a mechanism for ensuring that government functions continue regardless of which party holds power, and that technical decisions are made by people who know what they are doing rather than by people whose qualification is loyalty to the leader.
An independent military that is subordinate to civilian authority and serves the nation rather than the ruling party. Military coups remain one of the most common mechanisms of democratic breakdown worldwide, and the prevention of military intervention in politics requires sustained institutional design, including professional military education, civilian control of defense policy, and cultural norms that make political intervention by the military unthinkable.
A vibrant civil society -- the ecosystem of associations, organizations, advocacy groups, religious communities, professional associations, labor unions, and informal networks that exist between the individual and the state. Civil society provides the social infrastructure within which democratic participation takes place. It is the space where citizens organize, deliberate, disagree, and develop the skills and habits of self-governance. Authoritarian regimes invariably target civil society for suppression, because they understand that organized citizens are the greatest threat to concentrated power.
These institutions are not self-sustaining. They require active cultivation, defense, and reform. They can be gradually eroded by leaders who understand that the fastest route to authoritarian power is not the dramatic coup but the slow, systematic weakening of institutional constraints -- what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call "democratic backsliding." This is the primary threat to democracy in the twenty-first century: not tanks in the streets but the patient, incremental destruction of the institutions that make democracy meaningful.
Why Authoritarianism Keeps Coming Back
Given the catastrophic record of authoritarian governance and the clear advantages of democratic institutions, why does authoritarianism remain a permanent temptation? The answer involves both structural and psychological factors.
Structural factors include economic crisis, which generates demand for decisive action that democratic processes may be too slow to deliver; cultural anxiety, which generates demand for leaders who will defend traditional values against change; institutional weakness, which means that democratic institutions lack the legitimacy and capacity to address citizens' grievances; inequality, which generates resentment that authoritarian leaders can exploit; and external threat, whether real or manufactured, which generates demand for unity and strong leadership.
Psychological factors include the appeal of simplicity in a complex world. Democratic governance is inherently complicated. It involves compromise, negotiation, partial solutions, and the acceptance that not everyone can get what they want. Authoritarian governance promises clarity: one leader, one direction, one set of answers. For individuals who find complexity threatening and ambiguity intolerable, the authoritarian offer is psychologically irresistible.
There is also the deep human desire for a parental figure -- someone who will take care of things so that we do not have to worry. Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom (1941), argued that the freedom offered by modern democratic societies generates anxiety as well as opportunity, and that some individuals respond to this anxiety by seeking to surrender their freedom to an authority figure who will relieve them of the burden of autonomous decision-making.[12] This "escape from freedom" is not a sign of stupidity or moral failure. It is a deeply human response to the demands of living in a free society -- demands that require constant decision-making, responsibility-taking, and tolerance of uncertainty.
Finally, there is the problem of democratic disappointment. Democracy promises self-governance, and self-governance promises that the will of the people will be reflected in government policy. When it is not -- when elected governments serve the interests of elites, when corruption undermines public trust, when policy gridlock prevents action on pressing problems -- citizens experience a sense of betrayal that makes authoritarian alternatives seem attractive. The authoritarian leader offers not merely competence but vindication: he will punish the corrupt elites, cut through the gridlock, and restore the voice of the "real people" that democracy has supposedly silenced.
The tragedy is that authoritarian leaders, once in power, invariably betray the very people who supported them. They enrich themselves and their cronies, suppress the dissent that might hold them accountable, and create systems of governance that are even less responsive to popular needs than the democracies they replaced. But by the time this becomes clear, the institutions that might have enabled peaceful correction -- free elections, free press, independent courts -- have been destroyed. The escape from freedom leads not to security but to a new and more thoroughgoing form of bondage.
Conclusion: Vigilance as Civic Virtue
The argument of this chapter is not optimistic. Authoritarianism is not a problem that can be solved once and for all. It is a permanent temptation rooted in deep features of human psychology and social structure. As long as human beings experience fear, complexity, and disappointment, there will be a market for leaders who offer simple answers, strong authority, and the comforting illusion that someone is in charge.
The defense against authoritarianism is not a particular ideology but a particular set of practices: the maintenance of independent institutions, the cultivation of critical thinking, the preservation of a free press, the protection of civil society, and the perpetual willingness to defend democratic norms against those who would erode them. These practices are unglamorous. They do not inspire the passionate devotion that authoritarian movements command. They require patience, compromise, and the tolerance of imperfection that democratic life demands.
But they work. The evidence of the last two centuries is clear: societies that maintain democratic institutions, for all their inefficiencies and frustrations, produce better outcomes for more people than societies that concentrate power in the hands of the few. The price of this achievement is eternal vigilance -- the recognition that democracy is never secure, that authoritarian temptation is always present, and that the institutions of freedom require active defense by every generation.
Hannah Arendt, writing in the aftermath of totalitarianism, observed that the most reliable supporters of authoritarian movements were not the committed ideologues but the "masses" -- atomized individuals who had lost their connection to social institutions and their capacity for independent judgment.[13] The best defense against authoritarianism is therefore not merely institutional but social: the cultivation of engaged, connected, critically thinking citizens who are capable of recognizing manipulation when they see it and willing to resist it when it comes.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of realism. Authoritarianism will always be with us, as a temptation and as a threat. But so will the human capacity for reason, cooperation, and self-governance that authoritarianism seeks to suppress. The contest between these forces is the central drama of human political life, and it is a contest that, on the evidence, democratic institutions can win -- if we are willing to fight for them.
- ↑ Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Snyder's detailed analysis of the overlapping killing zones of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union provides the most geographically specific accounting.
- ↑ Frank Dikotter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (New York: Walker, 2010). Dikotter's archival research revised the death toll significantly upward.
- ↑ Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950).
- ↑ Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians (Winnipeg: published online, 2006). Available freely at theauthoritarians.org. Altemeyer's work is the most comprehensive empirical study of the authoritarian personality since Adorno.
- ↑ Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Stenner's distinction between predisposition and activation has been influential in explaining the rise of populist authoritarianism in established democracies.
- ↑ Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018). Levitsky and Ziblatt's comparative analysis of democratic breakdown identifies the systematic erosion of institutional guardrails as the characteristic mechanism of modern authoritarianism.
- ↑ Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The concept helps explain the phenomenon of regimes that maintain democratic facades while exercising authoritarian control.
- ↑ Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012). Their empirical framework has been enormously influential in development economics.
- ↑ Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), Chapter 7. Sen's observation about democracy and famine remains one of the most powerful empirical arguments for democratic governance.
- ↑ Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519-530.
- ↑ See the Freedom House annual reports (freedomhouse.org), the V-Dem project's data on democratic quality and development outcomes (v-dem.net), and Morton Halperin, Joseph Siegle, and Michael Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace (New York: Routledge, 2010).
- ↑ Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941). Fromm's analysis of the psychological appeal of fascism remains remarkably relevant.
- ↑ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951), Part III. Arendt's analysis of the "mass man" as the raw material of totalitarianism remains chillingly relevant.