When a Dictator Seems Necessary

After the First World War, democracy appeared to have won. Within years, powerful men were promising their nations something more urgent: order. How had the age of liberty become an age of dictators?

Jacques Bainville searches for an answer across two thousand years. From the tyrants of Greece and the fall of the Roman Republic to Cromwell, Napoleon, the caudillos of Latin America, Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler, he follows the moment when a society begins to trust one person more than its institutions.

His reversals are provocative. Ancient tyrants can appear as champions of the people; republics can protect a privileged few; revolutions can end in absolute power. Bainville also sees that a dictator rules through belief as well as force—through legends, ceremonies, and the promise to restore a nation’s destiny.

Written in the turbulent 1930s, The Dictators bears the marks of Bainville’s own political sympathies. This edition’s notes illuminate both the originality of his argument and the limits of his judgments. At its heart lies a question for any age: what happens to a people’s freedom when a strong hand begins to look like its only hope?