The good autocrat.

• Author: Kaplan, Robert D.
• Position: Autocracy and the Arab Spring - Essay

In his extended essay, On Liberty, published in 1859, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill famously declares, "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Mill's irreducible refutation of tyranny leads him to--I have always felt--one of the most moving passages in literature, in which he extols the moral virtues of Marcus Aurelius, only to register the Roman's supreme flaw. Mill writes:

If ever any one, possessed of power, had grounds for thinking himself the best and most enlightened among his contemporaries, it was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Absolute monarch of the whole civilized world, he preserved through life not only the most unblemished justice, but what was less to be expected from his Stoical breeding, the tenderest heart. The few failings which are attributed to him, were all on the side of indulgence: while his writings, the highest ethical product of the ancient mind, differ scarcely perceptibly, if they differ at all, from the most characteristic teachings of Christ. And yet, as Mill laments, this "unfettered intellect," this exemplar of humanism by second-century-AD standards, persecuted Christians. As deplorable a state as society was in at the time (wars, internal revolts, cruelty in all its manifestations), Marcus Aurelius assumed that what held it together and kept it from getting worse was the acceptance of the existing divinities, which the adherents of Christianity threatened to dissolve. He simply could not foresee a world knit together by new and better ties. "No Christian," Mill writes, "more firmly believes that Atheism is false, and tends to the dissolution of society, than Marcus Aurelius believed the same things of Christianity."

If even such a ruler as Marcus Aurelius could be so monumentally wrong, then no dictator, it would seem, no matter how benevolent, could ever ultimately be trusted in his judgment. It follows, therefore, that the persecution of an idea or ideals for the sake of the existing order can rarely be justified, since the existing order is itself suspect. And, pace Mill, if we can never know for certain if authority is in the right, even as anarchy must be averted, the only recourse for society is to be able to choose and regularly replace its forever-imperfect leaders. But there is a catch. As Mill admits earlier in his essay,

Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing ... but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one. Indeed, Mill knows that authority has first to be created before we can go about limiting it. For without authority, however dictatorial, there is a fearful void, as we all know too well from Iraq in 2006 and 2007. In fact, no greater proponent of individual liberty than Isaiah Berlin himself observes in his introduction to Four Essays on Liberty that, "Men who live in conditions where there is not sufficient food, warmth, shelter, and the minimum degree of security can scarcely be expected to concern themselves with freedom of contract or of the press." In "Two Concepts of Liberty," Berlin allows that "First things come first: there are situations ... in which boots are superior to the works of Shakespeare, individual freedom is not everyone's primary need." Further complicating matters, Berlin notes that "there is no necessary connection between individual liberty and democratic rule." There might be a despot "who leaves his subjects a wide area of liberty" but cares "little for order, or virtue, or knowledge." Clearly, just as there are good and bad popularly elected leaders, there are good and bad autocrats.

The signal fact of the Arab world at the beginning of this year of democratic revolution was that, for the most part, it encompassed few of these subtleties and apparent contradictions. Middle Eastern societies had long since moved beyond basic needs of food and security to the point where individual freedom could easily be contemplated. After all, over the past half century, Arabs from the Maghreb to the Persian Gulf experienced epochal social, economic, technological and demographic transformation: it was only the politics that lagged behind. And while good autocrats there were, the reigning model was sterile and decadent national-security regimes, deeply corrupt and with sultanic tendencies. These leaders sought to perpetuate their rule through offspring: sons who had not risen through the military or other bureaucracies, and thus had no legitimacy. Marcus Aurelius was one thing; Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben All, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Syria's Bashar al-Assad, quite another. Certainly...