The Concept of Dictatorship Through History

When was The Age of Dictatorship?

Why, the mid-twentieth century, of course.

It’s normally taken to be the period between the two world wars, with the rise to power of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Stalin – and a few subsidiary despots or despotic governments in Portugal, Poland, Romania and Lithuania.

(** BTW, which famous American singer was the first person to announce the death of Joseph Stalin? Read on.)

So the word was coined then, right?

No, because there had been dictators earlier than those twentieth-century titans who bestrode (or, rather, besmeared) history, large-scale dictators such as Napoleon Bonaparte, and innumerable smaller-canvas Latin-American ones.

So it’s a nineteenth-century word, then?

Not at all. It goes all the way back to Old English.

You mean, they had the concept of despotic and undemocratic rulers way back before the 1000s? Wow!

Well, not exactly. The first time we come across the word is – as with so many words – in a translation. It’s from Orosius’ fifth-century Historiae Adversus Paganos (‘Seven Books of History Against the Pagans’, a book King Alfred is known to have translated), when Orosius recounts how the Romans came to create the office of dictator, which, as the OED defines it, was ‘a chief [Roman] magistrate with absolute power, appointed for a limited period or for the duration of an emergency.’ Or, in Dr Johnson’s wonderful phrasing, ‘A magiſstrate of Rome made in times of exigence and diſstreſs, and inveſted with abſolute authority’.

In Latin it had a very specific and weighty meaning, as explained later, which is somewhat diminished by the translator spelling its plural as tictatores:

Æfter þæm wæs þæt Sabinisce gewinn, & him Romane þæt swiðe ondrædende wæron, & him gesetton hiran ladteow þonne hiera consul wære, þone ðe hie tictatores heton, & hie mid þæm tictatore micelne sige hæfdon.

(After that was the Sabine war, and the Romans were greatly afraid of it, and they appointed over themselves a higher leader than their consul was, whom they called dictators, and they had a great victory with the dictator.)

Shakespeare uses the word only once, in this meaning, in Coriolanus.

What did it mean in Roman times?

The office of dictator was created in Rome’s earliest days. It was a stopgap, designed to resolve a temporary crisis and to last no more than six months. Dictators could overrule the republic’s leading officials, the consuls, and had absolute authority. Some who held the post became legendary, such as (Lucius Quinctus) Cincinnatus, who literally left his ploughshare to take up office for a fortnight or so and then returned quietly to farming.  

Though the office served its purpose well until the third century BC, its revival by Sulla and then Julius Cæsar during the last century of the republic hastened the republic’s demise. Specifically, Cæsar, having been briefly appointed dictator for eleven days or so in 49 BC to oversee elections, was then appointed dictator for ten years in 46 BC. His appointment for life (as dictātor perpĕtŭō) in 44 BC is what prompted the conspirators, fearing he would make himself king, to assassinate him.

When did the closely related modern meaning appear in English?

The modern meaning ‘An absolute ruler of a state, esp. one whose rule displaces that of a democratic government’, and ‘typically one who has obtained control by force and behaves in a cruel or autocratic manner’ first appears in Christopher Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris (before 1593), when the King, alarmed by the Duke of Guise’s assembling troops (‘My Lord of Guise, we understand that you have gathered a power of men’), taunts him (‘Go ahead, then, why don’t you, Yah, boo, sucks!). Note how Marlowe accompanies the word with another Roman reference :

Guise, weare our crowne, and be thou King of France,
 And as Dictator make or warre or peace,
Whilste I cry placet like a senator.

The next OED citation is from Milton’s Paradise Regained, and the dictator in question is Satan himself:

Unanimous they all commit the care
And management of this main enterprize
To him, their great Dictator, whose attempt
At first against mankind so well had thriv’d
In Adam’s overthrow, and led thir march 
From Hell’s deep-vaulted Den to dwell in light,
Regents and Potentates, and Kings, yea gods
Of many a pleasant Realm and Province wide.

(Book I, 111–18)

I discovered afterwards that Dr Johnson used this same source in his entry for dictator.

What about its figurative meaning?

The idea of absolute and unquestionable power can, of course, be transferred into other domains than politics. As it happens, this use predates Marlowe’s by several years, which makes me, at least, wonder whether an earlier citation for the political meaning is yet to be unearthed. It’s from the pen of the ultra-Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, in 1575:

Who made him a dictator to determine the sence of other mens wordes. Euery man is best interpreter of his owne wordes.

(I’d love to know who that ‘him’ is.)

Later, Swift can refer to ‘The Dictators of Behaviour, Dress and Politeness’ (1728).

Derivatives of dictator include dictatorial (1587) , dictatorship (1542 in a translation of Erasmus’ Apophthegmes), and dictator-like – ‘I do not herein take vpon me dictatorlike to pronounce peremptorily’ (1581) – all of which predate the OED’s Marlowe citation.

The Collins Dictionary lays out dictator’s various threads of meaning with exceptional clarity (scroll down past the pronunciation vidz.)

What does ‘the data’ show?

A corpus ‘wordsketch’, which shows all the word’s collocates, is full of expected relationships, such as, for verbs, to overthrow, to topple, to assassinate, and so forth.

It also throws up a few novelties, such as Elon Musk – never one to bite his tongue –  accusing a Brazilian judge of ‘being an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge’, Donald Trump being ‘too willing to coddle dictators like Vladimir Putin’, and Mike Pompeo somewhat over-forthrightly being accused as ‘a wannabe dictator’s butt boy,’ to the chagrin of LBGT-you-name-it-it’s-got-a-letter groups.

European languages have adapting the word to their sound and spelling systems, from French dictateur to Italian dittatore, to Russian диктатор.

Another US/BrE wrinkle

In British English the stress falls on the second syllable, in US English on the first, British English

/dɪkˈteɪt/ vs /dɪkˈteɪt/. The same goes for the verb. Interestingly, Dr Johnson also shows the stress on the verb on the first syllable, but, tantalisingly, not for the noun. It’s presumably a fair bet that he too emphasised it the way people in the US now do.

The Age of Dictators Mark II?

Perhaps the great age of dictators is now, rather than between the world wars. It’s not that long since Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were overthrown, and Maduro’s ouster was only a few days ago; Xi Jinping, Putin and the demented North Korean leader still hold the reins of power in a tight grip; and Iran’s government is a theocratic dictatorship, even though its dictator poses as a spiritual leader: one of the war cries of the recent uprising was Marg bar Dīktātor (‘Death to the Dictator’). And many believe President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu to be dictators, not to mention Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

In 2015  there were, apparently, 49 countries whose governments could be characterised as dictatorships, and the US government was providing military assistance to 36 of them. (These comprised one-party states, absolute monarchies, military/hybrid regimes and strongman rule/closed autocracies.)

‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely’, and also creates megalomania, I should add. Kim Jong-il’s biography credits him with inventing the hamburger, while in 2016 Kim Jong-un banned the use of sarcasm.

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** The answer is Johnny Cash, when stationed in Germany and working as an air force morse code operator whose job was to intercept Soviet communications. On 5 March 1953, he intercepted a message that Stalin had died, which was conveyed to his superiors, thence to President Eisenhower.

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Orosius’ original Latin is:

 post haec Sabini conrasis undique copiis magno apparatu belli Romam contendunt. quo metu consternati Romani dictatorem creant, cuius auctoritas et potentia consulem praeiret; quae res in illo tunc bello plurimum emolumenti tulit

And the translation (not mine) is: After this, the Sabines gathered together every available soldier and with a great army hastened towards Rome. Alarmed by the danger which threatened, the Romans elected a dictator whose authority and power exceeded that of a consul. At this juncture of the war, this move was of the greatest advantage.