This week the Hansard Society warned that British voters, fed up with the current political havoc, were ready to embrace “authoritarianism”. This political term has become much more common in recent years, but what does it really signify?
According to the OED, “authoritarianism” was first used in print by Andrew Jackson Davis, an American who is of dubious renown as “the father of spiritualism”. For Davis, it was orthodox church-goers who were practitioners of authoritarianism in matters of belief. Indeed an “authoritarian” was originally one more in favour of obedience to authority than personal liberty; such a person would, naturally, prefer some political systems to others.
In the late 19th century, both the French minister Léon Gambetta and certain communists were accused of being authoritarian, and a writer for the London Daily News ushered in the modern sense in 1879, referring to “Men who are authoritarian by nature, and cannot imagine that a country should be orderly save under a military despotism”. Today, “authoritarianism” is used to describe the governing styles of everyone from Stalin and Hitler to Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump, and so is arguably an unhelpfully broad term, even if no one has the authority to ban it.
