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"Preface" [2019] ELECD 1151; in Alviar Garcia, Helena; Frankenberg, Gunter (eds), "Authoritarian Constitutionalism" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) x

Book Title: Authoritarian Constitutionalism

Editor(s): Alviar García, Helena; Frankenberg, Günter

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section Title: Preface

Number of pages: 3

Extract:

Preface
The recognition of authority as a basic force of social praxis attacks the very roots of
human freedom . . . Yet bourgeois philosophy put the autonomy of the person right at
the center of its theory . . . These antagonisms appear in the most varied forms in the
ambivalence of bourgeois relationships of authority: they are rational, yet fortuitous,
objective, yet anarchic, necessary, yet bad.
Herbert Marcuse, A Study on Authority (1936)

The end of history, allegedly marked by the post-Cold War triumph of both
liberalism and global capitalism, will have to be postponed again. After
democratic advances, albeit neither linear nor sustained nor unequivocal,
authoritarian regimes and rhetoric appear to be making a comeback in the
twenty-first century. Some observers argue that authoritarianism is `the domi-
nant form of rule in modern times despite the dip in democratization'.1 Others
count more than 40 authoritarian (autocratic, despotic, dictatorial, tyrannical)
regimes worldwide, and yet others consider roughly one third of the world's
population to be living under illiberal and nondemocratic rule.2 Whatever the
actual numbers may be, they warrant serious analysis and critique of political
authoritarianism.
Constitutions ­ their rhetoric and texts, doctrines and practices ­ are part and
parcel of the `culture of authoritarianism'.3 Authoritarian regimes invariably
come with constitutions that are dismissed in the dominant discourse as defi-
cient or deviant versions of liberal democratic charters ­ nothing but façades
or shams to camouflage the dark side of autocracy, the rulers' bad intentions


1
Hans-Joachim Lauth (2012) ` ...