Authoritarian Regimes — Developing Open Societies?

Abstract

Some of the papers in this round table foresee a decline of openness and pluralism in our society and ascribe the absence of openness and pluralism to all authoritarian societies. From a normative point of view it seems to be sufficient to take the empirical evidence of differences in pluralism between democratic Western and authoritarian societies as a justification to condemn in toto the underlying political ideologies of the less-open societies. The models of empirical research for European authoritarian systems, the most notable of which were the concepts of “totalitarianism” and “fascism,” were usually rather static. Even possibly valuable ideas of authoritarian corporatism on one hand and socialist systems on the other were considered futile, since there seemed to be no chance to develop them in a ideologically closed society. Liberal conservative students in the fifties and sixties usually used the concept of totalitarianism to explain both fascist and socialist societies, whereas leftist dialectical critics usually refuted totalitarianism as a valuable concept for socialist countries except for the Stalinist period, and used the concept of Fascism for the explanation of almost every reactionary system from the first Austrian Republic to Portugal and some South American regimes. In spite of the differences, these two schools had one thing in common: they did not believe in the possibility of peaceful change in authoritarian regimes.