To counteract these disintegrating trends in society, strong governments become necessary, and this, according to Rousseau, paves the way to despotism.
Obedience, unconditional obedience, is the catch-word of tyrants of every description, and to render " assurance doubly sure, " one kind of despotism supports another.
And how could he do that without telling the story of 1812, when Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia helped trigger the authoritarianism the Decembrists were rebelling against?
When he did he proved himself more than capable of uniting the disparate elements that had resisted crown absolutism into a working political arrangement.
We are being manipulated by the current information ecosystem entrenching so many of us so far into absolutism that compromise has become a dirty word.
It is so in every gradation of despotism, from that of the gentle and mild government of Paris, to that of the violent and furious government of Constantinople.
Not only Democrats but also a number of Republicans like Carl Schurz and independents like Mark Twain denounced this as " imperialism" and an imitation of European despotisms.
So, all notions that the British were trying to do their colonial enterprise out of enlightened despotism to try and bring the benefits of colonialism and civilisation to the benighted.
Why is it entirely misleading to look upon the concentration of national authority in France, England, and America as part of the tide o30autocracy which has been sweeping over Asia and Europe?
His forebodings that democracy, most fully realized in an equality of conditions, especially economic conditions, may lead to despotism is expressed in a passage that puzzles us when we first read it.