Further Reading

The global literature on the history of the idea and practice of despotism, both past and present, is extensive. Readers wishing to venture beyond the list of materials cited in this book’s endnotes may choose to consult the following short selection of highly relevant essays, pamphlets, books, and online resources:

Art, David. “What Do We Know about Authoritarianism after Ten Years?” Comparative Politics 44, no. 3 (April 2012): 351–373.

  • Bobbio, Norberto. “Dispotismo.” In Dizionario di politica, edited by Norberto Bobbio et al., pp. 276–283. Turin, 2004.
  • Boesche, Roger. Theories of Tyranny from Plato to Arendt. University Park, PA, 1996.
  • Boulanger, Nicolas-Antoine. Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental. London, 1762.
  • Brown, Wendy, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky. Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory. Chicago, 2018.
  • Curtis, Michael. Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India. Cambridge, 2009.
  • Derathé, Robert. “Les philosophes et le despotisme.” In Utopie et pragmatisme au XVIIIe siècle: Le pragmatisme des Lumières, edited by Pierre Francastel, pp. 57–75. Paris, 1963.
  • Dobson, William J. The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy. New York, 2012.
  • Felice, Domenico, ed. Dispotismo: Genesi e sviluppi di un concetto filosofico-politico. 2 vols. Naples, 2001–2002.
  • Geddes, Barbara, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz. How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse. New York, 2018.
  • Gessen, Masha. The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. London, 2012.
  • Internet Archive. “Despotism” (contains nearly 400,000 entries). Available at https://archive.org/search.php?query=despotism&sin=TXT.
  • Kaiser, Thomas. “The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth-Century French Political Culture.” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 6–34.
  • Kelsen, Hans. “Foundations of Democracy.” Ethics 66, no. 1, part 2 (October 1955): 1–101.
  • Kurfirst, Robert. “J. S. Mill on Oriental Despotism, Including Its British Variant.” Utilitas 8, no. 1 (March 1996): 73–87.
  • Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA, 2005.
  • Linz, Juan J. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration. Baltimore, MD, 1978.
  • Magyar, Bálint, and Julia Vásárhelyi, eds. Twenty-Five Sides of a Post-Communist Mafia State. Budapest, 2017.
  • Mandt, Hella. “Tyrannie, Despotie.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 6, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, pp. 651–706. Stuttgart, 1972–1997.
  • Marx, Karl. “The British Rule in India.” In Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, vol. 12, pp. 125–133. New York, 1975–2004.
  • Marx, Karl. “The Future Results of British Rule in India.” In Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, vol. 12, pp. 217–222. New York, 1975–2004.
  • McInerney, D. J. James Mill and the Despotism of Philosophy: Reading “The History of British India.” New York, 2009.
  • Meierhenrich, Jens. The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law. Oxford, 2018.
  • Minuti, Rolando. “Mito e realtà del dispotismo ottomano: Note in margine ad una discussione settecentesca.” Studi settecenteschi 1 (1981): 35–59.
  • Moradi, Hassan Ghazi. Despotism in Iran. Pittsburgh, PA, 2017.
  • Mujanović, Jasmin. Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans. London, 2018.
  • Quesnay, François. “Despotisme de la Chine.” In François Quesnay, Œuvres économiques complètes et autres textes, vol. 2, edited by Christine Théré, Loïc Charles, and Jean-Claude Perrot, pp. 1005–1114. Paris, 2005.
  • Ranum, Orest. “D’Alembert, Tacitus, and the Political Sociology of Despotism.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 191, in Transactions of the Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment, pp. 547–558. Oxford, 1980.
  • Richter, Melvin. “The Concept of Despotism and l’Abus des Mots.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 3 (2007): 5–22.
  • Richter, Melvin. “Despotism.” In Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, vol. 2, edited by Philip P. Wiener, pp. 1–18. New York, 1973.
  • Rosanvallon, Pierre. Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity. Princeton, NJ, 2011.
  • Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu.” Journal of Early Modern History 9, nos. 1–2 (2005): 109–180.
  • Saïd, Edward. Orientalism. New York, 1978.
  • Schabert, Tilo. Boston Politics: The Creativity of Power. Berlin, 1989.
  • Scheppele, Kim. “Autocratic Legalism.” University of Chicago Law Review 85, no. 2 (2018): 545–583.
  • Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. London, 2017.
  • Urbinati, Nadia. Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. Cambridge, MA, 2019.
  • Valensi, Lucette. Venise et la Sublime Porte: La naissance du despote. Paris, 1987.
  • Xuetong, Yan. Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers. Princeton, NJ, 2019.