What is it about?
Radical left regimes are not necessarily condemned to ending up as autocracies, but there are specific factors that increase the temptation to go that way. However there are also countervailing pressures to fulfil their emancipatory ambitions
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Why is it important?
After a generation in the ascendancy liberal theorists are now thrown on the defensive by a series of flaws and failings in their prescriptions. Many prefer to escalate their denunciations of "autocracy", without discriminating between its many variants, as a substitute for re-examining their own assumptions. In particular there is a temptation to revive Cold War binaries. This article recognises some validity to these arguments, but considers them too determinist. Liberals need to discriminate, and to revise their self-understandings and their stereotypical treatment of the radical left challenge..
Perspectives
My field is comparative politics rather than political theory. In this condensed article I proceed inductively to summarise the lessons derived from a diverse and ongoing set of radical experiments. Instead of providing case studies or empirical overviews here I stand back and seek to state my conclusions in terms that address the comparative political theorist.
laurence whitehead
Nuffield College, Oxford University
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This page is a summary of: The Authoritarian Temptation, and Its Radical Left Expressions, Comparative Political Theory, December 2021, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/26669773-bja10012.
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