ABSTRACT
Authoritarian regimes obviously have existed throughout history and have come in a variety of forms. Armies, parties, oligarchies, corporatist business elites – all can be the locus of those who inaugurate and maintain authoritarian rule. Clearly also, the political institutions of a society bear some relationship to the level of the development of that society. According to the classical view, modern industrialised societies have democratic politics. Authoritarian politics, in short, is thus incompatible with the modern society. This at least would appear to be the view of Samuel Huntington, who argued that authoritarian systems are only a short-term phenomenon in the transitional period of a state (Huntington 1970: 3–47).
