ABSTRACT
A Hobbesian fondness for the rule of a single strongman, as the antidote to conflict and disorder, may well be universal in human politics. The cult of Napoleon in nineteenth-century France, the hopes that Mussolini and Stalin once inspired in their respective countries, and perhaps even the temptations of the "imperial presidency" to very small numbers of Americans, show something of its strength. But because the unity of China was associated with the tradition of a universal monarchy for more than twenty-one centuries (221 B.C.-A.D. 1911), contemporary Chinese thinkers have been particularly sensitive to the supposed "retarding force" of such predispositions in their country.
