ABSTRACT
This chapter clarifies the meaning of some concepts: democracy, liberalism and the collectivist state. From a historical point of view the modern collectivist form of government bears a marked resemblance to those city regimes of antiquity which are known as tyrannis and which people find again in some of the city republics of the Italian Renaissance. While the collectivist state is clearly distinguished—as much as its predecessors in ancient times and in the Italian Renaissance—from dictatorship and mere despotism, it is yet incorrect to associate it with the concept of a pre-eminently hierarchic, aristocratic and authoritarian rule and to contrast it with democracy. The political and the economic structure of collectivism are merely two aspects of one and the same thing. They both are the ultimate result and the most radical manifestation of that spiritual collectivization, agglomeration, mechanization, atomization and proletarization which have become the curse of the Western world.
