Word Finder - autocracy

definition

A form of government in which unlimited power is held by a single individual.

definition

An instance of this government.

In some islands hereditary autocracy prevailed; in others the government was elective.

Paul III.s pontificate was further marked by important changes in the church, all of which confirmed the spiritual autocracy of Rome.

The supreme peril to the autocracy in Russia lay in the genuine grievances of the peasants, less political than economic, which had opened their minds to revolutionary propaganda.

He fought in the constitutionalist army against the Austrians at Rieti (7th of March 1821), and on the re-establishment of autocracy he was arrested and imprisoned for three months by order of the prince of Canosa, the chief of police, his particular enemy.

The collapse of the Prussian autocracy involved that of the lesser German potentates.

What form it would ultimately take depended still on the balance between the forces of conservatism and change, the suspicious temper of the autocracy being revealed, during the years of unstable equilibrium, by the alternate concession and withdrawal of privileges, e.g.

The autocracy of the Mathers in church, college, colony and press, had slipped from them.

It is also on a tough road from royal autocracy to a kind of democracy.

His determination to maintain autocracy was officially proclaimed a few days after his accession.

This leads to autocracy in politics, fatalism in religion and conservatism in both.

Bonaparte's powers were subsequently extended in the years 1802, 1804 and 1807; but it is clear that autocracy was practically established by his own action in the secret commission of 1799.

The Athenian empire again was a thinly disguised autocracy.

Ferdinand at once re-established autocracy in Naples; though the struggle in Sicily did not end until May, when Palermo, after a splendid resistance, capitulated.

With all its defective psychology, its barren logic, its immature technique, it emphasized two great and necessary truths, firstly, the absolute responsibility of the individual as the moral unit, and, secondly, the autocracy of the will.

Prince Mirski resigned, his resignation being immediately followed by a reactionary imperial manifesto reaffirming the principle of autocracy (February 18th).

Kossuth succeeded in granting them temporary emancipation, but the suppression of the War of Independence led to an era of royal autocracy which, while it advanced Jewish culture by enforcing the establishment of modern schools, retarded the obtaining of civic and political rights.

Arnold was by no means blind to the faults of Henry's government, but preferred an autocracy to the mob-rule which Simon de Montfortcountenanced in London.

While the hold of the popes on the States of the Church was constantly weakening, their power over the domestic policies of foreign governments was increasing; and the transition from autocracy to parliamentary rule accelerated this process, at least in non-Catholic territories.

He was himself a strange incarnation at once of " doctrinaire liberalism and the old Habsburg autocracy.

With these resources, and with the advantage of an assurance from the British government that he would be aided against foreign aggression, he was able to establish an absolute military despotism inside his kingdom, by breaking down the power of the warlike tribes which held in check, up to his time, the personal autocracy of the Kabul rulers, and by organizing a regular army well furnished with European rifles and artillery.

The Austrian occupation lasted until 1827, having cost the state 310,000,000 lire; but in the meanwhile the Swiss Guard had been established as a further protection for autocracy, and the revolutionary outbreak at Bosco on the Cilento was suppressed with the usual cruelty.

The mutinous regiments, however, were surrounded by loyal troops and shot down; and this affair resulted in the disbanding of the whole force - the last support of the autocracy.

For the Society, as befitted the great exponent of authority and the keeper of the consciences of many kings, had always been on the side of political autocracy; and therefore it became increasingly unpopular, when once the tide of French intelligence began to set in the direction of revolutionary reform.

In this way Gallicanism, which had once stood for all that was national and progressive, now came to mean subservience to a feeble autocracy already tottering to its fall.

The close relation between finance and general policy is most impressively illustrated in this failure of benevolent autocracy.

The gradual way in which the several provinces were brought under the general tax system, and the equally gradual extension of Roman citizenship, account further for the irregularity and increased weight of the taxes; as the absence of publicity and the growth of autocracy explain the sense of oppression and the hopelessness of resistance so vividly indicated in the literature of the later Empire.

The real control of affairs soon afterwards passed into the strong hands of Stuart and Beresford; and while the war lasted the Portuguese acquiesced in what was in fact an autocracy exercised by foreigners.

But except on rare occasions he allowed his power to be disguised under the old machinery of the medieval monarchy, and made no parade of his autocracy.

The principle of autocracy triumphed everywhere over the remnants of local or provincial authority, in the sphere of industry as in that of administration; while the gild system became much more rigid.

Italy not only gave him a taste for art and letters, but furnished him with an arsenal of despotic maxims. Yet his true masters were the jurists of the southern universities, passionately addicted to centralization and autocracy, men like Duprat and Poyet, who revived the persistent tradition of Philip the Fairs legists.

Richelieu completed the work of Francis I.; he endowed France with the fatal tradition of autocracy.

The government, strikingly unlike the Jesuit autocracy, is of a republican form; and the superior, though first in honour, has to take his turn in discharging all the duties which come to each priest of the society in the order of his seniority, including that of waiting at table, which is not entrusted in the Oratory to lay brothers, according to the practice in most other communities.

The mission of Russia in the West was, in accordance with the principles of the Holy Alliance as Nicholas interpreted them, to uphold the cause of legitimacy and autocracy against the Revolution; her mission in the East was, with or without the co-operation of " Europe," to advance the cause of Orthodox Christianity, of which she was the natural protector, at the expense of the decaying Ottoman empire.

When the storm burst, he remained entrenched behind the barriers of his own disciplined empire; sovereigns truckling in a panic to insurgent democracies he would not lift a finger to help;' it was not till Francis Joseph of Austria in 1849 appealed to him in the name of autocracy, reasserting its rights, that he consented to intervene, and, true to the promise made at Miinchengratz in 1833, crushed the insurgent Hungarians and handed back their country as a free gift to the Habsburg king.

Religion, literature, and law were employed to support the autocracy.

Populists believed that a free and prosperous community where everybody helped one another out would overthrow autocracy.

The dark forces that guarded the tsarist autocracy are going under.

At the end of nineteenth century a large number of Poles became involved in the struggle against Nicholas II and the Russian autocracy.

Then the Prussian autocracy was almost overwhelmed by a popular democratic movement.

I do not suppose that it is the author's aim to guide our future in the direction of political autocracy and ossifying belief-systems.

To all of these the Prussian military autocracy is an implacable foe.

But anarchists do not avow autocracy as the ultimate condition they seek.

In some ways the autocracy was a dictatorship which sat upon thousands of village republics that were mere vassals.

It was now seen how the absolutist doctrines of autocracy developed in Justinians age at Byzantium would bear fruits in the development of an imperial idea, which was destined to be the fatal mirage of medieval Italy.

In a small but influential section of the educated classes there was a conviction that the revolutionary tendencies, which culminated in Nihilism and Anarchism, proceeded from the adoption of cosmopolitan rather than national principles in all spheres of educational and administrative activity, and that the best remedy for the evils from which the country was suffering was to be found in a return to the three great principles of Nationality, Orthodoxy and Autocracy.

Grindal lacked that firm faith in the supreme importance of uniformity and autocracy which enabled Whitgift to persecute with a clear conscience nonconformists whose theology was indistinguishable from his own.

Even when Arabian medicine gave way before the direct teaching of the Greek authors rescued from neglect, the authority of Galen was increased instead of being diminished; and he assumed a position of autocracy in medical science which was only slowly undermined by the growth of modern science in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In spite, however, of his desire for peace he let his country drift into the disastrous war with Japan; and notwithstanding his sincere attachment to the principles of bureaucratic autocracy, it was he who granted the constitutional reforms which altered the whole political outlook in Russia (see Russia).

This is, indeed, a most special and pronounced feature of the Saint-Simon socialism, whose theory of government is a kind of spiritual or scientific autocracy, degenerating into the fantastic sacerdotalism of Enfantin.

As a legislative body the powers of the Council are co-ordinate with those of the Duma; in practice, however, it has seldom if ever initiated legislation.6 The Duma of the Empire or Imperial Duma (Gosudarstvennaya Duma), which forms the Lower House of the Russian parliament, consists (since the ukaz of the znd of June 1907) on the 27th of April 1906, while the name and princi p le of autocracy was jealously preserved, the word " unlimited " vanished.