Conditions and Methods for the Emergence of Authoritarian States

Authoritarian and single-party states did not appear from nowhere. Across very different regions and cultures, they grew out of shared conditions of crisis that discredited existing governments and made radical alternatives attractive. Studying emergence means asking two linked questions: what conditions created the opportunity, and what methods did an individual or movement use to seize that opportunity?

Economic and social crisis

The most common precondition was severe economic distress. Germany's Weimar Republic staggered through the hyperinflation of 1923 and then the mass unemployment of the Great Depression after 1929, when roughly six million Germans were out of work by 1932. In Russia, the strain of the First World War produced food shortages, transport collapse, and soldiers unwil