The despotism of Porfirio Diaz is unbearable.

This de facto surrender creates a fertile environment for despotism.

The evils most deeply resented in all societies are injustice, despotism, corruption, and poverty.

The history of peoples subjugated to despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes.

Of course, elections that lead to illiberal outcomes, and even to despotism, are not a new phenomenon.

This poster appears on many blogs. It says Majid Tavakoli is brave in the fight against despotism.

This explains why French governments of both right and left tend to support despotism in countries where it seems natural.

Russia, after a brief attempt at democracy under Boris Yeltsin, has reverted to a form of unenlightened despotism under Vladimir Putin.

A strong current of liberalism appeared in the late nineteenth century in Ottoman Syria in response to the religious despotism of Sultan Abdulhamid.

The regime s true ambition is to invent an alternative to Western democracy an enlightened despotism under the tutelage of a meritocratic Communist Party.

Privately owned newspapers, independent radio and television networks, trade unions, churches, professional societies, and other groups within civil society provide a bulwark against despotism.

Following de Gaulle s lead, elective monarchy or enlightened despotism is now perceived as a legitimate alternative to parliamentary democracy or US style separation of powers.

By strengthening civil society through legal rights and long term economic development and instituting clear rules to ensure accountability, political despotism and corruption will be brought under control.

The first has fallen away, its accompanying social structures superseded by industrialization, urbanization, and feminization of the workforce, while the oft seen link with despotism has delegitimized the second.

The philosophers who were the intellectual fathers of the 1789 revolution longed not for democracy, but for enlightened despotism, which is what many French still look for when they elect a president.

Although Russia s future is uncertain, its history is becoming clearer, in part because we now know that the Twentieth Party Congress started the process that brought about the end of Soviet despotism.

Turkey is not Asian only in terms of economic energy and rapid growth it is also Asian in a more political sense, with the rising temptation of a form of Oriental despotism.

Its preamble, which opens with the phrase We, the Egyptian people, can be read as a scathing attack on Egypt s current political order, and calls for an end to fear and despotism.

Many optimistic observers of China, often mollified by their close relations with the Communist regime, bet on a soft transition from despotism toward an open society, but recent events don t support such a benign interpretation.

This authority, the technocrats claim, in turn is part of a system of national and supra national checks and balances which, while not resembling a national democracy, would reliably prevent despotism from taking root in Brussels.

The past, darkened by suffering, executions, colonialism, slavery, apartheid, oppression and despotism, is now nothing other than a painful lesson for the African and Latin American democracies to become more worthy, more vigorous and more powerful.

What do you do when your big neighbor widens the gap that exists between its culture, which is European, and its political system, which is becoming increasingly Asian, at least in the bad old sense of Oriental despotism ?

But what do one billion people living in utter poverty (300 million on less than one dollar a day) and deprived of any rights think of this enlightened despotism? No one knows, because they cannot express their wishes.

Mr. Morozov who comes from Belarus and therefore has a clear understanding of the mechanism of 21st century despotism sees the ways in which the institutions of the net are increasingly being co opted by the state in an effort to limit control or eliminate freedom.

In the absence of the rule of law and functioning state services, we Russians generally perceive ourselves as subordinate to the state rather than as citizens acting out our lives in a functioning, vibrant, and independent civil society. This de facto surrender creates a fertile environment for despotism.

We in the West may badly need Russia s energy, but if Russia does not want its future to degenerate into Oriental despotism, it must engage with the West in good faith. If Putin genuinely seeks to bolster Russia s global standing, he must not allow Russians sense of humiliation in the years since the Soviet collapse to stand in the way.