The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (72 page)

(1841–1901)
Belgian lawyer and enthusiast for
proportional representation
. His formula for assigning seats to parties in multiseat districts was, unknown to him, the same as that proposed a century earlier by
Jefferson
to assign seats to states in the US Congress after each decennial census ( see
apportionment
). The d'Hondt (Jefferson) system is biased in favour of large parties. Unsurprisingly, it is the most popular of the apportionment rules used nowadays by parties to assign each other seats in assemblies with proportional representation.

 
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A theory of nature formalized from the work of
Engels
in particular by Soviet ideologists, dialectical materialism supposes that all phenomena consist of matter in motion. Motion itself is the result of the contradictions inherent among the elements in all objects. Moreover, arguing that they are putting
Hegel
on a materialist basis, dialectical materialists assert that nature itself has a history governed by determinate laws such as quantity into quality, interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation. The motion of matter has been subject to transformation and development, particularly the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative differences. Mankind is considered to be the highest stage of material development. As with nature itself, so human development is subject to dialectal processes of development. The motion of any given stage of society is to be understood in terms of the character of the contradictions of its constituent social elements. At certain stages, and of necessity, quantitative changes occur in a given order which result in such heightened social contradictions that a new, qualitatively higher, stage of social development results. For Soviet dialectical materialists, the highest stage of social development was communism.
SWh 

 
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In modern usage, absolute rule unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other political or social factors within the state. The original dictators, however, were magistrates in ancient Italian cities (including Rome) who were allocated absolute power during a period of emergency. Their power was neither arbitrary nor unaccountable, being subject to law and requiring retrospective justification. There were no such dictators after the beginning of the second century BC, however, and later dictators such as Sulla and the Roman emperors conformed more to our image of the dictator as an autocrat and near-despot.
In the twentieth century the existence of a dictator has been a necessary and (to some) definitive component of totalitarian regimes: thus Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, and Mussolini's Italy were generally referred to as dictatorships. In the Soviet case the very word and idea of dictatorship were legitimized by Marx's idea of the historical necessity of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ which would follow the revolution and eradicate the bourgeoisie.
LA 

 
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Understood by Marx as the transition period between capitalist and communist society ‘in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’ (
Critique of the Gotha Programme
, 1875). The proletariat would assume state power aiming to eliminate the old relations of production based upon class antagonism and protected by the coercive instruments of the state. It would replace these relations with a class dictatorship which would both place the productive forces under proletarian control and pave the way for the abolition of class distinctions culminating in a classless society.
The Communist Manifesto
(1848) stated that the result would be ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.
The expression was used very infrequently by Marx and when he did employ it, he appeared to understand the word ‘dictatorship’ as meaning a concentration of power or forces rather than as a repressive situation. A different model of transition is offered in
The Civil War in France
(1871) based upon the experience of the Paris Commune. It stressed the immediate dismantling of the state apparatus, the decentralization of power and popular democratic control over and management of civil society. The uneasy coexistence of the ‘commune’ and ‘dictatorship’ models is one amongst many ambiguities in Marx's work.
Lenin discussed both models in
The State and Revolution
(1917). It can be argued that the establishment of war communism in the immediate post-revolutionary era was an attempt to implement the dictatorship.
GS 

 
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(1713–84)
French philosopher and co-editor (with Jean d'Alembert ) of the original seventeen-volume
Encyclopédie
(1751–65): one of the most remarkable literary works of the
French Enlightenment
and a testament to the new intellectual enthusiasm of that age for secular rationalism and socially progressive ideas. In effect the
Encyclopédie
issued a direct challenge to royal
absolutism
and the religious supremacy of the Catholic Church in France and throughout Europe.
Diderot's strictly political ideas were rooted in his philosophical
materialism
and atheism, and an awareness of the link between political institutions and a society's underlying culture and socio-economic characteristics: a view he shared with
Montesquieu
and
Rousseau
. Diderot's guiding political belief was a desire to enhance conditions of human freedom, a goal which in his view required an open society and toleration of each individual's chosen route to happiness through the exercise of individual rights. Rights of property were particularly important and served as the only rational basis of citizenship. A political ruler must act as a guardian of such rights in the national interest.
Towards the end of his life, influenced by the events of the
American Revolution
, Diderot advocated the principle of popular sovereignty, and defended the people's right of revolution against tyrannical authority. Although he died in 1784, his radical ideas lived on as a key intellectual component in the early stages of the
French Revolution
.
KT