Volume 13, Number 12 · January 1, 1970
African Hitler
By Edmund R. Leach
Terror and Resistance
by E.V. Walter
Oxford, 385 pp., $8.50
This book, or something very like it, was accepted for publication about six years ago, and its final, long-delayed appearance is welcome. It is a study of despotic rule by terror and violence, a form of government all too familiar both from the pages of history and the newspapers of our own time. It is a topic which, in recent times at any rate, has received surprisingly little attention from the academic analysts of political thought. On a world scale there have been many famous writers—Kautilya, Han Fei Tzu, Machiavelli, von Clausewitz, to name but a few—who have taken it for granted that a ruler is one who aims at total domination and that he is subject to no moral constraints of any kind. Even Max Weber, the prophet of rational legality, made a point of expanding Trotsky's formula, 'Every state is founded on force (Gewalt)' into 'Every state claims for itself the legitimate monopoly of physical violence (Gewaltsamkeit).'
Review, 4154 words
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