The dictatorship is called form of government exercised by a single person who uses his power arbitrarily and without being specially limited by law. Thus, a dictator makes decisions leaving aside the possibilities of consensus with the governed people, an aspect that is the opposite of a democratic authority, which is elected by its governed.
It is worth noting that, according to the philosophical precepts of ancient Greece, the dictatorship does not seem comparable to the original proposed contrast between pure and impure forms of government. In this model, held by the Athenian philosophers, the one-person forms of government were the monarchy (monkeys: one, archos: government), as an ideal or pure form, and tyranny, as a corrupted variant of this governmental modality. Instead, the dictatorship as a concept and structure of political action was born in later stages of civilization.
Indeed, the origins of the term dictatorship must be traced back to the time when the Roman civilization. Basically, the dictatorship had a legal status there as a mode of government exercised in an extraordinary way before difficult times that required quick decisions. In this context, it is said that the proposal was made for the first time by Tito Laercio, who would have been the first to use this position.
The Senate was the authorized one to determine if this change was needed; if circumstances warranted it, an order was given to one of the consuls, who proceeded to appoint the dictator; after that moment, no one could criticize the management of the new government. However, in the beginning, there were reasonable limits to these special powers. Thus, the "dictator" only had power for a period of six months, after which his powers were revoked. At that moment, he had to give an account of his actions.
As expected, this practice could lead to an attempt to succeed indefinitely in power through stratagems that gave rise to the birth of monarchies; that is why it would later be abolished.
The dictatorial model of power was then the reason for various abuses that, far from stopping, intensified due to the personalized exercise of government acts. Although in Medieval Europe this form of government was attenuated as a result of the feudal distribution of power structures, the birth of modern states in the 15th and 16th centuries gave rise to a new approach to monarchies. Some of these nations evolved with governmental structures assimilable to dictatorships, until the models that emerged from the French Revolution and the independence of the American nations allowed republican modalities to spread throughout the world.
Nevertheless, dictatorships ruled the life of many peoples in the twentieth century, as happened with the unipersonal concentration of power in Germany during the government of Adolf Hitler, in Italy with Il Duce Benito Mussolini or with Josep Stalin in the Soviet Union.
At present, the most recent dictatorships must be found in underdeveloped countries. Many of them were extended and consolidated during the cold war era. At that historical moment, the United States and the Soviet Union maintained a veiled dispute that led each of them to support dictatorial governments that sustained their authority on the basis of fear and avoiding any possibility of consensus. The strongest examples include the various ruling dynasties in North Africa and the Middle East (Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, among others), the regime that has prevailed in Cuba since 1959, the military dictatorships in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980, the governments of the so-called "Iron Curtain" in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and the different governmental schemes of semi-colonial Africa. A majority proportion of these dictatorships They have ceased to exist, giving way to either transitional governments or republican structures of government, with the different regional variations that characterize each people and each culture.
Today, most of the world's societies have realized the deleterious effects of dictatorships on their individual rights, which is why democracies are the preferred form of government for these nations. Dictatorial modalities are recognized as a risk to the freedom and growth of states and are explicitly repudiated by the international community.
