The Rise of Authoritarian Liberal Democracy

Peter Baofu

Mar 2009 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

There is something fundamentally wrong with the conventional wisdom in the field of Comparative Politics, Political Theory, and even Political Science as a whole, which rigidly conceptualize and theorize political systems in terms of different categories (e.g., liberal-democratic vs. authoritarian), which are supposed to be distinct and separate, without much mixing of each other, certainly not in any major way.

A liberal-democratic political system (like the one in the U.S.), in accordance to this conventional wisdom, is anti-authoritarian (and therefore good). Conversely, an authoritarian political system (like the one in mainland China) is anti-democratic and therefore bad.

This book takes the challenging task to show that all political systems—different as each is, for sure, from the rest—have much in common. Under the right conditions, a liberal democracy, as an illustration, not only can be as evil as its authoritarian counterparts, albeit in different ways—but also can be more authoritarian as it becomes more advanced as a liberal democracy. In fact, Dr. Peter Baofu suggests that authoritarianism is an advanced stage of liberal democracy, under these conditions.

To understand this, the book is organized into two main parts with different sections, that is, in relation to meta-theory (i.e., methodology and ontology) and theory (i.e., nature, the mind, culture, and society).

About the author

Dr. Baofu is the author of many books in numerous fields ranging from the social sciences through the humanities to the natural sciences. He earned an entry to the list of “prominent and emerging writers” in Contemporary Authors (2005) and another honorary entry in The Writers Directory (2007). He was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in the Far East. He had taught as a professor at different universities in Western Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, and North America. He finished more than 5 academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from M.I.T., and was a summa cum laude graduate.