The Rise and Fall and Rise of Authoritarianism in the US and the World

By 1992, both right- and left-wing authoritarianism had fallen into such disrepute that the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama posited the arrival of "the end of history" and "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Since then, authoritarianism has rebounded in ways that are very similar to, yet in other ways different from, its rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This course examines the origins of the rise of radical right and radical left political movements and ideologies before World War II and the cold war, the reasons for their demise in the mid- and late-twentieth centuries, and the resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide in the twenty-first century.