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Mill’s proposition that persecution to preserve the existing order can
never be justified remains theoretical and may never be achieved;
even democratic governments must coerce their citizens for a variety
of reasons. Nevertheless, the ruler who moves society to a more
advanced stage of development is not only good but also perhaps the
most necessary of historical actors—to the extent that history is
determined by freewilled individuals as well as by larger
geographical and economic forces. And the good autocrat, I submit,
is not a contradiction in terms; rather, he stands at the center of the
political questions that continuously morphing political societies
face.
GOOD AUTOCRATS there are. For example, in the Middle East,
monarchy has found a way over the decades and centuries to
engender a political legitimacy of its own, allowing leaders like King
Mohammed VI in Morocco, King Abdullah in Jordan and Sultan
Qaboos bin Said in Oman to grant their subjects a wide berth of
individual liberties without fear of being overthrown. Not only is
relative freedom allowed, but extremist politics and ideologies are
unnecessary in these countries. It is only in modernizing
dictatorships like Syria and Libya—which in historical and
geographical terms are artificial constructions and whose rulers are
inherently illegitimate—where brute force and radicalism are
required to hold the state together. To be sure, Egypt’s Mubarak and
Tunisia’s Ben Ali neither ran police states on the terrifying scale of
Libya’s Qaddafi and Syria’s Assad nor stifled economic progress
with such alacrity. But while Mubarak and Ben Ali left their
countries in conditions suitable for the emergence of stable
democracy, there is little virtue that can be attached to their rule. The
economic liberalizations of recent years were haphazard rather than
well planned. Their countries’ functioning institutions exist for
reasons that go back centuries: Egypt and Tunisia have been states in

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