The rise of authoritarian liberal democracy : a preface to a new theory of comparative political systems

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). CONTENTS 10 TABLES 14 FOREWORD 18 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 20 ABBREVIATIONS 22 PART ONE 24 CHAPTER 1 26 PART TWO 40 CHAPTER 2 42 CHAPTER 3 52 PART THREE 106 CHAPTER 4 108 CHAPTER 5 120 CHAPTER 6 136 CHAPTER 7 210 PART FOUR 262 CHAPTER 8 264 BIBLIOGRAPHY 300 INDEX 318