Bonapartism

Marx's formulation

Marx formed the concept in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) in analysing the coup of December 1851. What he attended to was the process by which, in a deadlock where the bourgeoisie could not govern itself and the working class could not take power, the state apparatus set itself up as though subordinate to no class directly.

Three features mark this state. It preserves bourgeois property relations while remaining able to purge particular factions of the bourgeoisie; it builds a popular base through direct appeals to the peasantry and the urban poor; and it rests on the material apparatus of bureaucracy, army, and police. Marx treated it as an exceptional form of class rule, noting at the same time that the state's autonomy was not absolute.

Trotsky's extension

Trotsky extended the concept in two directions in the 1930s. One was as a preliminary stage in the analysis of fascism. He defined as Bonapartist a regime in which the state apparatus manages the crisis without relying on a mass fascist movement, and analysed several phases in Germany and Austria through it.

The other was the analysis of the USSR. He used the concept in describing the Stalin regime as a bureaucratic and police government maintaining itself on the relative equilibrium between two opposing camps. Where Thermidor named a phase of retreat in a revolution, Bonapartism named the state form constituted in that phase.

Contemporary use

Since the later twentieth century Bonapartism has served as a concept for analysing authoritarian crisis-management regimes: those in which, with parliamentary institutions deadlocked, executive and security agencies concentrate authority, popular support is organized through appeal to an individual leader, and property relations are left untouched.

The usefulness of the concept lies in its distinction from fascism. Unlike fascism, marked by a mass paramilitary movement and the destruction of the existing party system, Bonapartism works by keeping the forms of existing institutions while emptying their content. That distinction is referred to repeatedly in discussions of contemporary authoritarian cases.