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Executive Power
imminent danger, and the normal rhythms of public life are disrupted by extraordinary circumstances, the need to act promptly and forcefully becomes inescapable. The very abruptness of the moment condenses and precipitates events, producing an exceptional and immediate reaction, as when armed conflict breaks out or catastrophe strikes. In that case the supremacy of the executive inevitably imposes itself: ordinary rules are swept aside; decision supplants the norm. There is, of course, great danger in this as well. A government is apt to find itself e ither paralyzed, inca pable of reacting, or tempted to enlarge its prerogatives unilaterally, sus pending the rights and liberties of its citizens. To forestall an usurpation of power, the only option is to entrust executive authority during a state of emergency to a special magistracy. This is what the ancient Romans sought to do by supplementing the reg ular institutions of state with a unique public office, dictatorship, when confronting an urgent threat made it necessary to cast off the yoke of customary law.21 The etymology of the name for this office must be taken into account if we are to fully appreciate the originality of the in stitution. In Latin, the term does not carry any connotation of despotic or tyrannical power. Our word “dictator” comes from the verb dictare, which reminds us not only that his authority derived from the fact that it was his words that w ere obeyed, but also that the orders he gave w ere given orally, not in the form of written laws. The powers of the dictator, though they w ere considerable in Rome, were nonetheless strictly circumscribed. 22 The management of exceptional circumstances, in other words, was specifically contemplated as part of the normal func tioning of permanent institutions; the republican legal order was neither abolished nor suspended by the state of emergency that established the dictatorship. The flexibility of this arrangement, amounting to an in formal constitution, made it possible to cope with threats to the state of several kinds in a remarkably efficient way without the system itself ever being called into question.23 Machiavelli and Rousseau both praised clas sical dictatorship on precisely this ground.24 The failure of the moderns to develop a theory of executive power had the consequence that they were incapable of constitutionalizing emergency rule as the Romans had done.25 As a practical m atter they w ere able to consider how exceptional circumstances should be managed, but only in a purely finalist sense, with irregular measures of e very sort being licensed by appeals to “public safety” and the need to “restore
