The fall before the fall: the epistemological collapse of dictatorial authority

Abstract

In conventional political analyses, the fall of a dictator is usually understood as a historical and datable event brought about through death, a coup d’état, or exile. This article challenges that view and argues that the fall of a dictatorship is, above all, an event at the level of meaning and political legitimacy, constituted within collective consciousness before manifesting itself as a temporal event. According to this approach, political authority — even in its most violent forms — depends on the possibility of rational justification and subjective acceptance; once this possibility is lost, authority collapses from the standpoint of truth, even if the structures of repression remain. By distinguishing between a “real fall” and a “temporal fall,” the article shows that the temporal fall is a consequence of the real fall, not the reverse. Through an analysis of the dictator’s reaction to social protests, it argues that naked violence is not a sign of power but an indication of its absence. The text also examines the justification of violence in the name of the people’s good in light of practical logic, demonstrating that such justification has a fallacious structure marked by practical contradiction, begging the question, and a claim to representation lacking rational foundation. Finally, the article argues that political violence does not guarantee survival but reveals the collapse of the dictator’s authority by exposing the moment when he loses the capacity to offer a defensible future as the legitimate foundation of political order. From this perspective, the fall of dictatorships occurs at the level of truth and collective consciousness before being recorded, opening a new horizon for understanding the relationship between power, violence, and legitimacy in political theory.