The Modern Regime, Volume 1

A detailed political and psychological study examines the leader's personality, intellectual methods, memory, imagination, passions, and dominant drive for power, linking these traits to his administrative style. It traces the creation of a centralized, authoritarian state, explains motives for suppressing local election power, and describes institutions modeled on classical precedents. The narrative assesses achievements in restoring social order, stabilizing religion and education, resolving property questions, and expanding public services while identifying abuses of state intervention, fiscal policy, conscription, and bureaucratic centralism. It concludes by weighing ambition, social selection, and the tensions between efficiency and individual rights in the modern regime.