[paulsy]

so has there ever been a succesfull dictatorship in either new or old world history? (really curious, has there been?)

[RightOnline]

Depends on your definitions of "successful" and "dictatorship"........and from whose point of view.

[wastoute]

Read Herodotus. Read the Bible. Xerxes was pretty successful. When you thik about it, David and Solomon were dictators. Read Thucydides. Full of dictators. That was pretty much the way it was done back then. The whole "democracy" deal was kinda new in Athens. Herodotus talks about an earlier experiment in democracy that "ended in chaos". This is why our forefathers created a REPUBLIC and not a democracy. One of the problems today is nobody studies the Classics anymore...

[SauronOfMordor]

so has there ever been a succesfull dictatorship in either new or old world history? (really curious, has there been?)

What's your definition of success? Stability, welfare of the people, living standard and longevity of the dictator? If you define dictatorship as an autocracy, then all the old monarchies were dictatorship, and they lasted a long time.

[gcruse]

Successful dictatorship? I wonder if Napoleonic France was any worse than post-revolutionary France? I don't know if the definition of dictatorship would extend to the early days of Communist China, but if it did, the country was finally able to feed itself after generations of failure to do so. Other than that, I can't think of any.