despotism definition
despotism means one thing when its opposite is thought to be ‘liberty’; another thing, when ‘despotism’ is contrasted to ‘anarchy.’ A historical semantics which seeks to determine the meaning of single words often falls short of describing accurately what is entailed by a concept, understood as forming part of a larger structure of meaning, a semantic field, a network of concepts, or as an ideology, or a discourse. All these difficulties, familiar to English-speaking philosophers of language, have been identified by German conceptual historians, who have devised their own methods for dealing with them.” (Richter, 1995, pp. 9-10, our highlights).