The Era of Tyrannies Dates from August 1914

Writing in 1936, Halévy proposed a kind of baseline that has held up remarkably well. Finding the resulting new regimes characteristic of the era, he described them not as mere dictatorships but as tyrannies, connoting something provisional, an emergency expedient as opposed to a full-scale system of government:

The era of tyrannies dates from August 1914, that is, from the time when the belligerent nations turned to a system which can be defined as follows:

(a) In the economic sphere, greatly expanded state control of all means of production, distribution, and exchange;—and, at the same time, an appeal by the governments to the leaders of workers’ organizations to help them in implementing this state control—hence syndicalism and corporatism along with étatisme.

(b) In the intellectual sphere, state control of thought, in two forms: one negative, through the suppression of all expressions of opinion deemed unfavorable to the national interest; the other positive, through what we shall call the organization of enthusiasm.

 --David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (New York: Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2006), 166.