I've long believed that a civilization's natural, or sensible power structure reflects two things: the communications technology available, and the size of the

I've long believed that a civilization's natural, or sensible power structure reflects two things: the communications technology available, and the size of the economic/political structure. Greek city states could have a (slave-owning) democracy, because they were small enough that politically relevant information could travel to most of the citizens fast enough for them to act on a relevant opinion. But as states became empires, the communications became stretched across wide distances, and a more autocratic system had to come into play - ordinary citizens could not get relevant information fast enough to make political choices. But as we got modern postal services, the telegraph and so on, economic events on one side of a continent became pertinent to people on the other, and they would hear of them in short order. The technology made people feel invested in a nation's politics, so they could, and felt they had a right to, participate. So I would have said that in today's information society, in the age of TV and Wikileaks, a 5-man dictatorship can't effectively function. Too many people feel too invested in national and world events to permit it without a Soviet-style iron control of channels of information. But the effect of corporate money on what kind of information gets mainstream attention is a whole other question.