The seminar examines the conceptual and political history of dictatorship. It traces its origins in antiquity but is especially focused on modern notions and historical cases of dictatorship from Bonapartism to fascism and Cold War dictatorships in Latin America and Europe. We will treat dictatorship as a central yet evolving borderline concept through which we can explore and interrogate the themes of emergency rule, state of exception, revolution, and the making of the modern state by emphasizing the relationship between power, sovereignty, law, sedition, war, and violence. The seminar also focuses on the justifications that have informed theories of dictatorship in an attempt to elucidate and reconstruct the broader paradigm of politics that became associated with this concept. Respectively, we will critically investigate the historical impact of the concept and the practice of dictatorship in terms of violence and its antagonistic relation to democracy.