Marcus Aurelius comes to mind. Had pretty absolute power, but unlike so many other Roman emperors (ie Caligula or Caracalla), didn't kill many of his own people, didn't extravagantly waste state funds on himself, and spent his reign acting in what he sincerely thought were the best interests of Rome.

As to your argument that autocracy isn't inherently bad, I have to disagree. While its true that every now and then you get a good autocrat, having the success or failure of an entire system of government rest on the competence and morality of one man is playing with fire. This is illustrated by the dozens of incompetent/brutal/ineffective autocrats found in history for every one enlightened one. For example, take Marcus Aurelius's son Commodus, who was a brutal tyrant.

Sorry, we don't allow throughout history questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.