Tyranny

Plato treats tyranny both as a form of government and as a condition of the soul. In the Republic, the tyrant is said to emerge from democracy as a protector of the people who, once armed with power, cannot stop feeding his appetites. He begins by canceling debts and redistributing land, playing the champion of the multitude. He then manufactures wars to keep the people dependent on his leadership, and he eliminates the courageous, the wise, and the wealthy, until he is surrounded only by slaves and flatterers. The degeneration of constitutions that produces this figure is treated more fully under the ideas of Democracy and Government.

The deeper claim is that tyranny is first a disorder within the individual. The tyrannical man is ruled by a master passion, an erotic appetite that dominates the rest and drives him to lawlessness. He is the opposite of the philosopher: where the philosopher's soul is ordered by reason, the tyrant's soul is ordered by its worst desire. In Book IX Socrates argues that this man is therefore the most miserable of human beings, whatever the appearances of power may suggest. He cannot trust anyone, lives in constant fear, and is a slave to the passions he seems to command. The analogy between the order of the city and the order of the soul, which runs through the Republic, is thus applied with particular force to the worst of both.

In the Gorgias, Plato makes a complementary argument through Socrates' confrontation with Callicles and Polus. The tyrant who can kill, exile, and confiscate at will has great power in the common sense of the word, yet no real power at all, because he cannot do what he truly wants, which is to live well. On this view, doing injustice harms the doer more than the victim. The tyrant's seeming omnipotence is his deepest bondage. The same problem of justice and the good life is taken up under the ideas of Justice and Happiness.

Plato's portrait of the tyrant as the most enslaved of men set terms that later writers either develop or contest. Aristotle shifts the emphasis from psychology to constitutional definition; modern discussions of despotism and absolute power continue to work, whether by agreement or by opposition, with the claim that the worst government mirrors the worst soul.

Aristotle defines tyranny by constitutional criteria rather than by the psychology of the ruler. In Politics Book III he classifies regimes by who rules (one, few, or many) and in whose interest (the common good or private advantage). Tyranny is the perversion of kingship: monarchy exercised as the rule of a master over political society. The tyrant governs unwilling subjects for his own benefit. On this account tyranny is the worst of constitutions, for it combines the concentration of power in one person with the complete absence of concern for the governed. Kings, he says, rule according to law over voluntary subjects and are guarded by their fellow citizens; tyrants rule over involuntary subjects and are guarded against them. The distinction between lawful and lawless rule is treated more fully under the ideas of Monarchy and Law.

In Book V Aristotle gives a detailed account of how tyrannies arise and how they are maintained. Tyrants come to power through demagoguery, military force, or the corruption of existing offices. They keep power by three principal strategies: keeping subjects humble, sowing mutual distrust, and making the people incapable of action. They suppress associations, banish men of spirit, forbid common meals and education, employ spies, impoverish their subjects through heavy taxation and public works, and start wars to keep the populace busy and dependent on a leader. These devices, he suggests, have a certain sameness across times and places, a point later writers from Tacitus to the Federalists echo when they describe the instruments of arbitrary rule.

Aristotle also describes a subtler mode of preservation: the tyrant who imitates the king. By appearing moderate, managing public finances responsibly, honoring the distinguished, and cultivating the appearance of piety, a tyrant may prolong his rule. Yet this only confirms the basic definition. The tyrant who acts like a king admits that tyranny in its naked form is hard to sustain. Of all forms of government, tyranny tends to be the shortest-lived, whether because might without right is inherently weak, or because fortune fails those who depend on force alone.

Aristotle's analysis gave later thinkers criteria for identifying tyranny that do not depend on the ruler's inner state but on the structure of the regime. Aquinas, Locke, and the writers of the Federalist all draw on his distinction between rule for the common good and rule for private advantage. Machiavelli, for his part, takes up the advice Aristotle gives the would-be tyrant and restates it without the classical moral frame.

Aquinas inherits Aristotle's constitutional definition of tyranny and places it within a Christian account of law and the common good. In On Kingship he argues that monarchy is the best form of government when exercised virtuously, because the rule of one best mirrors the divine government of the universe. Its corruption, tyranny, is correspondingly the worst, because the concentrated power that can do the most good can also do the most harm. Tyrannical government, he says, is altogether corrupt and completely lawless. The comparison of kingship and tyranny, and the standing of each among the forms of government, is treated more fully under the idea of Monarchy.

The tyrant's fundamental fault is the inversion of the common good. Government exists by natural law to serve the community. The tyrant redirects the apparatus of rule toward his own benefit: he seeks his own profit rather than the good of the multitude, oppresses his subjects by his power, and satisfies his own desires. Aquinas catalogs the effects: the tyrant makes good men suspect, discourages excellence (since the tyrant fears the virtuous), sows distrust, and reduces his subjects to servility. In this respect his description continues Aristotle's account of the devices by which tyrannies are preserved, while casting them as offenses against justice and the natural order of the state. The relation of law to the common good is considered further under the ideas of Law and Justice.

On the question of remedy Aquinas is careful. He opposes individual tyrannicide as opening the door to worse disorders. The proper response is collective: it belongs to the community, or to the superior authority that appointed the ruler, to depose the tyrant. In the Summa he makes the striking claim that the tyrant, not the people who resist him, is guilty of sedition, because sedition is a sin against the common good, and the tyrant is the one who has attacked it. When a king becomes a tyrant he has, in effect, dethroned himself and put himself in a state of war with his people. Questions of resistance and the right of revolution are taken up under the idea of Revolution.

Aquinas's claim that the tyrant is the true rebel against order gave later writers, from Reformation resistance theorists to Locke, a basis for arguing that resistance to tyranny is not lawlessness but the defense of law.

Machiavelli sets aside much of the moral vocabulary by which his predecessors condemned tyranny. In The Prince he replaces the question whether a ruler is just with the question whether a ruler can hold power. Cruelty, deception, and fear are treated as instruments of statecraft rather than simply as marks of wickedness. Chapter 8 distinguishes cruelty well used from cruelty badly used: the former is applied once, decisively, at the founding, and then diminished over time; the latter increases daily and eventually destroys the prince who practices it. The end in view is success in gaining and keeping power, and the means, in general, are force and fraud, or, as Machiavelli phrases it, the methods of the lion and the fox.

This is not, on its face, an endorsement of tyranny as Aristotle defined it. Machiavelli's preference, as the Discourses on Livy make clear, remains the republic. Yet he holds that the founding and renewal of political orders may require acts that classical morality would condemn. Romulus killed his brother; Moses slaughtered the idolaters; every founder of a new order had to be alone in authority and willing to use extraordinary means. The prince who inherits a corrupt state may have no choice but to act tyrannically in order to create the conditions for good government. Rousseau later calls The Prince "the book of Republicans" and thinks the choice of Cesare Borgia shows a hidden aim; other readers take the surface counsel at face value.

The challenge Machiavelli poses to the tradition is his separation of political virtue from moral virtue. A prince who keeps faith, and who is merciful and generous in all circumstances, will be destroyed by those who do not. The prince must learn when not to be good. This is not tyranny as rule for private advantage alone, but it is an acknowledgment that political necessity has its own logic. Aristotle had already listed the devices by which a tyrant maintains power; Machiavelli restates many of them without the classical frame of condemnation. Whether the collapse of such rule is due to the inherent weakness of might without right, or to the mishaps of fortune, tyranny of this kind tends, of all forms of government, to be short-lived. The relation of force to right is treated further under the ideas of Government and Revolution.

Machiavelli forced the tradition to face a possibility it had often avoided: that the line between the founder and the tyrant may be drawn less by moral character than by historical results. Hobbes absorbs something of this lesson about power; Montesquieu and the Federalists design institutions meant to make such extraordinary means less necessary.

Shakespeare takes up tyranny with particular concentration in Macbeth, though the subject is present in the history plays and in King Lear. What distinguishes the treatment is its interior character. The philosophical tradition from Plato through Aristotle and Aquinas had discussed tyranny chiefly as a political disorder, defined by the ruler's pursuit of his own advantage in place of the common good, and characterized by the fear and the suspicion under which both the ruler and his subjects were forced to live. Shakespeare takes over the substance of this account but treats it from the inside. The tyrant whom he shows is not in the first place a form of government but a man, and the deformation he undergoes is the deformation of a soul that has acted against what it knew.

Macbeth is not at the start of the play a man without conscience. He hears the prophecy, resists the temptation, is reproached by his wife, and finally yields; and from the moment of the murder he is aware that he has forfeited what could not be recovered. The ensuing reign is held by the same means that brought it into being: further killings, in a rising sequence that exhausts the confidence and finally the life of the tyrant himself. What the play makes visible, and what the political philosophers had stated more abstractly, is that a rule founded on a crime must be sustained by further crimes, and that the interior cost to the tyrant is the gradual destruction of his capacity to take any further pleasure in what he has secured. Richard III presents the same pattern in a colder register, and King Lear shows, in Goneril and Regan and Edmund, how the usurpation of what has not been earned breeds the division that ends in their ruin.

The questions raised belong also to the treatments of Monarchy, where the difference between the lawful king and the tyrant is discussed on its own terms, and to that of Revolution, where the question of resistance to tyranny is considered. What belongs properly to the idea of Tyranny is the Shakespearean insight that the tyrant is undone from within, and that the external disorders of the state are only the secondary effects of a disorder in the soul of the one who has taken what was not his.

Hobbes, who reads the Shakespearean tragedies with care, will argue that what the tragic tyrants dramatize is only the specific case of the general truth that a man who rules by conquest must rule by fear, and that fear of this kind is incompatible with the quiet enjoyment of the fruits of rule. Locke, whose argument against the absolute monarch is more political than psychological, will take the existence of tyrants of the Shakespearean type as one of the reasons why the doctrine of the divine right of kings is dangerous. The later discussions of tyranny in Montesquieu and in the Federalist inherit both the philosophical analysis and the dramatic picture.

Hobbes is, among the authors of the great books, the principal exception to the common disapproval of absolute power. In Chapter 19 of the Leviathan he declares that "tyranny" and "oligarchy" are not distinct forms of government but names expressing disapproval. They that are discontented under monarchy call it tyranny; they that are displeased with aristocracy call it oligarchy. There are only three forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy), distinguished by the number of rulers. Whether the ruler governs well or badly is a separate question and does not change the form. Used descriptively, he holds, the name of tyranny signifies nothing more nor less than the name of sovereignty, save that those who use the former word are understood to be angry with those they call tyrants.

This move follows from his theory of sovereignty. The sovereign holds absolute power by covenant; the subjects have authorized all his actions in advance. There can be no injustice by the sovereign against the subjects, because injustice means violating a covenant, and the sovereign made no covenant with the people. If the sovereign taxes heavily, wages war foolishly, or punishes arbitrarily, these may be sins against the law of nature and therefore against God, but they are not grounds for resistance. The subjects have no standing to judge. Though men may fancy many evil consequences of unlimited power, the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse. The nature of sovereignty and of the social compact is treated more fully under the ideas of Government and State.

Hobbes's target is the classical tradition itself. Aristotle's distinction between kingship and tyranny, Plato's portrait of the tyrant's soul, and Aquinas's justification of resistance are, for him, doctrines that incite sedition. When subjects learn from philosophy that they may judge their rulers and call them tyrants, they learn the first lesson of civil war. He holds Aristotle's Politics responsible for spreading the fallacy of regarding anything except popular government as tyrannical, and he blames Greek and Roman writers for fomenting sedition against kings by treating tyrannicide as lawful. A professed hatred of tyranny he identifies with hatred of commonwealth in general. The question of anarchy as the alternative to strong rule is considered under the ideas of Liberty and Revolution.

Hobbes's erasure of the concept of tyranny provoked a direct reply from Locke, who made the definition and identification of tyranny a central task of his political theory. Later liberal accounts of limited government may be read, in large part, as answers to this challenge.

Locke restores the concept of tyranny that Hobbes sought to dissolve and gives it a precise definition. Chapter 18 of the Second Treatise begins by distinguishing usurpation from tyranny: as usurpation is the exercise of power which another has a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to. Tyranny is not a form of government but a mode of governing. It can be practiced by one person or by many, by a king or by a parliament. Wherever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another's harm. Absolute arbitrary power, or governing without settled standing laws, can neither of them consist with the ends of society and government. The relation of law to legitimate rule is treated more fully under the ideas of Law and Government.

The criterion is whether the ruler governs according to law for the public good, or uses power for private ends. Locke insists that the distinction applies universally. He rejects the idea that only monarchies can be tyrannical: the exceeding the bounds of authority is no more a right in a great than a petty officer, no more justifiable in a king than a constable. Absolute monarchy, in which the ruler stands above the law and judges his own case, is on this view inconsistent with civil society, because it leaves the subjects with no impartial arbiter to whom they can appeal. For that reason it can be no form of civil government at all. Locke also distinguishes despotical dominion from tyranny: despotical power is the absolute arbitrary power one man has over another, as of a master over slaves or of a conqueror over those who aided a war against him in a just cause. Unlike tyranny, despotism so understood is not always "power beyond right."

When tyranny is established, the subjects possess a right of resistance. Locke holds that this right belongs to the people collectively, not to every discontented individual. A few acts of misgovernment do not justify rebellion. It is the long train of abuses, the systematic pattern that reveals a settled design to reduce the people to subjection, that triggers the right. At that point the ruler has already broken the compact. He has placed himself in a state of war with the people, and they may respond accordingly. When a king, by becoming a tyrant, has dethroned himself, nothing hinders the people from prosecuting him who is no king as they would any other man who has put himself in a state of war with them. Questions of resistance and revolution are considered under the idea of Revolution.

Locke's definition of tyranny as power exercised beyond right became the working concept of the liberal constitutional tradition. The American Declaration of Independence, with its catalog of abuses demonstrating a design to reduce the colonies under absolute despotism, follows this logic with some precision.

Montesquieu shifts the analysis of tyranny from the character of bad rulers to the structure of bad governments. In The Spirit of the Laws he identifies three forms of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic. Each is sustained by a distinct principle or spring: virtue in the republic, honor in the monarchy, fear in the despotism. The despot governs without fixed laws, by his will alone, and his subjects obey because they are afraid. This is not merely Aristotle's tyranny as a perverted monarchy; it is a form of government in which arbitrary power is the norm and liberty is structurally impossible. Despotic government is that in which a single person directs everything by his own will and caprice. The classification of governments and the principles that sustain them are treated more fully under the ideas of Government and Constitution.

The portrait of despotism in Books II and III draws on Montesquieu's study of the Ottoman and Persian empires, though his concern extends to the absolutist tendency within European monarchy. Under despotism, education is unnecessary, because obedience requires no learning; commerce is stifled, because property is insecure; and the despot himself may be ignorant, for he delegates everything to a vizier and lives for pleasure. The system degrades everyone within it, the ruler no less than the ruled. Like Aristotle and Hippocrates before him, Montesquieu attributes to climate and disposition something of the submissiveness of certain peoples to the excesses of despotism. He does not so much condemn despotism as he deplores the conditions that seem to render it natural for a large part of mankind. The comparison of free and servile conditions is considered further under the ideas of Liberty and Slavery.

The remedy proposed in Book XI is institutional: the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty. Constant experience shows that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it and to carry his authority as far as it will go. Tyranny is prevented not by the virtue of rulers alone but by the architecture of the state. Each power must be able to check the others. This is a structural guarantee, independent of the moral character of the individuals who hold office. In all other governments, even in monarchy when it is constitutional, the separation of powers puts some limitation on the power entrusted to the offices of state.

Montesquieu's institutional account of how tyranny is prevented entered constitutional practice with unusual directness. The Federalists adopted the separation of powers as an organizing principle of the American Constitution, and later liberal constitutions have generally been built on the premise that divided power is a structural antidote to despotism.

Rousseau draws a distinction that earlier writers had often left blurred. In The Social Contract he defines a tyrant as one who seizes royal authority in violation of the laws, and a despot as one who places himself above the laws entirely, usurping sovereign power. The tyrant is he who thrusts himself in contrary to the laws to govern in accordance with the laws; the despot is he who sets himself above the laws themselves. Thus the tyrant cannot be a despot, but the despot is always a tyrant. Both are illegitimate, because both have broken the social contract that alone gives political authority its foundation. On one negative point Rousseau seems to agree with Hobbes: he rejects Aristotle's distinction between the king and the tyrant as good and bad monarchs, the one governing for the good of his subjects, the other in his own interest. From that distinction, he contends, it would follow that from the beginning of the world there has not yet been a single king.

According to a more precise conception, Rousseau insists, the tyrant is an individual who arrogates to himself the royal authority without having a right to it. This is how the Greeks understood the word: they applied it indifferently to good and bad princes whose authority was not legitimate. Tyrant and usurper are thus perfectly synonymous terms. The usurpation of power is the root of both tyranny and despotism, but they are not for that reason to be confused. Other writers, including Locke, hold against Rousseau that tyranny always involves a self-serving or unjust use of power, not usurpation alone, and they reject his conception of despotism as inseparable from usurpation. The problem of legitimacy and of the origin of political authority is treated more fully under the ideas of Government and State.

In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau traces the origin of despotism to the development of private property and social hierarchy. Political institutions arose, on this account, less to protect natural equality than to entrench inequality. The social contract, when it was first formed, could be a fraud: the rich persuaded the poor to accept laws that secured the property of those who had it and kept those who did not in permanent subordination. Despotism is the final stage of this process, when one man rises above all others and reduces the distinction between rich and poor to the single distinction between master and slave. Rousseau's response is not Montesquieu's institutional architecture alone but the reconstitution of political life through the general will. Legitimate government requires that the people as sovereign body make the laws under which they live. Any government that separates the people from the exercise of sovereignty already tends toward despotism. Questions of popular sovereignty and of the general will are considered under the ideas of Democracy and Citizen.

Rousseau's analysis of despotism as rooted in inequality as well as in bad governance prepared the way for Hegel's historical treatment and for later critiques of bourgeois society. His insistence that sovereignty belongs inalienably to the people became a standard claim of democratic movements from the French Revolution onward.

The writers of the Federalist take Montesquieu's doctrine of the separation of powers and apply it to the design of a working constitution. Madison opens Federalist 47 with a declaration that has the force of a definition: the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. He reinforces the point by quoting Jefferson's dictum that concentrating all the powers of government in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. The task of the new Constitution is to prevent this accumulation while preserving a government energetic enough to act. The writers use the words "tyranny" and "despotism" interchangeably, without varying from Montesquieu's definition of despotic government as that in which a single person directs everything by his own will and caprice.

The solution developed across Federalist Nos. 47 through 51 is a layered system of checks. The three branches are separated but not sealed off from one another; each has partial agency over the others. The president may veto legislation; the Senate confirms appointments; the judiciary reviews the constitutionality of laws. Beyond the horizontal separation, federalism creates a vertical check: the national government and the state governments limit each other. Madison's claim is that separation alone is insufficient. The branches must have the constitutional means and the personal motives to resist encroachment. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition; the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. Hamilton notes that unwarranted searches and seizures, the creation of ex post facto crimes, and the arrest and punishment of men without trial have been in all ages the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The design of constitutional government is treated more fully under the ideas of Constitution and Government.

The Federalists are also alert to the tyranny of the majority, a form that Aristotle's classification of oligarchical and democratic excess anticipates in part, and that Locke's theory of power beyond right makes room for. In an extended republic with many factions, no single interest can easily form a majority coalition capable of oppressing a minority. The multiplicity of sects, interests, and parties is itself a structural defense against the tyranny that pure democracy makes possible. Advocates of republican or democratic institutions are as much concerned to safeguard constitutional government from the tyranny of special interests, whether of a dominant majority or of concentrated wealth, as they are to protect the rule of law from the encroachments of despotism. These concerns are taken up further under the ideas of Democracy and Oligarchy.

The Federalists' answer to tyranny is institutional design that uses self-interest to protect liberty, rather than moral exhortation or philosophical education alone. Tocqueville would soon ask whether that design could withstand the pressures of democratic society in practice.

Hegel places tyranny and despotism within a historical sequence rather than treating them only as permanent dangers to any political order. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History he divides world history into great epochs. In the Oriental world, only one person (the despot) is free, and that freedom is arbitrary caprice; the freedom of that one is only ferocity and brutal recklessness of passion, so that one is therefore only a despot, not a free man. In the Greek and Roman world, some are free. Only in the Germanic-Christian world does the principle emerge that all human beings are free. Despotism, on this view, belongs to a stage of historical development, the childhood of the human spirit, rather than to politics as such. Hegel calls despotism that state of affairs where law has disappeared and where the particular will as such, whether of a monarch or a mob, counts as law or rather takes the place of law. The historical development of freedom is treated more fully under the ideas of History and Liberty.

In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel develops this insight into a theory of the rational state. The state is not, as the liberal tradition from Locke to the Federalists often held, merely a necessary device designed to protect pre-political rights. It is the actuality of the ethical idea, the institutional form in which freedom becomes concrete. The rational state achieves through law and institutional life what the despot could not achieve through will alone: the reconciliation of individual freedom with the common good. Tyranny is the failure to reach this reconciliation, the persistence of a form of rule in which the will of one person substitutes for rational law. Both Hegel and Plato see in the alliance between a scheming demagogue and an unruly populace the step by which a corrupt democracy turns into a tyranny. The degeneration of democracy into tyranny is considered further under the ideas of Democracy and Revolution.

Hegel's critique extends also to what he considers the inadequacy of liberal constitutionalism. The mere separation of powers, he argues, may produce a state at war with itself, each branch checking the others in perpetual antagonism. The truly rational state integrates these functions into an organic whole, with the constitutional monarch serving as the point of individual will that gives the universal its determinate actuality. Despotic and constitutional government are thus contrasted not only by the location of sovereignty but by whether law or particular will takes its place. The nature of the state and of constitutional monarchy is treated under the ideas of State and Monarchy.

Hegel's historicization of tyranny shifted the question from how tyranny is prevented in every age to what form of political life history next requires. Marx would take a related logic and turn it against the liberal state itself, arguing that bourgeois democracy could be a new form of domination under the appearance of freedom.