The words “tyrant” and “despot”1 have changed little in meaning since their origins in ancient Greek. They had, and still have, a common significance: that is, they denote someone who rules with absolute power. While not as good ethically as “monarch,” for the Greeks of Antiquity the tyrant could be a governor who rules somewhat favorably, or on occasion quite favorably toward his citizen-subjects. “Tyranny” would become an entirely negative type of perverted government, when some of the major medieval commentators took up the term. The few exceptions were the readers of Aristotle’s lengthy passage on how tyrants can learn to stay in power. But the ethical aspects of ruling or governing with absolute power frame the first common mark of tyranny (to use Bodin’s term).
This book is about what tyrants do. It is about important boundaries that more often than not are vague in society, that may be drastically altered or destroyed by the politics of the tyrant, which is nothing but ruling for his immediate personal advantage. Specific tyrannical actions do not simply break laws, undermine institutions, intimidate or murder judges, and in one way or another empty the common public treasury into the tyrant’s own pockets. Tyrants above all destroy public discourse and foster a climate of fear.
Our twenty-first-century mindsets balk at the very idea that the specific abuses of power and uses of violence would be so transhistorical as to be recognizable in Greece (Athens) under the sometime tyrant Pisistratus or his tyrannical sons, in Rome under Tiberius and Nero, in Sicily under Emperor Frederick II in the thirteenth century, in Milan under the Visconti and the Sforza, in Florence under Walter of Brienne, in England under Richard III, and in France under Louis XI and Henry III.
The simple act of murdering one’s political opponent may, of course, have extenuating circumstances2; but if someone ordered the murder and if it occurred without a legal investigation or judgment, it is a crime, not an execution. According to his subjects in the Holy League, Henry III of France watched as the Duke of Guise and his brother the Cardinal of Guise were murdered. Indeed, by adding legal actions post-mortem Henry asserted that he had had them “executed.”
For a public, one tyrannical act does not a tyrant make, unless it is very criminal. The degree of the tyrannical acts, their frequency, and their logical relations that constitute an attack on established laws and institutions gradually bring the charge of tyranny to the public mind. Here memory and history each play a part.
Over the centuries, descriptions of tyrannical acts have often prompted readers to think of them as commonplace. And it is true that the entire vocabulary about heinous human political conduct is limited, is amazingly stable. Indeed, this vocabulary is often found in loci .3 That is, in commonplaces that are the bane of intellectuals who seek more contemporary social vocabularies. Still, thanks to the power of their imaginations, poets, playwrights, and artists have created works that interpret corruption and violence. The tyrannical act becomes encrusted with horror and beauty. Only in the late nineteenth century did there appear new social-scientific, psychological, and aesthetic vocabularies that enriched political culture across the world. And would-be tyrants were not above creating their own “wooden languages.” To think the word “tyrant” is one thing; to say it in the presence of others, or to write it, are escalations or strengthening of signification. Writing “tyrant” in a letter and writing it in a treatise on politics have very different valences of meaning.
Orwell’s 1984 gave, and will always give, an immense shock to the routine discourses about abuse of power: discourse is suffocated and routine vocabulary is pared down to the essential words. Some of the most significant descriptive remarks about vocabulary and fear are, in fact, commonplaces.
The context provided for interpreting the actions of tyrants will consist of brief biographies of the writers, some of whom constitute the canon of political philosophy. Some attention will be given to their political activism and to the persons to whom they addressed “their” writings.
In addition to the lists of tyrannical acts that characterize one or another tyrant, there are numerous historical examples, drawn from the Bible, from ancient Greek and Roman history, and, in the cases of Bodin and Boucher, from more recent history. Some of these acts are included by commentators when it seems that there may be a contradiction between moral precepts and historical examples. In works from the later sixteenth century, most of these lists are found in texts of intense political engagement. Although Seyssel and Hotman have little to say about tyranny, their contribution to conceptions of power—as it has been preserved in their history-myth writing about the French past—accounts for their presence here.
It will not surprise readers of the history of political thought to learn that Aristotle’s Politics looms over this entire project, down to its terminal reading by Jean Boucher, titled De Justa abdicatione,4 which contains the longest list of the attributes of tyrannical misconduct yet found. All the readings predate 1590, with a concentration on works written in France during that great period of “troubles” known as the Wars of Religion. This is a book for non-specialist readers. Consequently, there will be the inevitable disappointment resulting from my misreadings, inaccuracies, and infelicities in this account of the reception of one or another edition of the Politics.5 With the exception of John of Salisbury and Erasmus, very little commentary has been found that, taking a human-nature perspective, argues that some people are born to be tyrannical.
Brief Historical Contexts
The biographical and general historical contexts6 developed here are brief but illuminating for interpreting the texts. Plato had the famous tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse and his son, called Dionysius II, very much on his mind when he wrote about tyranny. Several times Aristotle mentions Pisistratus, the Athenian tyrant who was not always tyrannical. Xenophon’s Hiero was a known historical figure. Seneca the Younger refers to Sulla the dictator, and later to Seneca’s pupil Nero.
The medieval writers on tyranny—John of Salisbury (1115/1120–1180), Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and Giles of Rome (1243–1316)—vary. There are specificities drawn from actual dedications to princes, and there are silences that prompt speculation.
The humanist writers of the Renaissance—Machiavelli, Claude de Seyssel, Guillaume Budé, Erasmus, and Thomas More—are writing in what A.F. Pollard referred to as the Age of New Monarchy.7 Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, and Charles I of Spain (also known as Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor), shared a monarchical political culture of beliefs in their absolute powers, manifest displays of magnanimity, luxury, and arbitrariness. Pollard’s thesis on new monarchy did not survive the scrutiny of his fellow historians, who delighted in proposing example...