The word ‘tyrant’ was not originally Greek, but borrowed from some eastern language, perhaps in western Asia Minor. On the other hand, tyranny as it developed in the Greek cities in the archaic age would seem to have been initially an indigenous growth, independent of any intervention by foreign powers. It then became a constantly recurring phenomenon of Greek political and social life, so long as the Greeks enjoyed an independent history.

The word ‘tyrant’ was not originally Greek, but borrowed from some eastern language, perhaps in western Asia Minor. On the other hand, tyranny as it developed in the Greek cities in the archaic age would seem to have been initially an indigenous growth, independent of any intervention by foreign powers. It then became a constantly recurring phenomenon of Greek political and social life, so long as the Greeks enjoyed an independent history.

This chapter discusses the role played by guardians and tyrants in Star Wars. The Jedi align themselves with the light side of the Force, while the Sith align themselves with the dark side. Although the Jedi are guardians of the galaxy, they refrain from ruling directly, acting as willing servants of the Old Republic. In Attack of the Clones, Anakin Skywalker and Senator Amidala demonstrate the trajectory of Plato's thinking when they engage in a semi‐serious debate about the politics of (...) the Republic. Plato's views in the Republic mirror the different types of rule in the Star Wars galaxy surprisingly well: democracy is vulnerable, tyrants only care about their own interests, and guardians of peace and justice are the state's best chance for flourishing. While democracy fails, allowing the Emperor to become a malevolent tyrant, the Jedi Council is cut off in its service to the Republic. (shrink)

The forces of freedom are challenged everywhere by a newly energized spirit of tyranny, whether it is Jihadist terrorism, Putin's imperialism, or the ambitions of China's dictatorship, writes Waller R. Newell in this engaging exposé of a thousand dangers. We will see why tyranny is a permanent threat by following its strange career from Homeric Bronze Age warriors, through the empires of Alexander the Great and Rome, to the medieval struggle between the City of God and the City of Man, (...) leading to the state-building despots of the Modern Age including the Tudors and 'enlightened despots' such as Peter the Great. The book explores the psychology of tyranny from Nero to Gaddafi, and how it changes with the Jacobin Terror into millenarian revolution. Stimulating and enlightening, Tyrants: Power, Injustice, and Terror will appeal to anyone interested in the danger posed by tyranny and terror in today's world. (shrink)

What is the significance of the recurring link between tyranny and philosophy in Plato? Often, Plato’s treatment of tyranny is discussed either in the context of moral psychology—as a problem of agency, moral choice and akrasia — or political science, where it is the limit case of political decline. It is suggested, however, that a close inspection of the myth of Er and an elucidation of its neglected links, not just with the rest of the Republic but also with dialogues (...) such as the Philebus and the Symposium, shows that Socrates’ fascination with tyrannical characters points to a deeper theme — nature, and specifically the problem of its benevolence to our purposes and its very ambiguous relation to human excellence and degradation. Philosopher and tyrant, for all the radical differences between them, both illuminate the internal instability of the human being in Plato’s thought. (shrink)

What is the significance of the recurring link between tyranny and philosophy in Plato? Often, Plato’s treatment of tyranny is discussed either in the context of moral psychology—as a problem of agency, moral choice and akrasia — or political science, where it is the limit case of political decline. It is suggested, however, that a close inspection of the myth of Er and an elucidation of its neglected links, not just with the rest of the Republic but also with dialogues (...) such as the Philebus and the Symposium, shows that Socrates’ fascination with tyrannical characters points to a deeper theme — nature, and specifically the problem of its benevolence to our purposes and its very ambiguous relation to human excellence and degradation. Philosopher and tyrant, for all the radical differences between them, both illuminate the internal instability of the human being in Plato’s thought. (shrink)

This article considers a longstanding problem: what does the word τύραννος mean? And if it means ‘bad / tyrannical ruler’, why are good rulers called tyrants? The solution proposed here is that tyranny is not a fixed state of being, or not being, but instead a gradual process of development. To be called a tyrant, a ruler need not embody all the stereotypical traits of tyranny. If tyranny is, by definition, unconstitutional and illegitimate rule, then there may be no (...) clear moment at which one ceases to be a general or king and becomes a tyrant, only a process by which the tyrant gradually strengthens his rule and develops the negative attributes associated with absolute and illegitimate power. A strong trend in not only the political theory of Plato and Aristotle, but also Greek poetry and historiography in general, is to trace the decline of tyrannies from initially good and popular governments to ones that are despotic and unpopular: the tyrant’s progress. (shrink)

This essay examines the two means by which Machiavelli thought republics could address the political problem of predatory socio-economic elites: Healthy republics, he proposes explicitly, should consistently check the “insolence of the nobles” by establishing constitutional offices like the Roman tribunes of the plebeians; corrupt republics, he suggests more subtly, should completely eliminate overweening oligarchs via the violent actions of a tyrannical individual. Roman-styled tribunes, wielding veto, legislative and accusatory authority, contain the oppressive behavior of socio-economic elites during normal republican (...) circumstances. By contrast, having overthrown a republic grown corrupt through oligarchic encroachment on the commonweal, Machiavelli suggests that Greek-styled tyrants lay the foundation for a more robust—that is, more egalitarian and martial—republic down the road by eliminating elites entirely and by instituting economic redistribution and military reforms. (shrink)

In recent decades, the philosopher William Desmond (1951-) has offered both insightful readings of individual tragedies and a striking reformulation of old Aristotelian standbys like hamartia and catharsis. This reformulation grows out of his wider philosophy of the “between,” which stresses humans’ fundamental receptivity or “porosity.” For Desmond, tragedy strips away characters’ self-determination and returns them to porosity. The audience is returned to porosity as well, a process of exposure that can be harrowing, and at times leads to despair, but (...) that can also lead, in Desmond’s take on catharsis, to a renewed sense of the worth of fragile beings. Both tragic “being at a loss” and catharsis are important for philosophy because they resist determinate conceptualization. Tragedy reminds philosophy of its limits, and it challenges philosophy to attend to the intimate and the singular. This essay situates, synthesizes, and extends Desmond’s many reflections on tragedy. It focuses in particular on Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear. (shrink)

Athenian democracy is rightly recognized for its extensive network of accountability institutions. This essay focuses instead on popular unaccountability in democratic Athens: ordinary citizens participating but not speaking in the Courts and the Assembly were unaccountable. I explore possible justifications of popular unaccountability, including arguments from democratic sovereignty and epistemic arguments, and stress the importance of a third strand: the identification of jurors and assemblymen with deservedly unaccountable, because comparatively weak and powerless, idiōtai (private citizens), whose political activity failed to (...) reach a level requiring intense scrutiny and control. Nonetheless, such a justification was always tenuous in light of the power jurors and assemblymen collectively wielded in the city. As I show through a reading of Aristophanes’s Wasps, it was always possible to destabilize the juror idiōtēs identity and replace it with a much more troubling image: the identification of the juror with the dangerously unaccountable tyrant. (shrink)

"If being a humanitarian imperialist means advocating that the hegemon use its might to advance freedom, human rights, and democracy, then I am a humanitarian imperialist.".

At Quaestiones Graecae 32.298c–d, Plutarch raises the question, τίνες ο ειναται παρᾰ Μιλησίος, ‘Who were the Perpetual Sailors among the Milesians?’ he frames the circumstances of his answer using a genitive absolute clause: τν περ Θόαντα κα Δαμασήνορα τυράννων καταλυθέντων. In the absence of any other mention of these men in the extent sources, these words—especially the appellation τυράνων—have caused concern among editors and commentators of Plutarch. In the Teubner edition of 1935 Titchener changes τυράνων to the accusative τυράννους, while (...) Halliday in his Oxford commentary suggests that the word should be deleted as a gloss. Each of these suggested changes to the received text is motivated by the occurrence here of the common idiom ο πεί ⁺ Accus. nominis proprii. This expression is, from the time of Polybius on, frequently used by Greek historians to indicate succinctly a group or faction, especially one centred around an important personage. Furthermore, a rather odd periphrastic usage of this phrase has been identified by scholars of Greek grammar as common from at least the Roman period. In this usage, ο περί τινα I serves as the equivalent of the simple proper name. Thus τν περ Θόαντα κα Δαμασήνορα may be a periphrasis for Thoas and Damasenor alone. (shrink)

At Quaestiones Graecae 32.298c–d, Plutarch raises the question, τίνες οἰ ειναται παρᾰ Μιλησίος, ‘Who were the Perpetual Sailors among the Milesians?’ he frames the circumstances of his answer using a genitive absolute clause: τν περ Θόαντα κα Δαμασήνορα τυράννων καταλυθέντων. In the absence of any other mention of these men in the extent sources, these words—especially the appellation τυράνων—have caused concern among editors and commentators of Plutarch. In the Teubner edition of 1935 Titchener changes τυράνων to the accusative τυράννους, while (...) Halliday in his Oxford commentary suggests that the word should be deleted as a gloss. Each of these suggested changes to the received text is motivated by the occurrence here of the common idiom οἵ πεί ⁺ Accus. nominis proprii. This expression is, from the time of Polybius on, frequently used by Greek historians to indicate succinctly a group or faction, especially one centred around an important personage. Furthermore, a rather odd periphrastic usage of this phrase has been identified by scholars of Greek grammar as common from at least the Roman period. In this usage, οἱ περί τινα I serves as the equivalent of the simple proper name. Thus τν περ Θόαντα κα Δαμασήνορα may be a periphrasis for Thoas and Damasenor alone. (shrink)

According to classical and postclassical sources, the early Greek turannoi were, by definition, illegitimate rulers who overturned existing political arrangements and installed rogue monarchic regimes in their place. And on this one fundamental point at least, modern observers of archaic turannides seem to have little quarrel with their ancient informants. To this day, it remains axiomatic that Cypselus, Peisistratus, and the rest were autocrats who gained power by usurpation. Whatever their individual accomplishments, they were still, in a word, "tyrants." Relying (...) mostly on evidence from the contemporary literary and material records, my paper aims to challenge this time-honored conventional wisdom and restore the first turannoi to the political mainstream. (shrink)

Plato's Republic presents the characters of the philosopher and the tyrant as similar. Strongly focused by indiscriminate erotic motivation, both defy convention and lack familiar emotional responses, which make them appear to be mad. This essay argues that Plato put forward these parallels partly in order to defend Socrates from the charge of corrupting the young, partly to present a possible way to overthrow the current regime and partly to show the ineffectiveness of democracy. The very best leaders may (...) look like tyrants; it is only through proper philosophical education that their true natures can be discerned. (shrink)

Wreathed in myrtle, my sword I'll conceal Like those champions devoted and brave, When they plunged in the tyrant their steel And to Athens deliverance gave. (Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Hymn to Harmodius an...

This article argues against the long-enduring practice of Josephan scholarship to treat the termsτύραννος(‘tyrant’) andλῃστής(‘brigand’) as a collocation, or as undistinguished terms of invective employed by Josephus against various Jewish antagonists in hisBellum Judaicum(=BJ). Towards this aim, the article first examines the frequency in which these two terms appear together throughout the text of theBJ, before turning to a critical examination of particular passages that feature the terms, in order to prove that they are, in fact, not used as (...) undistinguished terms of invective but as terms pertaining to two distinct classes of people: renegade aristocrats vying with their peers for absolute power (the ‘tyrants’) and their gangs of foot soldiers comprising men from the lower classes (the ‘brigands’). The article concludes that Josephus used these terms in this manner in order to convey to his readership, which largely consisted of Roman aristocrats, that the ringleaders of the Judaean revolt which raged betweena.d.66–73 were akin to renegades who periodically wreaked havoc on Rome's own aristocracy, often with devastating consequences for class and country alike. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to shed light upon Bitinna's reference to a goddess who is described as ‘tyrant’ in Herondas 5.77. Light is also shed on the delineation of Bitinna's character and social status in terms of the immediate context of mimiamb 5 as well as of the wider Alexandrian cultural context of Herondas' work. Bitinna's reference is for the first time examined in relation to the depiction of her character and it is shown that the goddess- (...) class='Hi'>tyrant must be Aphrodite. (shrink)

In recent years, most political theorists have agreed that shame shouldn't play any role in democratic politics because it threatens the mutual respect necessary for participation and deliberation. But Christina Tarnopolsky argues that not every kind of shame hurts democracy. In fact, she makes a powerful case that there is a form of shame essential to any critical, moderate, and self-reflexive democratic practice. Through a careful study of Plato's Gorgias, Tarnopolsky shows that contemporary conceptions of shame are far too narrow. (...) For Plato, three kinds of shame and shaming practices were possible in democracies, and only one of these is similar to the form condemned by contemporary thinkers. Following Plato, Tarnopolsky develops an account of a different kind of shame, which she calls "respectful shame." This practice involves the painful but beneficial shaming of one's fellow citizens as part of the ongoing process of collective deliberation. And, as Tarnopolsky argues, this type of shame is just as important to contemporary democracy as it was to its ancient form. Tarnopolsky also challenges the view that the Gorgias inaugurates the problematic oppositions between emotion and reason, and rhetoric and philosophy. Instead, she shows that, for Plato, rationality and emotion belong together, and she argues that political science and democratic theory are impoverished when they relegate the study of emotions such as shame to other disciplines. (shrink)

This essay argues that Callicles is depicted by Plato in the Gorgias as a potential tyrant from a psychological standpoint. To this end I will contend that the Calliclean moral psychology sketched at 491e-492c points towards the analysis of the tyrannical individual pursued by Plato in books VIII and IX of the Republic based upon the tripartite theory of the soul. I will thereby attempt to show that (i) in the Gorgias, Callicles does not actually personify the ideal of (...) the superior person advocated by himself insofar as he is still susceptible to shame, as evinced by Socrates' cross-examination (494c-495a); and that (ii) looking forward to the Republic, he can be understood for this same reason as being precisely on the threshold between the democratic and the tyrannical soul. (shrink)

In Chinese history the periods known as Spring and Autumn (770-476 BC) and the Warring States (475-221 BC) were times of conflict and political instability caused by the increasing power of centralized and competing states. During this time of crisis many schools of thought appeared to offer different philosophical doctrines. This paper describes and studies ideas about the limitation of power defended by these different schools of ancient Chinese thought, and suggests some reasons why they failed to prevent the emergence (...) of an authoritarian imperial government in early China. (shrink)

This paper examines the conceptual development of the philosophical justifications for tyrannicide. It posits that the political philosophy of tyrannicide can be categorised into three distinct periods or models, the classical, medieval, and liberal, respectively. It argues that each model contained unique themes and principles that justified tyrannicide in that period; the classical, through the importance attached to public life and the functional role of leadership; the medieval, through natural law doctrine; and the liberal, through the postulates of social contract (...) theory. Subsequent analysis of these different models however, reveals that these historical models are unable to provide a sufficient philosophical basis for a contemporary justification of tyrannicide. In Part II, it will be contended that a reinvigorated conception of self-defence, a theme common to all three models, when coupled with the modern notion of universal human rights, may provide the foundation for a contemporary theory of tyrannicide. (shrink)

In certain contemporary theories of the politics of shame, shame is considered a pernicious emotion that we need to avoid in, or a salutary emotion that serves as an infallible guide to, democratic deliberation. The author argues that both positions arise out of an inadequate notion of the structure of shame and an oversimplistic opposition between shame and shamelessness. Plato's dialogue, the Gorgias, actually helps to address these problems because it supplies a deeper understanding of the place of shame in (...) democratic politics in ways that address our contemporary dilemmas. It does this first, by avoiding the simple opposition between shame and shamelessness and secondly, by articulating three different kinds of "politics of shame" that can characterize democratic deliberations. Finally, Plato's treatment of shame extends upon contemporary ethical and psychoanalytic notions of shame in ways that are directly relevant to the our contemporary political situation. (shrink)

El artículo es un estudio detallado del panfleto “An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex” (1696). Ofrece una reconstrucción de su estructura argumentativa y un análisis de sus estrategias retóricas. El marco teórico y metodológico empleado es histórico y sistemático: buscamos contextualizar el escrito en el campo intelectual de la ilustración británica en los albores del siglo xviii, así como también interponer una perspectiva de género contemporánea para la examinación de los argumentos empleados, del despliegue retórico del discurso y (...) de las conclusiones filosóficamente más robustas. En especial, el artículo defiende la emergencia de una dicotomía naturaleza-historia que permite a la autora, por un lado, desenmascarar una situación de dominio masculino críticamente reconocible como antecedente directo de las discusiones feministas contemporáneas y, por el otro, ofrecer una vía retórica para la conformación y reconfiguración de un ethos y un pathos femenino. (shrink)

This volume, with contributions from scholars in political science, literature, and philosophy, examines the mutual influence of reason and religion at the time of the American Founding.

This is the final part of a series of two papers that have examined the conceptual development of the philosophical justifications for tyrannicide. While Part I focused on the classical, medieval, and liberal justifications for tyrannicide, Part II aims to provide the tentative outlines of a contemporary model of tyrannicide in world politics. It is contended that a reinvigorated conception of self-defence, when coupled with the modern understanding of universal human rights, may provide the foundation for the normative validity of (...) tyrannicide in contemporary world politics. (shrink)

Solon's fragments 9–11 are preserved in three late authors: frr. 9 and 11 by Diodoros Sikelos , 9.20.2, Plutarch , Solon 3.6 and 30.3 respectively, and Diogenes Laertios , 1.50 and 1.51 respectively; and fr. 10 by Diogenes Laertios alone, 1.49. They are all quoted in the context of Solon's reaction to Peisistratos. Stories on this theme were circulating by the time of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia , and Rhodes' scepticism about them is well founded. Its author did not garnish (...) his version of events with these poems, nor indeed with any Solonian utterance, and he explicitly states that myth-making on this subject had already resulted in two stories about Solon and Peisistratos which were chronologically impossible. (shrink)

This paper discusses David Gauthier’s attempt to refine the theory underlying constrained maximization so that it ceases to have a certain implication that he regards as objectionable. It argues that the refinement Gauthier introduces may be initially appealing, but actually does his theory more harm than good.

As one might expect of an author of the complexity of John of Salisbury, there is little scholarly agreement regarding the proper interpretation of the major features of his social and political thought. The twelfth-century church-man has always been a controversial figure. Since the late Middle Ages, the ideas contained in his main contribution to political theory, the Policraticus , have been widely analyzed and interpreted. In more recent years, controversy has raged about the nature and significance of many of (...) his main doctrines , his source materials, and his attitudes towards contemporary events and people. (shrink)