The Tyrant Is Dead...Or Is He?

A symposium entitled "Tyranny, Ancient and Modern" was held recently at the University of Chicago, debating the relative merits of concepts like "tyranny," "totalitarianism," and so on...The discussion was sparked, it seems, by Mark Lilla's 2002 essay in the NYROB [unfortunately not free!]. The Boston Globe reported on the proceedings in a fairly lengthy article; here's an excerpt:

...there are regimes and movements that fall way to the tyrannical side of that gray zone. And far from being a purely 20th-century phenomenon, the writer Paul Berman argued, totalitarianism is the true modern successor to classical tyranny. It combines a revolt against modern liberalism with a grotesque perversion of the soul -- the very notion at the heart of the ancients' definition of tyranny. The austere creed of liberalism, with its foundation in reason, "is not satisfying to the soul," which craves more than parliamentary debate and legislative efficiency, Berman said. We have to recognize the totalitarian impulse as both a spiritual rebuke to -- and consequence of -- that liberalism.

Looked at this way, Berman argued, ostensibly antithetical movements such as Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's secular Ba'athism exist on a continuum of totalitarianism. Berman reiterated his support for the Iraq war as a strike against a "weak link" in the totalitarian system -- hardly a popular position at the gathering -- though he was highly critical of the conduct of the occupation. (Musing over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Nathan Tarcov concluded, "There are tyrannical desires in everyone, not just the ancient Greeks.")

For some definitions and background, the author of the article writes:

As the ancients generally understood it, a "tyrant" was a king who had succumbed to base desires and ceased to rule legitimately. Greek thinkers viewed tyranny as a perversion of the spirit, a triumph of Eros over the nobler instincts of reason and restraint. Crucially, they made no simple opposition between tyranny and democracy; Socrates argued that everyone has tyrannical instincts, and that an excessive desire for freedom can itself lead to tyranny.

Keep in mind, however, that "tyrant" was not necessarily a dirty word in archaic Greece, nor did they typical archaic tyrant start out as a king--see (e.g.) the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2nd ed.--sorry!), under "tyranny":

...the illegal monarchy which was usurped by individuals in many oligarchic city-states of the seventh and the sixth centuries B.C., the 'age of tyrants'....It was not a special form of constitution or a reign of terror; that bad sense was attached to it later, especially by the democratic polis of the fifth century which glorified the tyrannicide, and by the political philosophers, e.g. Plato...Tyranny of the older type mostly arose from political and economic leadership of the lower classes, and often prepared the rise of democracy.

[Thanks to Peter at Changes in the Glass, who also offers his own comments on the story.]

Comments

[Mario Turchetti]

I am pleased to inform you that some scholars are trying to hide from the American readers the existence of a French book, which perhaps inspired - from October 2002 - the American debate about ancient and modern tyranny. Here is the title: Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l'Antiquité à nos jours, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2001 (septembre), 1044 pages.
My compliments for your website.
Best, M. Turchetti