Tyrants

Waller R. Newell: Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 54, Number 4, July/ August 2017.

 

Like Napoleon on the battlefield, tyrants delight in stealing a march on their enemies—those decent if stolid legitimists of monarchic, aristocratic, or republican leanings. Newell writes this book to smarten us up, cut our complacency and prevent us from sputtering denials of a reality we prefer to overlook: tyranny remains a perennial possibility in political life. That being so, we had better know it when we see it.

For example, we would confuse ourselves less when we think about terrorism if we understood that terrorists “are tyrants in waiting, and tyrannies, once established, continue to terrorize their captive subjects.” To put it in the terms of classical political science, tyranny is a regime, the tyrant a human type. Being (so to speak) a natural deformation of nature, the would-be tyrant will always be with us, and the regime he aspires to found will appear when he gets lucky and the rest of us don’t.

Newell identifies three kinds of tyrants. “Garden-variety” tyrants treat their country as personal property, using it for the profit and pleasure of themselves and, secondarily, their clan and cronies. Ancient examples include Hiero I and the Emperor Nero; modern examples include Generalissimo Franco and President Mubarak. “Reformer” tyrants “really want to improve their society and people”; in ancient times they built empires (Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Julius Caesar) and in modern times they’ve built centralized states (Louis XIV, Napoleon I, Ataturk). “Millenarian” tyrants arose only in the modern world, beginning with Robespierre. They seek “to bring about a society of the future in which the individual will be submerged in the collective and all privilege and alienation will forever be eliminated,” characteristically by means of “utopian genocide” committed against enemies of all humanity who stand in the way of consummating the glorious future of the human race. After Robespierre, mankind enjoyed more than a century of freedom from the millenarians, but the twentieth century saw their return in a phalanx including Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot. Today’s jihadists mimic them.

Why are millenarian tyrants so recent? Newell points to Machiavelli as the proximate cause—specifically, to his claim that human beings with a sufficiency of a certain sort of virtue, very different form the sorts admired by the classical philosophers or the ancient religions—could master the cycle of fortune and ultimately master nature itself. Although Machiavelli might have frowned upon millenarian tyranny as absurdly unrealistic, he did tempt men to question exactly what the limits of reality might be for a sufficiently leonine and vulpine prince. It remained for Rousseau to take the crucial step of regarding not only the natural world outside our bodies as an object of mastery but of contending that human nature itself has proven malleable, a thing to be shaped and reshaped by political and social institutions designed by a Founder. In the minds of natural-born tyrants, this notion has led to “the beautification of violence”—the conviction that the apparent ugliness of bloodshed can bring about a radical transformation of our now-prosaic and less-than-noble selves, a new earth created not by God but by man, with the Leader pointing the way. If “the revolutionary’s zeal for punitive justice is, quite simply, an independent variable in political behavior that will never go away,” belief in the conquest of human nature and the promise of a shining tomorrow authorizes that perennial passion to commit the vastest crimes—called crimes against humanity by the bourgeois bootlickers of capitalism, but in the tyrant’s mind crimes for humanity, and indeed for the transcendence of mere humanity as it has hitherto been supposed to be.

Newell devotes each of the three main parts of his book to a learned but also readable (at times even breezy) account of these tyrannical types; he does not do them the honor of taking them with the intense seriousness they demand. In his earlier book, Tyranny: A New Interpretation, he presented an elaborately footnoted, scholarly survey of the topic; in this book, intended for a general audience, there is not a footnote to be found. He intends to write something of a page-turner, and brings it off with gusto. Tyrants and tyranny scarcely become glamorous under his sharp eyes, but they are quite interesting.

Charged with anger and eros, young men imagine themselves as demigods. This makes them prey to tyrannical ambitions and keen to terrorize. Homer’s Achilles really is a demigod, slighted by an older man in authority over a woman, even as a dispute over a woman sparked the war in which they are fighting. Troy served as a buffer state between the great Hittite empire and such marauding Hellenes; Newell suspects Helen’s abduction to have been a pretext for a more serious geopolitical struggle between the freedom-loving but (or perhaps therefore) ever-quarrelsome Greeks and the Great King. Achilles charges the decidedly less-than-great king, Agamemnon, with tyranny in arrogating Achilles’ Trojan captive, Briseis, for himself. As young men will do, he magnifies this slight into a grievance against the cosmos and even the gods. The struggle, then, pits an old, legitimate king acting arbitrarily—a kind play a bit of the tyrant—against a young, impassioned allied chieftain whose passions might turn him into a tyrant if he, or someone else, does not moderate them. The Iliad educates its listeners in such moderation, in part by the very means of giving grand passions their innings—an anticipation of the purgation felt by audiences of the later tragedies written by Aeschylus an Sophocles. Newell observes two things about tyranny in Greek antiquity; it was limited in scope, entertaining no ambitions of world domination, and the Greeks thought up civilizing remedies for the tormented souls of tyrants-in-the-making, beginning with the Homeric epics but in some respects ending with Socratic philosophy.

The Greeks fought the other form of ancient tyranny practiced by the great Eastern monarchs. The Hittites, but also the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians all attempted rule “of the entire world.” Their emperors practiced monotheism, not the polytheism of the confederated, monarchic city-states of Greece; they also inclined to divinize themselves, more or less in parallel to the One God above. They won wealth and honor by overseeing vast architectural and engineering projects still impressive in their ruin. They also tolerated diverse religious practices within their domains. Nonetheless, “whatever their achievements for the peoples they ruled, these eastern monarchs were tyrants.” Whereas for Aristotle the distinction between king and tyrant is clear—the king rules parentally, for the good of his subjects, while the tyrant rules for hi own good, like a master over slaves—Newell prefers to express this dichotomy as a paradox or at least question: Can tyrants, ruling “unconstrained by an aristocracy of near-equals,” nonetheless “achieve good things”?

The question becomes acute when West meets East in the persons first of Alexander the Great and then Caesar Augustus. After a tutorship under Aristotle, Alexander “saved the Greeks by conquering them and finally making them united” in imitation of Aristotle’s “perfect monarch” of the Politics III. 17. He effected not only regime change among the peoples he conquered but also a revolution in what might be called their state-forms as well: “The numerous cities he founded were, in effect, replicas of the Greek polis air-lifted to Mesopotamia, Assyria, and Egypt, each complete with an agora, a local council, gymnasium, temples, theater, and schools”—a touch of “local self-government” within an imperial framework that protected its smaller components. Rome faced the problem from the opposite end, beginning as a republican city-state, conquering an empire for itself, and then raising up a monarch to govern what it had seized. Permanent commander-in-chief, endowed with tribunal and priestly powers, Augustus required that “every aspect of Roman life including art, literature, architecture, and religion must conform to and glorify the new Augustan principate.” (This included patronizing Virgil, so it does help when the emperor-tyrant has good taste). While to some degree imitating the Eastern despots in the vastness of his empire and the self-assigned divinity of his person, Augustus worshipped Apollo, not Dionysus; he condemned Antony and Cleopatra, Hollywood stars with armies, as the decadents they were—Eastern, all too Eastern. “In effect,” Newell writes with donnish amusement, “Augustus was the first Orientalist.”

Relying on its local allies, the land-owning aristocrats, the Roman imperial monarchy swayed from what Aristotle would call kingship to outright tyranny; no less civilized a man than Edward Gibbon (who strikes me as Newell’s favorite historian) famously judged the post-Neronian period of the Good Emperors as “the happiest of mankind.” Their model, Augustus, deployed the “image of Achilles-like youthful courage and sublime beauty” as “the outward camouflage for what was in fact a universal despotism, pharaoh in a toga.” But a moderate pharaoh, one whose Achillesian tendencies either moderated with maturity or were prudently used for temporary show on the way to supreme authority. Either way, the classical way of inflecting spiritedness and eroticism toward protection and betterment of the people(s) ruled proved both effective and more or less just.

Two lines of thought intervened to change this, as Newell explains in his description of tyranny’s second modern form—the one associated with the modern state. He sides with Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Gibbon in charging that Christianity “undermined the moral fiber of the Roman Empire and thereby sped its decline by dividing men’s loyalties between what Augustine saw as a merely fleshly, sinful, and temporary sojourn here on earth and the infinitely greater happiness of the afterlife that awaits us.: He also inclines to regard Constantine as an emulator of the “eastern god-kings, the Pharaohs, Nebuchadnezzar, and Cyrus the Great—that is, a politically effective ruler without an Augustinian-Christian bone in his body. “Christianity’s [putative] champion was a ruthless, brutal despot knee-deep in blood,” having “strangled his own son with his bare hands for suspected plotting” in a gesture difficult to attribute to either fatherly or agapic tough love. Once comfortably empowered, soi-disant Christians “were more than happy to employ the murderous tools of the imperial City of Man once they had it on their side.” For the first time, “tyranny started to become ideological, a religious predecessor of later secular ideologies like Communism claiming to possess ‘the unity of theory and practice’ enforced by an all-powerful state.”

Western Christianity turned a different way. There, the Papacy established spiritual authority well before anything like a revival of the Roman Empire could be undertaken—famously by Charlemagne, but not until the middle of the eighth century. The Holy Roman Empire “was an uneasy blend of secular and divine authority that could never achieve the Caesaropapist fusion of the two spheres because of the spiritual supremacy of the Popes.” Aristocrats retained the political space necessary to resist centralization, leading to such assertions of civil and property rights against the state seen in Magna Carta. Thomas Aquinas’ recovery of Aristotelian political philosophy enhanced this appreciation of the political among Christians, even if he preferred genuinely pious monarchs to Aristotle’s favored “aristocracy of virtuous gentlemen.” “Unlike Augustine, Thomas’s [philosophy] conceded that citizen virtue had its place in the Great Chain of Being as the first run on an ascent that enabled us to aspire to goodness and, therefore, prepare for our future in heaven”—even if “it was no more than the first rung.”

Western Christendom’s compromise between spiritual and secular authority saved political liberty there; Newell points to the contrast between today’s western and eastern section of Ukraine to illustrate the longevity of the difference between an ethos of liberty and an ethos of Caesaropapist tyranny. But the compromise proved vulnerable to a new formulation of “reform” tyranny: “the absolute monarch as the builder of the modern state.” Machiavelli provided the new moral and political template: rejection of classical and Christian virtue for virtù coupled with the institutional device of a centralized but not necessarily imperial state that brought both aristocrats (with their classical or gentlemanly virtues) and churchmen (with their Christian virtues) firmly to heel. Machiavelli intended this new moral-political dispensation to fire an aspiration to conquer fortune and nature. With the Protestant Reformers finding themselves in need of just such a state in order to protect themselves from Roman-Catholic monarchs and popes, state-building reformer-tyrants exploited a rare coincidence of atheistic and theistic purposes.

Keeping with his theme of the importance of liberal education as a cure of tyrannical passion seen in young men, Newell observes that Machiavelli rejected the core of that education as preserved in the great Christian universities. The young prince needs not moderation but “the ferocity of the lion [combined with] the cunning of a fox,” and he will learn this from a new mentor, a new prince of princes, Machiavelli himself. Newell shows how the Tudors in England, the Bourbons in England, the Romanovs in Russia, and Frederick the Great in Prussia all adapted Machiavelli’s precepts to their own political circumstances, instantiating the first recognizably ‘modern’ states in their countries. In addition to the distinction between East and West, Newell introduces a distinction (seen most clearly in England) between Machiavelli’s two regimes, as the monarchic, Hobbesian Machiavellians contested the terrain with republican, Harringtonian Machiavellians—a dispute finally reconciled in the Glorious Revolution, which inaugurated a regime that “did not quite add up to a republic” but “a balance of powers among commons, lords, and crowns not unlike what Machiavelli had praised about ancient Rome.” This regime crucially retained the old ‘aristocratic’ sense of civil and property rights, now given theoretical justification in the modern natural rights doctrine of John Locke. Continental modern state builders couldn’t afford to give such scope to liberty, living as they did on the great European Plain (“from the Atlantic to the Urals,” as a later statesman described it), where military assaults by foreigners came quicker and more frequently than anything that might be hurled at the British Isles.

The reforming tyrants of antiquity imposed peace on warring tribes and nations while building grand monuments to themselves, some of them generally useful. The reforming tyrants of modernity imposed peace on warring tribes, often consolidating nations, built grand and sometimes useful monuments to themselves, but additionally promoted social equality against aristocracy while advancing the scientific-technological conquest of nature that Machiavelli and his disciple Bacon had urged. They shared with those philosophers (and also with Christians) an esteem for “the supreme value of the individual.” Statism broke the aristocracies, curbed Christian other-worldliness, and promoted economic prosperity; it did this for Machiavellian reasons, but not incidentally enhanced the material well-being of the vast majority of its subjects. Unfortunately, by leaving only modest outlets for the grander ambitions, and by redirecting education from its classical and Christian purposes, it also provided fuel for its nemesis, millenarian tyranny.

Millenarianism exploits the anger of each new Achilles by channeling it into attempts to “remake human nature” and hasten the projected arrival of a perfected society. Having excised from Rousseau’s writings “their nuances and qualifications” and then “reduc[ing] [them] to their most memorable purple prose,” the first millenarian tyrant, Robespierre, designed “the first methodically planned extermination campaigns based on class, regional loyalty, and religious faith—the beginning of utopian genocide.” “A new kind of leader, the technician of murder, the idealist of death, emerges.” The Jacobins aimed not only at destroying the Old Regime of throne and altar but also the new regime of liberalism in defense of individual rights. Far from merely nihilistic, however, death en masse was intended to prepare the (killing) fields for a society “completely transformed from being unjust, materialistic, and selfish in the present to being spiritually pure, selfless, and communal in the future.”

What was true of the Jacobins has remained true of all subsequent millenarian tyrants: First, they seek a future resembling some imagined and idealized social condition located in a distant past, whether the Year One of the Jacobins, the primitive communism of Marx, the unsullied German Volk of the Nazis, or the Caliphate of the jihadists; second, they identify an enemy “standing in the way of the coming nirvana, an enemy that sums up in itself all the modern world’s worst qualities—the titled aristocrat, the bourgeois, the Jew, the heretic—and set their sights on exterminating him; third, they appeal to egalitarianism in some form, even as they exalt themselves as the leaders on the cutting edge of ‘the Movement.’ Rotten elites will be replaced by a purified people, living either in equality simply (Jacobinism, communism) or under the benevolent rule of the genuine aristocracy (the Nazis, the Islamic clerics). Newell observes that the genocidal means to this millenarian end are supposed to purify the new elites themselves; it is “a therapeutic experience for the revolutionaries,” a “violent catharsis that purifies their own inner resolve, enabling them to throw off bourgeois or religious scruples that prevent the masses, still clinging to their outmoded religious faith or deference to tradition, from grasping the new world to come.”

In his well-known exchange with the Hegelian Alexandre Kojève, Leo Strauss identified historicist philosophy as the source of modern tyranny. Newell wants to defend part of historicism from this charge, grouping Hegel with Tocqueville, Burke, and Mill as advocates of “moderate progressivism.” Apart from the question of whether some of those thinkers really are historicists at all, and considering Hegel, it should be noted that even he describes the dialectic of history as a “slaughter-bench”—albeit one resulting ultimately in a constitutional monarchy, not an egalitarian utopia. Beyond these scholarly-exegetical points, one must ask: What is it that gives “millenarian” tyranny its millenarianism, if not historicism—that is, the replacement of natural right defended by civil rights to self-government with historical rights that human beings do not have but must win? Rousseau then does indeed become the pivotal figure, very much along the lines Strauss discerned, because although he still upheld natural right he also regarded human nature as malleable. Along with David Hume (coming at it from a very different direction), Rousseau initiated what Strauss called the crisis of modern natural right, eventuating in the very replacement of natural with historical right that gives millenarian aspirations scope to rampage like avenging gods. The philosophic point is that a doctrine that builds on Enlightenment rationalism even as it rejects Enlightenment politics might also lend itself to millenarian tyranny. After all, Marx’s proudest claim was not that he was a socialist but that he was the first genuinely scientific one. The same goes for the ‘race science’ behind Nazism; racial hierarchies and eugenics were scientific mistakes, but they were propounded by scientists and not only millenarians.

If so, then Newell’s description of the Bolsheviks not so much as Marxists but as latter-day versions of “millenarian and mystical Russian sects like the ‘god builders,’ inspired by Nietzsche’s writings about the Superman to create a new world from the ground up on the ruins of the old,” becomes unnecessary. If historicism has a tyrannical core, a conception of right derived simply from the might that survives the slaughter-bench of dialectic, then Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were correct to quote Marx so extensively and to ignore Nietzsche—whose all-the-way-down aristocratism comports poorly with Communist egalitarianism.

Such complaints as these should not detract from Newell’s considerable achievement, especially as he addresses the latest manifestation of millenarian tyranny, jihadism. “My reason for writing this book about the strange career of tyranny is to suggest that, however many times decent people express the decent hope that mankind has learned its lesson, the drive to tyrannize is a permanent passion in human psychology. It’s never going away. We will always have to be on guard against it, prepared to resist it, if need be to fight it.” Jihadism is the latest proof of this, as well as the latest example of the new, millenarian tyranny.

Newell concurs with Olivier Roy and other scholars who trace jihadism as formulated by Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, Abul A’la Mawdudi of Pakistan, an Iran’s Ali Shariati to their synthesis of Islamic fundamentalism and secular millenarianism. Qutb and Shariati had imbibed the thought of Heidegger, Sartre, and Fanon along with the suras of the Qu’aran. Mawdudi appropriated the secular revolutionaries’ language and also their vision of an egalitarian society removed from the clutches of clerical elites. Even the Shi’ite Shariati, who in an earlier generation might have waited patiently for the return of the Hidden Imam, became persuaded that human beings can hasten the establishment of Heaven on earth through collective and violent action. Although the Prophet Muhammad hardly eschewed collective and violent action, he never went so far as to claim that “human beings are free and the architects as well as masters of their own essence.” The regime founded by means of terrorism will continue to deploy terrorism as its instrument—’institutionalize’ it, as social scientists like to say. Lenin and Stalin did this, and Trotsky would have continued doing it, as did other leftist millenarians (Mao, Pol Pot) and of course Hitler and the jihadists on the Right.

To resist such movements intelligently, liberal democrats must first see that “the real battle is not with terrorism, an abstract noun, but between two fully actualized regimes with their diametrically opposed principles—liberal democracy and tyranny.” It is “my purpose to recognize the threat posed by contemporary Jihadist terrorism by seeing how it flows from the long history of tyranny in its several varieties.” Without that recognition, no sensible policy can follow. Regrettably, as Newell also recognizes, the kind of education that forms politicians and social scientists today ill equips them to understand tyranny. Even the millenarians, who in some sense intend either to subsume Enlightenment rationalism (Marxism) or reject it (existentialism) had studied the Enlightenment thinkers and also those whom the Enlighteners themselves had rejected. Nietzsche and Heidegger were no mean readers of Plato. Accordingly, Newell prescribes what he calls a “homeopathic cure” for tyranny: serious study of “the canon of the Great Books with their breadth, depth, and psychological finesse about the best and worst in human nature.” “Ambition cannot be removed from the human soul, no matter how much wealth, comfort, and entertainment we are offered. It can only be reshaped by liberal education, and redirected from unjust to just goals.” Simultaneously, on the military and diplomatic side of things he recommends alliances between liberal democracies and whatever “garden-variety” and reformist tyrants might be convinced that millenarian tyranny poses a common threat. He rejects premature and ham-fisted efforts at regime change in any tyranny, although the logic of his argument suggests that such change ought to be promoted on those occasions when it will likely lead not merely to change but improvement. Just as tyrants arise perennially, the need for statesmanlike judgment recurs, as the antidote.