Tyranny From Ancient Greece To Renaissance France

173 Pages·2020·1.969 MB·English

by  Orest Ranum

Tyranny from
Ancient Greece to
Renaissance France
Orest Ranum
Tyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance
France
Orest Ranum
Tyranny from Ancient
Greece to Renaissance
France
Orest Ranum
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-43184-6 ISBN 978-3-030-43185-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3
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For
Patricia McGroder Ranum
Muse, Inspired Critic, Typist, Friend, Wife
P
reface
Many readers do not bother to read prefaces for various reasons, but the
most typical reason is a lack of interest in the more personal professional
experiences of the author. But interpreting texts is all about contexts, and
the primary, primordial context of any writing is the author. What are
some of my major experiences as a close reader of political thought?
As an undergraduate at Macalester College in 1952, I enrolled in
Professor G. Theodore Mitau’s course on reading excerpts from almost all
the major political treatises, from antiquity to the present. Such a body of
texts may be referred to as a “canon,” because, as a constituted whole, the
absence of one or another text or author may be immediately noticed.
Readers who move from Bodin to Locke are breaking the canon when
they omit Hobbes. Mitau’s course centered on the close reading of texts,
and on commentary, or to be more accurate, on “learning to comment.”
During my first year in graduate school at the University of Minnesota,
I enrolled in Professor Mulford Q. Sibley’s course on the history of
Western political thought. We read essentially the same texts I had read in
Mitau’s course. My first paper for Sibley was an essay on W.F. Church’s
Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth Century France (Cambridge, USA,
1941). Readers familiar with my educational trajectory may recall that I
attended Professor Roland Mousnier’s seminar at the Sorbonne. We were
still in social stratification and orders when I attended those seminars. The
research on assassination would come later, and was so personal and
intense that I am not sure he shared it with students.
When my doctoral thesis, Richelieu and the Councillors of Louis XIII,
appeared in 1963 at the Clarendon Press, the first review was by a political
vii
viii PREFACE
scientist writing for the Bombay Times. A second review by an anonymous
critic (I later learned that it was Robert Darnton) appeared in the Times
Literary Supplement. It summarized my argument about fidelity to the
Cardinal versus administrative competence in selecting councilors. The
critic’s implication was that the book lacked interest. The conclusion
encouraged readers to go back to The Three Musketeers. The advertise-
ments of the Clarendon Press listed the book under the heading “political
science.”
If my first published article was not about political thought, my second
one, “Personality and Politics in the Persian Letters,” Political Science
Quarterly, 84 (4), 1969, 606–622, certainly was. And when the History
Department at Columbia University gave me the opportunity to develop
my own undergraduate course, I worked up “French Government in
Thought and Practice, 1515–1789.” Year after year in the 1960s, for four
hours a week I also taught a course for the undergraduates of Columbia
College called “Contemporary Civilization.” (It began with Plato!) This
strengthened my already quite sharp familiarity with many of the canonical
texts I had first read for Mitau. True, as I think about it now, very few
works had been read in their entirety. The pedagogues of Port Royal
insisted on reading and teaching entire works; the Jesuits carefully selected
extracts.
Invited by Father Lékai, Cistercian, to participate on a panel at a con-
ference, I presented “The French Ritual of Tyrannicide,” Sixteenth
Century Journal, 11 (1980), 63. The theme was how tyrannicide was col-
lective in the murders of the Duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal,
and in the murder of Concini, whereas in the murders of kings Henry III
and Henry IV, individuals acted alone within a religiously grounded legiti-
mation (Clément and Marillac). But let us move on to the present. Strange
as it may seem, my control of the canon has become hazy. But I can tell
when something is wrong-headed.
In 2017 there seemed to be an increased use of the words “tyrant” and
“tyranny” in the news media, notably about the Russian and Turkish heads
of state, and others as well. This piqued my curiosity about the word as it
is currently being used. So I bought T. Snyder’s On Tyranny (New York,
2017), a strong and engaging book that centered largely on recent politi-
cal developments in Eastern Europe. After further research, I would like
to say that Snyder’s warnings and exhortations are remarkably original and
analytically strong. They are not commonplaces drawn from the venerable
lists of commonplaces about tyranny that have appeared over the centuries
PREFACE ix
and that are partly the subject of this book. Just what has happened to the
concept of tranny since the rise of the social and political sciences in the
late nineteenth century? It is one thing to ask a general question; it is quite
another to have the energy and discipline required to answer it.
There was a sense that the old concepts were simply not strong enough
to characterize the horrors of the mid-twentieth century. What had
occurred in Stalinist Russia and Hitlerian Germany seemed to go way
beyond the tyrannical, as I thought about it. The word “dictator” seemed
still to carry strength, but I was just speculating.
At this point, questioning and humble about the complexities of an
entire field of inquiry, I happened upon Mario Turchetti’s Tyrannie et
tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris, 2013). It is a true monument
of scholarly learning, of exemplary intellectual history. In 1044 pages of
incisive and convincing contexts and close readings, Turchetti sets the
concept of tyranny in its changing political-philosophical contexts. He
confirmed my hunches about the fate of the concept “tyranny” after World
War II, and he traces its more recent partial recovery (pp. 900–927). The
concepts “totalitarianism,” “Fascism,” “autocracy,” and “dictatorship,”
minted to interpret political horror and terror in World War II, have
enabled scholars to grasp, if not always comprehend, happenings in the
twentieth century.
The strength and chronology of Turchetti’s thematic structure and
chronology do not in any way obscure the significances of change and
continuity. To the contrary. They permit the reader to perceive them more
effectively.
The decade after World War II witnessed a veritable transformation of
the way power, human nature, and evil are understood. Though less
intense, did something similar happen, albeit more slowly, after the St.
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 1572? The borrowings back and
forth between the major thinkers about tyranny and tyrannicide-regicide
during the years 1572–1605 have interested scholars for many years, but
the totality, or at least the proximate totality of their achievement is largely
unknown to general readers.
I thank my teachers and colleagues—Gérard Defaux (on Tolkien),
Jacques Poujol (on De Gaulle), Nancy Struever (on Seneca), and Paul
Saenger (on Bismarck)—for speaking and writing to me about politics
with intensity and conviction. Charles Duff pointed out that there is more
description of thought in the book than what historical tyrants in fact did.
He is right. But I am reluctant to go farther down the pretty-familiar
x PREFACE
biographical road than is absolutely necessary. Exemplarity, that is, in this
instance, the power of the evil or negative sign, also holds me back.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the professionalism, patience, and ami-
able support of the Palgrave Macmillan staff: Megan Laddusaw, Joseph
Johnson, Tikoji Rao Mega Rao, Sudha Soundarrajan.
My expression of gratitude toward Patricia McGroder Ranum is found
in the Dedication. It has no bounds.
Baltimore, MD, USA Orest Ranum
September 11, 2019
c
ontents
Part I Antique Understandings of Tyranny 1
1 The Athens of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon 3
2 Tyranny and Despotism in Plato’s Republic and Laws 11
3 Aristotle on Tyranny in the Politics 17
4 Xenophon on Tyranny in Hiero 25
5 Seneca the Younger on Tyranny in On Mercy 31
Part II Three Medieval Commentators on Tyranny 37
6 Mimetic Impulses and Early Receptions 39
7 John of Salisbury on Tyranny in Policraticus 45
8 A quinas on Tyranny in the Regime of Princes and in the
Summa Theologica 49
xi