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 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland 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