Tyranny And Revolution

The Philosophy of Freedom from Rousseau to Heidegger transformed political thought, feeding catastrophic revolution, tyranny and genocide.

Lenin. Mao. Castro. Mugabe. Khomeini. All sparked movements in the name of liberating their people from their oppressors—capitalists, foreign imperialists, or dictators in their own country. These revolutionaries rallied the masses in the name of freedom, only to become more tyrannical than those they replaced. Much has been written about the anatomy of revolution from Edmund Burke to Crane Brinton Crane, Franz Fanon, and contemporary theorists of revolution found in the modern academy. Yet what is missing is a dissection of the revolutionary minds that destroyed the old for the creation of a more harmful new. Revolutionary Monsters presents a collective biography of five modern day revolutionaries who came into power calling for the liberation of the people only to end up killing millions of people in the name of revolution: Lenin (Russia), Mao (China), Castro (Cuba), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), and Khomeini (Iran). Revolutionary Monsters explores basic questions about the revolutionary personality, and examines how these revolutionaries came to envision themselves as prophets of a new age.

The fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 has become the commemorative symbol of the French Revolution. But this violent and random act was unrepresentative of the real work of the early revolution, which was taking place ten miles west of Paris, in Versailles. There, the nobles, clergy and commoners of France had just declared themselves a republic, toppling a rotten system of aristocratic privilege and altering the course of history forever. The Revolution was led not by angry mobs, but by the best and brightest of France's growing bourgeoisie: young, educated, ambitious. Their aim was not to destroy, but to build a better state. In just three months they drew up a Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was to become the archetype of all subsequent Declarations worldwide, and they instituted a system of locally elected administration for France which still survives today. They were determined to create an entirely new system of government, based on rights, equality and the rule of law. In the first three years of the Revolution they went a long way toward doing so. Then came Robespierre, the Terror and unspeakable acts of barbarism. In a clear, dispassionate and fast-moving narrative, Ian Davidson shows how and why the Revolutionaries, in just five years, spiralled from the best of the Enlightenment to tyranny and the Terror. The book reminds us that the Revolution was both an inspiration of the finest principles of a new democracy and an awful warning of what can happen when idealism goes wrong.

"What is the purpose of political life? Is it meant to protect our rights as individuals, leaving us free to work hard and prosper, protected from illegal infringements on our liberty, free to do as we please in our private lives so long as others are not harmed, including the freedom to ignore politics and public life altogether? That is the recipe for the classical liberalism of Locke, Montesquieu and their heirs including the American Founders for good government: Secure the maximum net material gain for every member of the social contract to enable them to live in comfort and otherwise get out of the way - for as Jefferson put it, that government is best which governs least. Government is not about teaching people how to be virtuous - that is a matter for individual choice. Politics is about means, not ends. As Madison wrote, the sources of factional strife are sewn into human nature. Their causes cannot be removed, but their harmful effects can be controlled by the social contract"--

For many common people, the American Revolution offered an opportunity to radically reimagine the wealth and power structures in the nascent United States. Yet in the eyes of working-class activists, the U.S. Constitution favored the interests of a corrupt elite and betrayed the lofty principles of the Declaration of Independence. The discontent of these ordinary revolutionaries sparked a series of protest movements throughout the country during the 1780s and 1790s. Redemption from Tyranny explores the life of a leader among these revolutionaries. A farmer, evangelical, and political activist, Herman Husband (1724-1795) played a crucial role in some of the most important anti-establishment movements in eighteenth-century America--the Great Awakening, the North Carolina Regulation, the American Revolution, and the Whiskey Rebellion. Husband became a famous radical, advocating for the reduction of economic inequality among white men. Drawing on a wealth of newly unearthed resources, Stewart uses the life of Husband to explore the varied reasons behind the rise of economic populism and its impact on society during the long American Revolution. Husband offers a valuable lens through which we can view how "labouring, industrious people" shaped--and were shaped by--the American Revolution.

This is the first comprehensive exploration of ancient and modern tyranny in the history of political thought. Waller R. Newell argues that modern tyranny and statecraft differ fundamentally from the classical understanding. Newell demonstrates a historical shift in emphasis from the classical thinkers' stress on the virtuous character of rulers and the need for civic education to the modern emphasis on impersonal institutions and cold-blooded political method. The turning point is Machiavelli's call for the conquest of nature. Newell traces the lines of influence from Machiavelli's new science of politics to the rise of Atlanticist republicanism in England and America, as well as the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and their effects on the present. By diagnosing the varieties of tyranny from erotic voluptuaries like Nero, the steely determination of reforming conquerors like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and modernizing despots such as Napoleon and Ataturk to the collectivist revolutions of the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Nazis, and Khmer Rouge, Newell shows how tyranny is every bit as dangerous to free democratic societies today as it was in the past.

Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age. Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion. Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.

A history of tyranny from Achilles to today's jihadists, this volume shows why tyrannical temptation is a permanent danger.