Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Plato: The Political Psychology of Tyranny
2. Aristotle: Tyranny as Unnatural
3. Tacitus: Tyranny as a Politics of Pretense
4. Machiavelli: Defeating Princely Tyrannies
5. Montesquieu’s Two Theories of Despotism: Fearing Monarchs and Merchants
6. Tocqueville: The Pleasures of Servitude
7. Marx: Despotism of Class and Workplace
8. Freud: The Reproduction of Tyranny
9. Weber: The Inevitability of Bureaucratic Domination
10. Fromm, Neumann, and Arendt: Three Early Interpretations of Nazi Germany
Conclusion: Thinking About Tyranny
Afterword
Index
Roger Boesche is Professor of Politics at Occidental College. He is the author of The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (1987) and editor of Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society (1985).
“A great achievement in the scholarship of political philosophy.
Anyone who wants to think deeply about the meaning of tyranny must
read it.”—American Political Science Review (APSR)
“Lucid in its analysis and accessible in style, Boesche’s book will
prove to be a wonderful companion piece for students looking for a
fresh interpretive angle on the classic texts of political
philosophy.”—Review of Metaphysics
“This book is an unexpected pleasure. Unexpected, because the topic
of tyranny might seem antiquated, dark, and plain uninviting. But
the subject becomes perversely fascinating under Roger Boesche’s
pen. Written in steady, jargon-free prose, Theories of Tyranny
holds the reader’s attention and sustains one’s interest over the
course of almost 500 pages. . . . Each well-researched chapter
contains insightful gems. . . . The strength of the book—I would
even say the marvel of the book—is that Boesche truly identifies or
at least creatively redescribes an entire subterranean ‘tradition’
of discourse in the European canon just at the time when that form
of theorizing was thought to be exhausted or
discredited.”—Political Theory
“[Boesche’s] treatment of such different authors as Tacitus,
Tocqueville, and Freud is clever, elegant, and never perfunctory;
his final definition of tyranny as ‘the form of government that
least meets human needs’ is both correct and attractive, for it
reminds us that tyranny is not only the symbol of political evil
but also an actual form of government that too many people have
experienced.”—Booklist
“Always clear and concise. . . . original. . . .
provocative.”—American Historical Review
“This book is not only a significant historical and analytical
study of the idea and concept of tyranny—a project that is in
itself unique and distinctive—but a sensitive and creative
rendering of the classic texts that are discussed as well as of the
work of twentieth-century theorists such as Arendt.”—John Gunnell,
SUNY at Albany
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