Chapter 3 describes how the Constitution created a system for control of factions. But when those factions more and more polarized around the issue of slavery, the Northern and Western national majority was unable to rule and eventually had suppress the Southern minority in the Civil War. In recent decades, much Black migration out of the South and some White migration into the Republican Party have again polarized voter sentiment into red and blue states, or two tribes. This gridlock in the national government has again created a national majority which cannot rule (see the Senate cloture procedure), in which case a new political crisis plagues the country.

This chapter deploys the modes of relating to the classical past established in the previous chapter to survey the contemporary resonances of the full range of declamation scenarios, paying particular attention to the realm of the imaginary. The interpersonal conflicts (murder, rape, disownment, etc.) of the genre are very close to the gossip about and probably some of the reality of many star declaimers' lives. Similarly, declamations on war tapped into a major Greek imperial discourse as well as the civil wars and foreign incursions about which most of our sources keep a diplomatic silence. Declamations on tyranny tapped into another common discourse and offered space for reflection on illegitimate power. The survey continues with civil strife and misconduct in public life and and moves on to consider honours, embassies, religion, migration, both collective and personal, and construction projects. In these areas, too, declamation speaks both to contemporary realities and to contemporary discourses.

Abstract: The material for this chapter is drawn in part from a class I taught on American pragmatism at a local correctional institution. It raises the question: Since a habit is something we take for granted, how could we even begin to recognize our own habits as supporting tyrannical relationships? A response to this question and to the role that formal education could play in promoting this recognition is the topic for the remaining chapters in the book.

Despite their diplomatic function, the Residents in office between 1798 and 1818 often preferred intimidation to accommodation. To some extent, their interventionist attitude reflected wider assumptions about the prevalence of ‘tyranny’, ‘inhumanity’, and misgovernment in India. These moral imperatives, combined with the supposed ineffectiveness and untrustworthiness of Indian allies, led Residents to argue for the necessity of unequal alliances backed by force. These convictions shaped the Residents’ relationships to the military, leading them to try and assert control over subsidiary forces in the region, and to panic when forces were disordered or insufficient. Subsidiary forces might have posed problems for the Resident, not least in the form of open mutiny, but they were also seen as essential to his control. Residents explicitly equated military and political power, and were determined to make a show of strength, contrary to the governor-general-in-council’s emphasis on conciliatory conduct. These differences of opinion become most apparent in the controversies that occasionally erupted around the Resident’s acts of judicial violence. Whereas superiors in London and Calcutta worried about undermining the Company’s claims to civilizational superiority through brutal acts of corporal punishment, in the Residents’ view civilization was instead a hindrance to be cast aside.

This chapter investigates Thucydides’ views about morality and justice and the role that these concepts play in his work. It argues that Thucydides’ own ideas about justice were conventional, but that his understanding of the role of justice in shaping human affairs was more novel. The chapter explores the methodological problem of reconstructing Thucydides’ views about justice and morality, given that most statements on these themes are made by characters rather than the author. It then analyses the text’s representation of key ideas about justice, morality and other virtues; it explores how these are manifested in Thucydides’ characterization of individuals in the work; and it surveys the differences between Thucydides’ representation of Spartan and Athenian approaches to justice and morality.

The history and nature of the Athenian Empire (arche) is not the primary subject of Thucydides’ History, but his text is nevertheless a critical piece of evidence for it. After briefly surveying the key features of the Athenian Empire and its development, this chapter explores Thucydides’ picture of Athenian imperialism, focusing on three areas in particular. First: how can imperial power be justified? Second – a related but different question – why do states seek imperial power (is it, indeed, something over which states have a choice or is it an inevitable feature of interstate politics)? Finally, how and why do empires fail?

This chapter argues that Thucydides’ History provides for its readers an opportunity to assess the limits and opportunities of diverse political regimes, particularly democracy, oligarchy and monarchy. In doing so, he offers insights not only into the specific characteristics of the cities that employ those regimes (Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes), but also into what is distinctive about those regime types, understood in categorical terms. The chapter focuses on Thucydides’ presentation of democracy in Athens and in Syracuse, arguing that Thucydides, although alert to the weaknesses of democracy, was also an admirer of the attainments and ambitions of this form of governance.

We will turn now to two symbolic images: The allegory of Injustice in the Arena Chapel (Padua) by Giotto di Bondone (1303–1305) and the allegory of War in the Palazzo Pubblico (Siena) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338–1339). They are major milestones in the visualization of rape in European art, condemnatory representations intended for a public audience. Despite the extensive secondary literature on these sites, the representations of sexual violence have never been examined or compared to each other, even in specialist studies. They can potentially reconfigure our views of wartime rape before modernity.

This chapter addresses the question of why prominent nobles were so interested in being church advocates by examining the legitimate financial benefits that came with the position. Using sources from the period 1050 to 1250, it argues that advocates typically received one-third of the fines when they held court on ecclesiastical estates, and also received food and lodging in return for fulfilling their role as judge. It also demonstrates that many advocates received separate income for their responsibilities in providing protection. While all of these payments were initially in kind, by the thirteenth century it was increasingly common for advocates to receive a single lump-sum money payment for fulfilling all their advocatial responsibilities, which is evidence of the increasing commodification of local positions of authority in this period. This chapter also investigates the numismatic evidence for church advocates as additional source material for the economic dimensions of the role.

This chapter serves as a counterpoint to the previous chapter and frames the book’s arguments up to this point in very broad terms, looking back to corruption in the ancient Roman Empire and forward to the Sicilian mafia and other modern, nonstate actors. It argues that advocates’ corrupt practices of protection and justice ought to be understood as encompassing two main strategies: either extracting as much income as possible from regions that were peripheral to their own territorial interests or – in contrast – attempting to win the hearts and minds of churches’ dependents in order to convince them to abandon their allegiance to their landlords. Both of these strategies are commonplace ones across human history and highlight more general challenges tied to protection and justice. This chapter also contends that, precisely because these corrupt practices were so common, scholars’ arguments about the decline of advocatial abuses from the thirteenth century onward are misleading.

The central theme of Chapter 2 is anti-monarchism. The chapter shows that during the free state monarchy was widely thought to be the worst form of government. Monarchy entailed tyranny and the concomitant slavery of the people. However, an even more powerful anti-monarchical argument rose to prominence during the free state. Based largely on 1 Samuel 8, numerous advocates of the free state maintained that monarchy was against God and thus both idolatrous and sinful. Already in early December 1648, a radical pamphlet, Light shining in Buckingham-shire, equated kingship with the devil. But the argument that monarchy was a sin and idolatry became particularly vociferous during the Engagement controversy. It was argued repeatedly that monarchy, as a form of government, was against God’s express will. Such an argument led to the conclusion that monarchy was finished in England and would soon be so elsewhere in Europe as well.

Long before the United States was any more than a collection of British colonies in North America, Protestants viewed Catholicism as a threat to national identity, individual liberty, personal salvation, and the stability of free government. Their fears continued up through the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. Understanding why Protestants viewed Catholicism with fear and loathing reveals much about the evolution of American understandings of freedom, which for decades were forged unabashedly in opposition to the Catholic Church and its understanding of what freedom was and how people could attain it. To be sure, social issues like birth control and gay marriage have helped to create a “new ecumenism.” Just as important, however, have been the inequities caused by the advent of modern industrial capitalism, which have forced American Protestants to stop using the Catholic Church as a foil when defining freedom and the conditions that sustain it.

In The Winter’s Tale, power, eros, death, the utopian, and the aesthetic are the main themes in play. It begins in a world of amoral and dehumanizing power politics and ends in affirmations of the utopian spirit – while acknowledging the realities of death and suffering. It draws on festival traditions, fairy tales, and ancient issues of resurrection and rebirth in its end and political and psychological issues, as King Leontes becomes a mad tyrant. His madness paradoxically takes an aesthetic form in its (perverse) creativity and reliance on intuitive mental decisions as defined by Kant – thus relating to the aesthetic issues later in the play. The play’s utopian space is a mixed, complicated locus that includes both the utopian and the nonutopian. What makes it a consummate example of Shakespearean metatheater is its investigation of the relations of two concepts of ancient provenance, “art” and “nature,” introduced off-handedly, played with extensively in the second half of the play, and climaxed and thematically resolved in the complex, dissonant unity of the two terms figured when an apparent stone statue of the supposedly dead Queen Hermione is revealed as living flesh.

offers canonical and non-canonical examples of early seventeenth-century female voices that call for freedom of speech and resistance to tyranny. Drawn from drama and print culture, authored by men and women, such voices figure the connection between women and political dissent. If Othello’s Emilia and Desdemona use free speech to express their virtue and contest male authority, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale plays the shrew to call out domestic and political tyranny, while Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Vittoria speak truth to power and Elizabeth Caldwell’s Letter denounces her husband in a display of Protestant religious zeal. Rooting these voices in sixteenth-century female-voiced political and religious dissent, the chapter suggests that representations of the woman as resistant subject could take on a particularly acute political inflection during the early Stuart period.

This chapter is largely devoted to commenting on the other contributions to the volume. An attempt is made to evaluate the arguments and criticisms brought to bear by each contributor on the project of defining civil liberty not as absence of interference but rather in neo-Roman terms as absence of more general conditions of subjection and dependence. The chapter opens with an exposition of the neo-Roman theory, focusing on its articulation in Roman and common law traditions of thinking about the law of persons and related arguments about ‘fundamental’ rights and liberties. The chapter next defends the distinctiveness and coherence of the neo Roman approach against a number of objection that have been raised against it. The chapter ends by reflecting on how the re-appropriation and development of a neo-Roman perspective might help us to think more fruitfully about some current threats to privacy and democracy as well as individual liberty. This concluding section focuses particularly on threats stemming from increasing surveillance and other silent exercises of power.

The English poet William Blake provides one of the keenest allegorical descriptions of tyranny. Urizen embodies reason and law using architects’ tools and nets to entrap society in webs of law and convention.1 Urizen believes himself holy and writes the law. The book of brass, brass being the metal of tyranny, forces peace through single rule.2 Urizen is also the creator of wrath and justice. Urizen binds people utilising law and convention to stultify imagination and rebellion. Orc, in contrast, embodies rebellion, revolution, passion and freedom, the very opposite of Urizen’s tyrannical god. But the two are intertwined.3 Urizen uses law to enforce reason, peace and oppression which Orc rebels against with creativity and revolution, but Orc also demonstrates a potential to descend into tyranny if Urizen’s tyrannical tools are not entirely discarded once he is overthrown.4 Blake’s complicated mythology mirrors tyranny’s complexity. Tyranny uses law and reason to establish that absolutism is necessary for peace. Tyrannicide recognises the necessity of rebellion, the false restraint of both rule by law and fear of anarchy, but, as such, tyrannicide is only legitimate if it does not replicate the tyranny it seeks to overthrow.