Several Thoughts on Newell's Tyrants

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis critical review of Newell's Tyrants consists of two parts. The first one departs from questions Jan Patočka, the most important Czech philosopher of the 20th century, raised in the 1970s in the context of his critical reading of a book by Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History. Patočka's criticism of Barraclough, suggested here as a starting point for a dialogue with Newell, departed from Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences and his own interpretation of the current phase of history of mankind as the end of Europe and the arrival of a post-European age. The second part confronts Newell's treatments of tyrants usurping power throughout the human history and his efforts to offer a “homeopathic cure for the tyrannical temptations” that we might see emerging in the future with the concept of totalitarianism elaborated in the political thought of Hannah Arendt.