Threat Of Tyranny Research Articles

Henry Adams, political reform, and the legacy of the Republican Roman Senate

This article examines references to the Senate of the Roman Republic in several of the early writings of Henry Adams. It looks particularly at his journalism and reform writings of the 1860s and 70s, and culminates in an analysis of his novel Democracy from 1880. Adams’ great-grandfather John was a leading proponent of a senate in the deliberations over the US Constitution. For Henry, the intellectual and political legacy represented by the Senate crystallized political problems, including the appropriate balance of power, the nature of representation, the threat of tyranny, and the dangers of party and personal corruption. Adams was closely engaged with historiographical debates in the UK and Germany over ancient republics and the lessons they held for modern ones such as USA. His portrait of the corrupt senator Silas Ratcliffe in Democracy resonates in particular with Theodore Mommsen’s treatment of Cicero. In The History of Rome, Mommsen rejected the heroic image of Cicero as the father of his country and presented instead a portrait in which the Roman senator’s self-interest predominated. At the same time, he burnished Caesar’s image as a dictator who loved the people. Mommsen’s critique of Cicero echoes through Democracy, which concludes in some despair over the prospects of the American democratic system while offering no compensatory, heroic Caesar figure.

Unruly Beasts: Animal Citizens and the Threat of Tyranny

AbstractMany commentators—including some animal rights theorists—have argued that non-human animals cannot be seen as members of the demos because they lack the critical capacities for self-rule and moral agency which are required for citizenship. We argue that this worry is based on mistaken ideas about both citizenship, on the one hand, and animals, on the other. Citizenship requires self-restraint and responsiveness to shared norms, but these capacities should not be understood in an unduly intellectualized or idealized way. Recent studies of moral behaviour show that civil relations between citizens are largely grounded, not in rational reflection and assent to moral propositions but in intuitive, unreflective and habituated behaviours which are themselves rooted in a range of pro-social emotions (empathy, love) and dispositions (co-operation, altruism, reciprocity, conflict resolution). Fifty years of ethological research have demonstrated that many social animals—particularly domesticated animals—share the sorts of dispositions and capacities underlying everyday civility. Once we broaden our conception of citizenship to include a richer account of the bases of civic relations, it becomes clear that domesticated animals and humans can be co-creators of a shared moral and political world. We have nothing to fear, and much to gain, by welcoming their membership in the demos.

Dewey and the Threat of Tyranny of the Majority

(1998). Dewey and the Threat of Tyranny of the Majority. Perspectives on Political Science: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 206-211.

A form of government organization from the perspective of transaction cost economics

Taking the approach of the superfirm, we characterize government organization through six different features. First, citizens are viewed as sovereign owners of a superfirm; elected officials are employees of the sovereign citizens. Second, in analogy to the economic principle of the division of labor and specialization, a division of labor between five independent branches of government is advocated: the legislative, the budgetary, the executive, the law enforcement, and the judiciary branch. Third, we do not suggest a mechanism of checks and balances between government branches but deal with the threat of tyranny using the principle of separation of decision control and decision management developed by Eugene Fama and Michael Jensen. Fourth, with election as a decision control device, we demarcate the constituency of the budgetary branch by age groups to provide an explicit control mechanism for intertemporal and intergenerational trades. Fifth, to strengthen sovereign citizens' decision control, the powers to recall elected chief public servants, to declare emergency and war, to sign into international treaties, and to amend the constitution are vested with a national assembly. Sixth, there is no head of state.

Augustus and Pope

WHAT DID Pope think of Augustus in Imitations of Horace? In conventional panegyric English poet praised London of Anne as Augusta, capital of a land renowned for Arms and Arts; now, in satire, he inverted Horace's celebration of his ruler to ridicule George II. The general tenor of argument at first seems clear, for George, inglorious, surrounded by flatterers and bad poets, a type of stupidity and corruption destroying nation, is antithesis of an English Augustan monarch. A satiric (or panegyric) device, however, is not same thing as a historical judgment, which may be more complex and skeptical. It need not necessarily follow from use of figure of Augustus in Imitations that Pope wanted such a ruler in England. In same decade he was instrumental in publishing Bolingbroke's vision of an ideal monarch, The Patriot King, and there Augustus is represented as a tyrant and Horace as his flatterer. Does this represent a division of opinion among friends, or can it be shown from a close reading of Pope's Horatian poetry that Pope too, like Bolingbroke, reservations about Rome's great man? There seems no intrinsic reason to accept a simplistic reading of Imitations of Horace in an age which seen publication of that searching work of skepticism, Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire. Horace's own attitude to Augustus was known to be complex. He fought against ruler at Philippi as a tribune in ranks of republican hero Brutus and, abandoning his shield, fled when virtue was broken (II Od. vii.l i). For this espousal of cause of republic, Warton was to praise his high spirit of liberty and independence before he had an opportunity of flattering AUGUSTUS, and Warburton, annotating Pope, claimed that Roman poet remembered the cause of Freedom and of Brutus in his satires and apologized to his ruler for this liberty.' There can be little doubt that Pope's circle would likewise have stood among the last of Romans at Philippi, for Brutus was ideological heir of Cato, whose daughter he married, and Pope declared himself likewise a disciple of this hero when he joined forces with Addison in Cato (1713) to defend pristine British liberty and virtue before threat of tyranny. That story has been told elsewhere.2 Bolingbroke, who delighted in being compared with

United States Leadership in a Divided World

in the history of the United States, also in the history of freedom-loving nations. Our Republic occupies a destiny-given position of leadership in a sharply divided world. The United States, by far the strongest and the most powerful nation which has to date existed upon this earth, possesses an opportunity without parallel in the annals of mankind to exercise leadership. The free world is being attacked on many fronts and is being undermined from within wherever the Communists are able to make their sinister influence felt. In this universal struggle the forces of freedom must prevail, if ultimately there is to be fashioned an international society in which human beings can live free from molestation and free from the threat of tyranny and enslavement.