Tyranny was obtained when the government failed to “govern in justice and mercy, according to the laws and constitution derived to them from the God of nature and transmitted to them by their ancestors”

Tyranny in American Political Discourse

by Shaun Rieley

The word “tyranny” has a long history in American political discourse. Since at least the American Revolution, Americans have used the word to describe political actions they find distasteful. But what is tyranny? Some have defined tyranny to be identical with monarchy; others identify it with any form of government which is not democratic, or at least republican. But are these sufficient? For the sake of rhetoric, perhaps, imprecision in discourse is permissible. This, however, becomes problematic when considering which actions to take. That is, in order to know prudentially what actions are legitimate in a given situation, the nature of the situation must be accurately ascertained. Chief among these, I would suggest, is tyranny, given that tyranny is that which illegitimates political regimes.

Aristotle’s famous discussion of political regimes in Book 8, Chapter 10 of the Nichomachean Ethics notes that there are three basic kinds of constitution, and an equal number of corruptions of them. The best of the six regimes, he says, is kingship, but the worst corruption of a regime is what he calls “tyranny”. The tyrant, he says, rules “for his own advantage,” while the king “looks to [the advantage] of those who are ruled”.[1] The same change is noted when each other regime is corrupted–aristocracy into oligarchy, and timocracy into democracy. It would seem that the common principle of corruption for Aristotle is the move from the consideration of the welfare of the ruled to that of the ruler. If, then, the term “tyranny” may be applied more broadly as a synonym for corrupted government (a meaning it has taken on in modern times), from this analysis, tyranny would seem to be any government which rules for the sake of the ruler(s), rather than for the sake of the ruled. Some definitions would also include the further qualification that tyranny consists in government which rules arbitrarily, that is, in contradistinction to the “rule of law,” whereby the governing is predictable and equitable for those who are ruled.

Given this, it seems that tyranny is not a wholly absolute term—that is, it is, at least in part, historically contingent.

First, this is because tyranny is not identical with any particular form of regime. Rather, if Aristotle is correct, it consists of the corruption of regimes, which ostensibly are capable of being legitimate, at least in principle.

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