The Return of Tyranny

“The New Age of Tyranny” by Mark Lilla, in The New York Review of Books (Oct. 24, 2002), 1755 Broadway, 5th fl., New York, N.Y. 10019–3780.

President George W. Bush, the United States, and the democratic West now face not an “axis of evil,” but rather the uncharted expanse of “a new age of tyranny,” argues Lilla, a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The “hollowness” of Bush’s phrase reflects the West’s conceptual unpreparedness to deal with this new challenge.

The totalitarian threat posed by Hitler’s Germany and then the Soviet Union is past, Lilla notes, yet the West’s long confrontation with that menace “still sets our intellectual compass,” rendering us “less sensitive to tyranny in its more moderate forms.” Thus, in the recent war in the Balkans, most Europeans found it difficult to grasp that though Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was not Adolf Hitler, he “still was a dangerous tyrant who had to be combated.” A similar reluctance is evident today among Europeans and many Americans with regard to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

“From Zimbabwe to Libya, from Algeria to Iraq, from the Central Asian republics to Burma, from Pakistan to Venezuela,” says Lilla, “we discover nations that are neither totalitarian nor democratic, nations where the prospects of building durable democracies in the near future are limited or nil.”

“Sooner or later,” he writes, “the language of anti-totalitarianism will have to be abandoned and the classic problem of tyranny revisited.” From the ancient Greeks down to the Enlightenment, there was “a continuous tradition of political theory . . . that took the phenomenon of tyranny as its theoretical starting point, and the establishment of barriers against tyrannical rule as its practical aim. That tradition came to an effective halt with the French Revolution,” when political tyranny, understood chiefly as a deformation of absolute monarchy, seemed to disappear.

The ancient concepts of tyranny cannot simply be dusted off for use today, says Lilla, though many features of contemporary bad regimes—“political assassination, torture, demagoguery, contrived states of emergency, bribery, [and] nepotism”—would be very familiar to earlier political thinkers. But the ancient Greeks limited their analysis of tyranny to areas where Greek was spoken, and medieval and early modern political thinkers mainly confined theirs to Europe. The need today is for concepts that apply universally.

“We live in a world,” Lilla says, “where we will be forced to distinguish, strategically and rhetorically, among different species of tyranny, and among different sorts of minimally decent political regimes that might not be modern or democratic, but would be a definite improvement over tyranny. As yet, we have no geographers of this new terrain.”