A family of political concepts: Tyranny, despotism, bonapartism, caesarism, dictatorship, 1750-1917

European Journal of Political Theory

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 221-248

  Richter, Melvin ^a,b  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

^b PHB   (United States)

Author keywords

Absolute monarchy; Bonapartism; Caesarism; Despotism; Dictatorship; History of political concepts; Tyrannicide; Tyranny

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248039589     PISSN: 14748851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474885105052703     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. The latest and most comprehensive historical study of the concepts of tyranny and tyrannicide is Mario Turchetti (2001) Tyrannie et Tyrannicide de l'antiquité ànos jours. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
2. Other studies in English include Roger Boesche (1996) Theories of Tyranny from Plato to Arendt. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
3. Franklin N. Ford (1985) Political Murder. From Tyrannicide to Terrorism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
4. Leo Strauss (1968) On Tyranny. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
5. Oscar Jaszi and John D. Lewis (1957) The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
6. As for the concept of despotism, the most extensive treatment to date is in the essays contained in Domenico Felice (ed.) (2001) Dispotismo. 2 vols, Naples: Liguori Editore.
7. Shorter treatments in English include Richard Koebner (1951) 'Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term', Journal of the Warburgand Courtauld Institute 14: 272-302.
8. Melvin Richter (1973) 'The History of the Concept of Despotism', in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 2, pp. 1-20. New York: Scribners.
9. For histories of the concept of absolute monarchy, see J. Daly (1978) 'The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth-Century England', Historical Journal 21: 227-50.
10. Julian Franklin (1973) jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory in France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11. Melvin Richter (1987) 'Absolutism', Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. David Miller, pp. 1-3. Oxford: Blackwell.
12. Rudolf Vierhaus (1972) 'Absolutism', Marxism, Communism, and Western Society. New York: Herder.
13. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds) (1972-97) Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. i, pp. xiii-xxvii. 8 vols, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
14. Turchetti (n. 1), p. 914.
15. See my review (2003) History of Political Thought 24: 537-41.
16. Mark Lilla (2002) 'The New Age of Tyranny', New York Review of Books 49 (24 Oct.).
17. This analysis is developed in Melvin Richter (1982) 'Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy', Political Theory 10: 185-21.
18. Reinhart Koselleck (1996) 'A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe', in Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (eds) The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts, New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, p. 64. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute.
19. Johann Christoph Beckmann, cited in Merio Scattola (2001) 'Models of Natural Law', in lus Commune 28: 150 n. 159.
20. This analysis is developed in Melvin Richter (1982) 'Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy', Political Theory 10: 185-214.
21. The original statement of this thesis was made by W. B. Gallic (1955-6) 'Essentially Contested Concepts', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56: 167.
22. This section (2) on contestable and contested concepts summarizes my (2000) 'Conceptualizing the Contestable: The Begriffsgeschichte of Political Concepts', Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Sonderheft Jahrgang 135-43.
23. Other significant discussions include: W. E. Connolly (1983) The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
24. John Gray (1978) 'Liberty, Liberalism, and Essential Contestability', British Journal of Political Science 8: 385-402.
25. Alasdair Maclntyre (1973) 'The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts', Ethics 84: 1-9.
26. Much of my summary of this thesis derives from Jeremy Waldron (1994) 'Vagueness in Law and Language: Some Philosophical Issues', California Law Review 82: 509-40.
27. Koselleck (n. 6), pp. 63-4.
28. Thomas Kaiser (2000) 'The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth-Century French Political Culture', Journal of Modern History 72: 6-34.
29. Jeremy Popkin (1990) in 'The Pre-Revolutionary Debate', ed. Jeremy Popkin and Dale Van Kley, section 5, in Colin Lucas (ed.) The French Revolution Research Collection, p. 1. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
30. Thomas Paine (1946) 'The Rights of Man', in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, vol. 1, p. 256. 2 vols, New York: Citadel Press.
31. Prof. Koselleck has called attention to a similar outcome in the overuse of the concept of crisis. See his conclusion to the article on 'Krise' in Brunner et al. (n. 2), vol. 3, pp. 647-50.
32. This and the variety of remedies proposed for it is the subject of a striking recent book, Sophia Rosenfeld (2001) A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late EighteenthCentury France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
33. Two informative previous treatments of this theme are: Ulrich Ricken (1982) 'Réflexions du XVIIIe siècle sur "l'abus des mots"', Mots 4: 29-45.
34. Brigitte Schlieben-Lange (1985) 'Die Wörterbucher in der Französischen Révolution', in Rolf Reichardt, Eberhard Schmitt and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (eds) Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680-1820, 1-2: 149-89. Munich: Oldenbourg.
35. Condorcet (1847) Suvres de Condorcet, ed. A.C. O'Connor et al., vol. 8, p. 164. 12 vols, Paris. Cited from Turchetti (n. 1), p. 694. I here follow Turchetti's account of Condorcet.
36. Saint-Just (1968) Suvres choisies, ed. Denys Mascolo, pp. 74-83. Paris: Gallimard. Cited from Turchetti (n. 1), p. 668.
37. Robespierre (1967) Suvres, vol. 10, p. 357. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
38. Keith Michael Baker (ed.) The Old Regime and the French Revolution, pp. 374-5. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
39. Constant (1957) Oeuvres, ed. A. Rollin, pp. 1004-05. Paris: Pléiade.
40. In a letter to Kergolay, January, 1835, Tocqueville identified Tiberius and Claudius as the Caesars he had in mind. OC will be used to designate the almost complete newer edn of Alexis de Tocqueville (1951-) Oeuvres complètes, ed. J. P. Mayer, André Jardin and Francoise Mélonio. Paris: Gallimard. OCP will be used for the ongoing Pléiade edn of Tocqueville (Paris, 1991-). The letter to Kergolay is in OC, vol. 13, 1, 373.
41. OC, vol. 1, 1, 330.
42. Our knowledge of De la Démocratie en Amérique has been transformed by two critical edns in French. The first will be designated DA, N: Eduardo Nolla (ed.) (1990) 2 vols, Paris: Vrin. The second will be designated as DA, OCP, vol. 2: Jean-Claude Lamberti and James Schleifer (eds) Paris: Pléiade. Tocqueville's comments on the differences between his 1835 and 1840 texts occur at DA, N, vol. 2, p. 254, n. d; and OCP, vol. 2, p. 1177, n. b to 837.
43. DA, N, vol. 2, p. 265; OCP, vol. 2, p. 836.
44. 'Cela marquait un grand changement dans ma pensée . . .': OC, vol. 12, p. 35; OCP, vol. 3, P. 733.
45. Benjamin Constant (1988) 'The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and their Relation to European Civilization' (1814) in Benjamin Constant. Political Writings, ed. and tr. Biancamaria Fontana, 45-167, at 165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
46. François-René Chateaubriand (1951) Mémoires d'outre-tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier, vol. 1, p. 1004, 2 vols, Paris: Pléiade.
47. (1965) The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, tr. and ed. Robert Baldick, p. 329. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
48. Marx (1996) 'Eighteenth Brumaire', in Later Political Writings, ed. and tr. Terrell Carver, p.32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
49. Marx, Later Political Writings, Ibid. pp. 117-18.
50. Chateaubriand (1951, in n. 27), vol. 1, p. 869; (1965, in n. 27), p. 243.
51. Marx (1978) 'The Civil War in France' (First Draft), in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. 22, pp. 53-4. Berlin.
52. Peter Baehr (1993) 'Caesarism', in The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, ed. W. Outhwaite and T. Bottomore. Oxford: Blackwell.
53. This definition combines the summaries of these theories provided by Nolte, 'Diktatur', in Brunner et al. (n. 2), vol. 1, pp. 922-3. Baehr, 'Dictatorship', in Baehr (n. 32).
54. Turchetti (n. 1), pp. 984-88, has provided a thoughtful treatment of this subject in his discussion of modern theories which, in his view, have superseded.
55. Kirsten Sellars (1999) 'The Tyranny of Human Rights', The Spectator (28 Aug.), 11. Cited in Turchetti (n. 1), p. 983.