Tyranny, all government unjustly exercised, without the restraint of the laws.

The Greeks and Romans gave the name tyranny to the intention of overturning power founded by the laws, and especially democracy. It seems, however, that they distinguished two sorts of tyranny: one real, which consists in government violence; and one based on opinion, when those who govern establish things that offend a nation’s manner of thinking. [1]

Dio says that Augustus wanted to have himself called Romulus, but that, having learned that the people were afraid he wanted to make himself king, Augustus changed his mind. [2]

The first Romans did not want a king, because they did not want to endure his power; the Romans of Augustus’s time did not want a king, so as not to endure his manners. For although Caesar, the triumvirs, and Augustus were all genuine kings, they had kept up the exterior of equality, and their private lives contained a kind of opposition to the kingly pomp of that time. And if the Romans did not want kings, this signified that they wanted to keep their manners and not take up those of the peoples of Africa and the East.

Dio adds that the same Roman people were indignant at Augustus because of certain overly harsh laws he had passed, but as soon as he recalled the performer Pylades—exiled by the city’s factions—the discontent ceased. [3] Such a people felt the tyranny more acutely when a dancer was exiled than when all their laws were eliminated. It was indeed inevitable that they succumb to the domination of a real tyranny , and this event was not long in coming.

Since usurpation is the exercise of a power to which others have the right, we define tyranny as the exercise of a power that is both unjust and excessive, to which no one—whoever he may be—has a right in nature. Or else tyranny is the use of a power exercised against the laws to the public detriment, in order to satisfy one’s private ambition, vengeance, avarice, and other disordered passions harmful to the state. It unites extremes, and on the backs of a million men that it crushes, it raises the monstrous colossus of some unworthy favorites who serve it.

This degeneration of governments is all the more fearsome in that it is slow and weak at the beginning, rapid and brisk at the end. At first it shows only a helping hand, but then it oppresses with boundless brawn. I say this degeneration or corruption of governments, not—like Pufendorf—of simple monarchy, because all forms of government are subject to tyranny . [4] Wherever the persons who are raised to supreme power in order to lead the people and preserve what belongs to them as property employ their power for other ends and tread on people they are obliged to treat in a completely different manner—there, certainly, is tyranny , whether it be one man vested with power who acts in that way, or whether it be many who violate the rights of the nation. Thus, history tells us of the thirty tyrants of Athens, as well as of the one in Syracuse. And everyone knows that the domination of the decemvirs of Rome was but a true tyranny .

Wherever the laws cease or are violated by brigandage, tyranny exerts its dominion. Whoever is vested with supreme power and uses the forces at hand without any regard for divine and human law is a true tyrant. Neither art nor science is necessary to manage tyranny . It is the work of force, and is altogether the grossest and most horrible manner of governing. Oderint dùm metuant ; this is the tyrant’s motto. But this execrable maxim was not that of Minos or of Rhadamantus. [5]

Plutarch reports that Cato of Utica, when still a child and under a firm hand, went often (although always accompanied by his master) to see Sulla the dictator, because of the proximity and kinship connecting them. [6] One day, he saw that in this great house of Sulla’s, in his presence or on his orders, some men were being imprisoned; others were being sentenced to various punishments: this one was being exiled, that one stripped of his property, a third one strangled. To get to the point, everything was happening not as it would before a magistrate but before a tyrant of the people. This was not a tribunal of justice; it was a cavern of tyranny . Indignant, that noble child turned sharply to his preceptor.

“Give me a dagger,” he said; “I’m going to hide it under my cloak. I often enter that tyrant’s bedroom before he gets up. I’m going to plunge it into his breast and deliver my country from that execrable monster.” Such was the childhood of that great personage whose death placed a crown on virtue.

When Thales was interrogated as to what thing seemed to him the most surprising, he said, “it’s an old tyrant, because tyrants have as many enemies as they have men under their domination.” [7] I do not think there has ever been a people barbarous enough and imbecilic enough to submit to tyranny by an original contract. Nonetheless, I know very well that there are nations over which tyranny has been introduced either imperceptibly, or by violence, or by prescription. I will not set myself up as a political casuist on the rights of such sovereigns and the obligations of such peoples. Men must perhaps content themselves with their lot, suffer the disadvantages of governments as they do those of the climate, and endure what they cannot change.

But if one were to speak to me of one people in particular who have been wise enough and fortunate enough to found and preserve a free constitution of government, as for example the people of Great Britain have done, it is to them that I would freely say that their kings are obliged, by the most sacred duties that human laws can create and that divine laws can authorize, to defend and maintain—in preference to every other consideration—the liberty of the constitution at whose head they are placed. That was the opinion not only of Queen Elizabeth, who never spoke any other language, but even of King James himself. Here is the manner in which he expressed himself in the speech he gave to parliament in 1603. “I would always prefer in publishing good laws and useful constitutions, the public good and the advantage of the entire state to my own advantage and private interest, persuaded as I am that the good of the state is my happiness on earth, and that it is on this point that a true king differs from a tyrant.” [8]

It is asked whether the people—that is, not the rabble but the sounder portion of the subjects from all the orders of a state—may escape from the authority of a tyrant if he mistreats his subjects, exhausts them with excessive taxes, neglects the interests of government, and overturns the fundamental laws.

My first answer to this question is that a clear distinction must be made between an extreme abuse of sovereignty, which degenerates manifestly and overtly into tyranny and which tends to the ruin of the subjects, and a moderate abuse such as may be attributed to human weakness.

In the first case, it appears that the people have a full right to retake the sovereignty they have entrusted to their leaders, which the latter have abused excessively.

In the second case, it is absolutely the people’s duty to suffer something rather than to rise up by force against their sovereign.

This distinction is founded on the nature of man and government. It is just to suffer patiently the bearable faults of sovereigns, and their minor injustices, because that is a just support owed to humanity. But as soon as the tyranny is extreme, one has a right to wrest the sacred trust of sovereignty from the tyrant.

This is an opinion that can be proven (1) by the nature of tyranny , which in itself degrades the sovereign’s condition, which ought to be beneficent. (2) Men have established governments for their greatest good; now it is evident that if they were obliged to endure everything from their governors, they would find themselves reduced to a much more deplorable state than the one from which they meant to shelter themselves under the wings of the law. (3) Even a people who have submitted to absolute sovereignty have not, for all that, lost the right to have their own preservation in mind, when they find themselves reduced to the lowest misery. Absolute sovereignty in itself is nothing but the absolute power to do good, which is quite contrary to the absolute power to do evil, which in all probability, no people have ever had the intention of entrusting to any mortal. Suppose, says Grotius, one had asked those who first handed down civil laws whether they meant to impose on the citizens the harsh necessity of dying rather than taking up arms to defend themselves against their sovereign’s unjust violence; would they have answered yes? There is every reason to believe that they would have decided that one should not endure everything—unless, perhaps, when things are found to be such that resistance would inevitably cause greater disturbances in the state, or would consign a very large number of innocents to ruin. [9]

In fact, it is indubitably the case that no one would renounce his liberty this far. That would be to sell his own life, his children’s lives, his religion— in a word, all his advantages, which is certainly not in man’s power.

Let us even add that strictly speaking, the people are not obliged to wait until their sovereign has completely forged the irons of tyranny , and made them powerless to resist him. For them to have a right to show due regard to their preservation, it is enough that every step taken by their leaders tends manifestly toward oppressing them, and that these leaders march, so to speak, flags unfurled, toward the violence of tyranny .

The objections made to this opinion have been so often resolved and by so many fine talents—Bacon, Sidney, Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, and Barbeyrac—that it would be superfluous to respond to them again. [10] Nonetheless, the truths that have just been established are of the first importance. It is appropriate that they be known for the happiness of nations and for the advantage of sovereigns who abhor governing against the laws. It is very good to read the works that instruct us about the principles of tyranny , and about the horrors that result from it. Apollonius of Tiana went to Rome in Nero’s time to see for once, he said, what kind of animal a tyrant is. [11] He could not have done better. The name of Nero has become proverbial as designating a monster in government. But unfortunately, under him Rome no longer had but a feeble vestige of virtue, and since she possessed ever less of it, she became ever more enslaved. All the blows went against tyrants, none against tyranny . [12]

1. For this distinction, and for the three paragraphs that follow, see Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws , 19.3.

2. Dio Cassius, Roman Histories , LIII.16.7–8, for this episode.

3. The episode appears at Dio Cassius, Roman Histories, LIV.17.4.

4. The reference is perhaps to Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations , VII.v.11.

5. “Oderint dum metuant” (“Let them hate, as long as they fear”). Originally attributed to the tragic poet Lucius Accius (170–ca. 86 b.c.e.), it was a favorite expression of the Emperor Caligula. Minos, the mythic son of Zeus and Europa, and his wise brother Rhadamanthus sat in judgment over the souls of the underworld; Socrates evoked them on the eve of his death. See the final four paragraphs of Plato’s Apology.

6. Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger , 3.

7. Thales of Miletus (ca. 624–ca. 546 b.c.e.), pre-Socratic philosopher. The story can be found in Diogenes Laertius, “Thales,” in Lives and opinions of Eminent Philosophers , I.36, and in Plutarch, “On the Sign of Socrates,” in Moralia , 578d.

8. “I will ever preferre the weale of the Body and of the whole Commonwealth, in making of good Lawes and Constitutions, to any particular or private ends of mine, thinking ever the wealth and weale of the Commonwealth to be my greatest weale & worldly felicitie: A point wherein a lawfull King doeth directly differ from a Tyrant.” King James’s accession speech of March 19, 1603, in The Kings Maiesties Speech . . . (London: Robert Barker, 1604), p. 18 of an unpaginated pamphlet. The passage is also cited in John Locke, Second Treatise on Government , chap. 18, par. 200.

9. Grotius, Rights of War and Peace , I.IV.vii.

10. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), English statesman, chancellor, and philosopher; Sidney, Discourses; Barbeyrac was the influential translator and commentator of the natural-law theorists Grotius and Pufendorf.

11. Apollonius of Tiana, charismatic Pythagorean sage and miracle worker of the first century; see Flavius Philostratus (ca. 170–ca. 247), The Life of Apollonius of Tyana , 4.387.

12. See Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 3.3, for this remark.