Theoria

Both from the current (35(4) August 2007) issue of Political Theory.

Machiavelli’s Political Trials and “The Free Way of Life”

John P. McCormick University of Chicago, Illinois

This essay examines the political trials through which, according to Machiavelli’s Discourses, republics should punish magistrates and prominent citizens who threaten or violate popular liberty. Unlike modern constitutions, which assign indictments and appeals to small numbers of government officials, Machiavelli’s neo-Roman model encourages individual citizens to accuse corrupt or usurping elites and promotes the entire citizenry as political jury and court of appeal. Machiavellian political justice requires, on the one hand, equitable, legal procedures that serve all citizens by punishing guilty parties and discouraging retaliatory reprisals, including foreign intervention. On the other hand, frankly acknowledging the power disparities that exist in every republic, Machiavelli outlines how political trials enable pro-plebeian magistrates and populist reformers to thwart patrician-generated smear campaigns and oligarchic conspiracies.

Key Words: Machiavelli • liberty • republicanism • popular government • political trials

The Tyranny of Dictatorship

When the Greek Tyrant Met the Roman Dictator

Andreas Kalyvas New School for Social Research in New York City

The article examines the inaugural encounter of the Greek theory of tyranny and the Roman institution of dictatorship. Although the twentieth century is credited for fusing the tyrant and the dictator into one figure/concept, I trace the origins of this conceptual synthesis in a much earlier historical period, that of the later Roman Republic and the early Principate, and in the writings of two Greek historians of Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Appian of Alexandria. In their histories, the traditional interest in the relationship between the king and the tyrant is displaced by a new curiosity about the tyrant and the dictator. The two historians placed the two figures alongside one another and found them to be almost identical, blurring any previous empirical, analytical, or normative distinctions. In their Greco-Roman synthesis dictatorship is re-described as `temporary tyranny by consent’ and the tyrant as a `permanent dictator.’ Dictatorship, a venerated republican magistracy, the ultimate guardian of the Roman constitution, is for the first time radically reinterpreted and explicitly questioned. It meets its first critics.

Key Words: Dionysius • Appian • tyranny • dictatorship • Athens • Rome • democracy • republicanism

Kalyvas is, in my view, one of the most interesting political theorists writing today. His paper, “Carl Schmitt and the Three Moments of Democracy” (Cardozo Law Review, 2000), remains one of the better interpretations of Schmitt written in English.