the Cambridge Humanities Review.

Issue 6/2014
Matthew Ellison. Eros and Fortuna.

It seems that tyranny, like certain other political concepts (democracy, free- dom, the people,
perhaps even politics itself) is marked by an essential inde- terminacy. The use and abuse of
these terms in everyday parlance is a mark
of this ambiguity. For example, one may just as easily hear an overbearing or micromanaging
boss labelled a tyrant as one may murderous dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Where the
Ancients tend to understand the tyrannos
as an illegitimate and oppressive monarch, Moderns such as De Tocqueville write, in an
apparently opposing fashion, of democracy as the tyranny of the majority or the masses. As this
demonstrates, one can employ tyranny in
more and less valid ways, and in more and less political contexts. Often it is a simple matter of
perspective. Hobbes points out in the Leviathan, for example, that while we may look favourably
on those who protect our interests, we label a tyrant anyone who acts against them. However
one wishes to define tyran- ny, it is clear that it is a phenomenon which has haunted politics and
political thought since the Greeks, albeit in manifold incarnations in both the practical and
theoretical realms. It is precisely this conceptual plasticity that lies at the origin of tyrannys
usefulness in political discourse, as well as, of course, the political theorists desire to determine
its meaning.
Waller R. Newells Tyranny: A New Interpretation is motivated by this manifest lack of theoretical
clarity. In the introduction to his vast study, Newell defines tyranny most basically as the use of
coercive or violent force to treat others unjustly through the exercise of political supremacy. As
he points out, how- ever, this formulation begs a number of questions: what is the nature of this
force? Who makes use of it? And is it right to restrict the concept of tyranny
to human actors? Newell is cautious in his attempt to answer these and oth- er questions, in
large part because he believes the dominant approach to the study of tyranny throughout the
history of political philosophy - the psycho- logical model - to be inadequate, if highly interesting.
For Newell, there is no single psychological theory that can explain tyrannical modes of acting
from the Ancients to the present day. More fundamentally, no theory can adequate- ly account
for tyranny in all its guises in the history of philosophy. The rea- son for this, Newell argues, is
that there occurs a radical shift in the meaning of tyranny between the ancient and modern
ages. Thus the task of his book, rather than elaborating a general theory of tyranny, is to
determine the precise nature of this rupture.
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Having rejected the psychological approach to

tyranny as superficial and reductive, Newell seeks
to identify the philosophical ground underlying the phenomenon. This leads him to the question
of ontology, since all positive treatments of tyranny are always intertwined with more purely
theoretical speculations about the ultimate character of real- ity. The ontological approach in
turn leads him to the central thesis of the study: that the difference between classical and
modern forms of tyranny can be attributed to divergent conceptions of mans relationship to
nature. This entails the claim that it is not only the meaning of tyranny that changes, but also the
way we understand more general concepts like reason, nature and statecraft.
Newell elaborates on this fundamental ontological
difference through a series of detailed comparisons of texts from the ancient and modern
periods, with Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon representing the former, Machiavelli and Hobbes
the latter. The crux of the divergence between the two groups of think- ers lies in the status of
eros. The Ancients viewed eros, understood as longing for unity with beauti- ful, as both the
cause and the potential remedy for tyrannical excess. Plato believed, for instance, that rather
than purge himself of his erotic desires, the statesman ought to sublimate them through civic
education in the hope that they lead to the higher virtues of character and, ultimately, a just
regime. Nature and reason are not yet thought in antithet- ical terms, Newell points out, since
there exists a transcendental and rational ordering of the cosmos with which man must reconcile
himself. It is only prior to philosophic education that eros is danger- ous and irrational; after this
it can be redirected and put to the service of the public good and virtuous statecraft.
With the modern age, however, and with Machiavelli
in particular (Newells book is overwhelmingly about his writings), a fundamental shift occurs.
For Mach- iavelli nature is not structured by any overarching transcendent unity, but is
characterised by chance, motion, and risk. This natural chaos, which takes the name of fortuna,
offers no prospect for lasting peace or order; there is no longer any rational ordering of the cosmos. Accordingly the
Machia- vellian prince has no hope of leaving statecraft to the natural order, or of sublimating his
own erotic longings. Rather, for Machiavelli the prudent ruler stands radically apart from nature
construed as a field of hostile happenstance, so as to more effec- tively focus his will on
attacking and subduing it.
Therefore, as Newell points out: With the early moderns, the classical opposition of virtue and
vice becomes that between relying on virtue and relying on fortuna. This process, which
Bonnie Honig has termed the exteriorisation of virtue, inaugurates a new mode of statecraft.
The prince must learn to react to all that fortuna throws his way, and beat and batter her
(fortuna e una donna) into sub- mission. As Newell underscores, political reason
is therefore no longer grounded in the good or
the just (such metaphysical categories are largely irrelevant for Machiavelli), but emerges as a
pure technique of ruling. Abstract philosophical contem- plation becomes a kind of vice for

Machiavelli, as does ignorance of reality and the subordination of politics to Platonic imagined
republics and twist- ing the particulars to fit already-held cosmologies.
The other key element of this radical ontological shift is the changing place of man within the
cos- mos. Where ancients like Xenophon were sceptical of mans ability to reshape nature,
Newell reads Machiavelli as evoking a secularisation of the the- ological conception of creation
ex nihilo. (Newells point about the primacy of the sense of touch in The Prince is highly
illuminating). At the same time this produces a picture of the ruler as stripped of any inner
content. Newell argues that this shift an- ticipates the Cartesian cogito, which portrays man as
devoid of all tradition and the world as meaning- less, a mere resource for scientific domination.
Hobbes is another key figure in Newells story, for he narrows Machiavellis prescriptions for
the prince into a new science of politics. Hobbes, like Machiavelli, insists on the chaotic and
dangerous nature of reality, but develops the latters doctrine of virtu and virility into an
institutional method for the mastery of nature, including, most terrifyingly, human nature. It is
precisely the dark irrationality of nature that calls for its violent reordering, Newell shows. As
man is perpetually anxious in the face
of his finitude, Hobbes believes that mans erotic desires can be exchanged for the promise of
secu- rity and prosperity. Accordingly reason undergoes
a thorough denaturing. Given no connection with the cosmos, it is instead conceived of as a tool
with which to (re)shape nature and human nature as desired. It is here, in this dark possibility
within Hobbess thought, of the endless reengineering of the human soul through terror, that
Newell locates one of the origins of totalitarianism, echoing an im- portant theme in Hannah
Arendts book of the same name.
Nonetheless, Newell argues, modern totalitarianisms like those of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks cannot be fully explained with recourse to the
early modern conquest of nature instituted by Machiavelli and Hobbes. While it is indeed with
them that one finds the beginnings of a purely technical method of statecraft, which will later
crystallise in the form of modern bureaucracies, Newell sees a crucial element as being absent.
He locates the second paradigm shift of the modern era in the writings of Rousseau. It is here
that we find a fateful synthe- sis of politics and eros which provides the condi- tions for modern
revolutionary terror. Although
the account of Rousseau here is rather hasty and one-sided (he only appears in the conclusion),
Newell provides an important supplement to his sharp dichotomy set up earlier between the an12cients and moderns. On Newells reading, Rousseau
effects a synthesis between the classical longing for
a primordial, organic wholeness (largely through
the romanticisation of the people) and the modern
ontology of motion. This step lays the foundation for movements which are simultaneously
atavistic and futuristic, both mythical and modernising (in this regard Newell cites the
Jacobins wish to return to year one; the Nazis also showed that these two impulses are by no
means mutually exclusive). Such movements want to rapidly accelerate modernisa- tion, but for

the sake of returning to a lost age of collectivist harmony and purity. The invocation of
Rousseau is important here, since it provides the link between the early modern origins of
technical statecraft and the ideological fantasies from the Jacobins onwards. According to
common lore Stalin and Hitler both read Machiavelli, but Newell believes these two
revolutionary fantasists are not his true heirs, for their respective movements rely on the
synthesis of ancient and modern initiated by Rous- seau. Machiavelli is open to brutality, he
avers, but not to sentimental brutality. Rather, Newell points to more recent secularising or
post-ideo- logical despots like Ataturk and Putin as among the true heirs of Machiavelli.
Before this important supplement, the books
overarching argument seems very simple: that the
difference between classical and modern forms of
tyranny lies in divergent evaluations of eros. While
this thesis is convincing, and is sure to offer fruitful
ways of comprehending the phenomenon of tyran- ny, one is left wondering whether it requires
such
a lengthy, and at times repetitious, exposition (the book runs to 518 pages including the
epilogue). Similarly, though the conceptual argument convinc- es, it is not terribly
groundbreaking. Newell recog- nises his debt to Hegels assessment in The Phe- nomenology
of Spirit that with the Jacobin tyranny we see a move away from individual greed toward an
impersonal and idealistic conception of the com- munity or state.
A more important philosophical source here is Hei- degger, whose reflections on the essence of
mo- dernity as technology Newell cites as a useful prism through which to understand
Machiavellis, and above all Hobbess, technical method of statecraft. Newell seems to believe
himself to be further from Heidegger than he actually is, however. While he is rightly critical of
Heideggers utterly reductive ac- count of the history of being, which leaves us bereft of ways to
criticise more and less just or tyrannical regimes, he neglects to mention a key argument
of Heideggers that is remarkably close to his own.
It is true, as Newell points out, that in his various writings on technology Heidegger claims that
the impulse behind the technological mastery of modernity can be traced back to the Platonic forms
and their tyranny over nature. Nonetheless, in the 1938 essay Die Zeit des Weltbildes (The
Age of the World Picture), Heidegger argues that the specificity of modernity lies in the world
becoming grasped
as a neatly circumscribed object - a world picture, for the Cartesian subject. This move grounds
mod- ern science and later technology on the certainty
of the all-powerful human subject, while making the world a resource for technological
domination (what Heidegger will elsewhere call a Bestand). What changes in modernity is the
ontological position of man within nature: man becomes subject and the world becomes object.
Heidegger believes that such a model is completely alien to the Greeks. While Heidegger does
not speak of eros, this argument rather undercuts the one made by Newell, all the more so given

the latters earlier contention that any definition of tyranny must be traced to its underly- ing
ontological ground. I noted before that Newells conceptual approach, focusing as it does on an
on- tological shift instead of psychological explanation, attaches much importance to the
changing mean- ings of nature and reason. While he is certainly right to insist on these
conceptual shifts, this kind of transcendental approach risks relegating the status of tyranny, and
even statecraft, to that of a second- ary phenomenon.
These purely conceptual limitations aside, I would
suggest that the real value of Newells work lies in
his application of these ideas to concrete politics. He is extremely illuminating when discussing
tyran- nical leaders, whether that be Robespierre, Pol Pot or Putin, and his distinction between
the two types of modern tyrants is a very useful one. Whats more, he rightly warns against the
idea that we are some- how beyond tyranny. The idea, to quote Arendt, that for technological
man anything is possible still prevails, and the near total interconnectedness of politics,
economics, and technology demands our attention. Newell also thankfully avoids that trap of
thinking that we in the West - neither of these terms is unproblematic, are insulated from
tyranni- cal excess. He rejects the naive belief that progress will lessen the likelihood of
tyrannical violence. On the contrary, we are reminded that tyrants can (and these days often do)
appear as political reformers, not just as revolutionaries. Today impersonal and systemic
violence are just as much a threat as is violence directly inflicted by other human beings. Above
all, what Newells book shows is the stark reality that far from being a purely exceptional phenomenon, tyranny has in fact haunted the project of
modernity from the beginning.