Instructor: Feisal Mohamed
Meeting: T Th 1-2:15p
“Tyrant” is a word often, and not always thoughtfully, thrown about nowadays. The aim of this course is to rescue the term from becoming a contentless pejorative, a mud-slinging device in an age of political divisiveness. Tyranny, in fact, has a specific meaning, one influentially articulated by Aristotle and at the heart of ideas of legitimate resistance. For Cicero, tyrants show the exact opposite of the spirit of fraternity that should govern human interactions, and so, as he puts it in De officiis, “that pestilent and abominable race should be exterminated from human society.” That said, it is important to note that Roman authors distinguish between the tyrant and the dictator, who can have a salutary influence on the state, in a way that complicates questions of autocracy. They also worry, as in Tacitus, if open resistance to corrupt rule is the most effective means of opposing it. In early modernity, the Reformation’s white-hot religious controversies, and humanist reengagement of classical authors, lead the question of tyrannicide frequently to bubble to the surface, as is visible in Stephanus Brutus and John Milton.
Seneca’s Hercules declares that “There can be slain no sacrifice to God more acceptable than an unjust and wicked king.” But immediately after killing the tyrant Lycus, he is visited by a madness that leads him to kill his wife and children. Though noble and necessary, the need to resist tyranny is also symptom and expression of a deep wrench in right order. So it is often in tragedy, that genre obsessed with ills spanning human and cosmic realms, that we see tyranny and anti-tyranny explored in all of its complexity. Ancient as such concerns might be, a sense of fundamental order as out of joint also characterizes modern anti-tyranny, which focuses on questions of property as a fundamental, pre-political injustice lurking beneath the surface of iniquitous rule. Lest we think that resistance to tyranny is an impulse of the Western tradition alone, we will explore the tradition surrounding Imam Hussein in Shi’a Islam and well beyond, and Indigenous resistance movements focused on environmental justice. We will also see how resistance to slavery can deploy a biblical and classical language of anti-tyranny.
To be clear, this course has no intention whatsoever of offering a forum for facile commentary on the current political scene. It is entirely invested in a temporally and geographically broad study of fundamental political concepts. When we fail to understand tyranny, we fail to understand liberty, and are rendered incapable of taking accurate measure of any political settlement, past, present, or future.
Texts to be read in this course include the following:
- Aristotle, selections from Politics
- Sophocles, Antigone
- Stephanus Junius Brutus, selections from Vinidiciae, contra tyrannos
- John Milton, Samson Agonistes
- David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
- CLR James, Toussaint Louverture
- Indra Sinha, Animal’s People
- Paul Schrader (dir.), First Reformed
- The Red Nation Collective, The Red Deal