Evil Lords

This edited volume uses the prism of bad rule or tyranny to sharpen our understanding of political discourse from the ancient world to the Renaissance. Eleven chapters present case studies examining Hebrew, Greco-Roman, Byzantine, early, high, and late medieval, and Renaissance conceptions and representations of bad or tyrannical government. Since bad rule is always a perversion of the norm, its shifting conceptualizations shed light on historically specific assessments of what constitutes legitimate and acceptable political behavior. Meanwhile, political debate also reflects specific power structures, authors, and audiences. The book’s chapters, therefore, examine notions of bad rule within the ideological frameworks and societal patterns of the respective periods, thus painting a picture of historical and intellectual change. However, these often profound variations notwithstanding, the book also shows that it is meaningful to think of its subject as a ‘premodern Western tradition’, in the sense of an exchange of ideas. There are shared roots in Greek and biblical thought, and ongoing cross-fertilization spanning two millennia. Moreover, the rationale of both pro- and anti-monarchical discourse by and large derives from virtue ethics, in their Greek, Roman, and Christian incarnations. This reliance on morality as the foundation of political organization only declined in the sixteenth century, which therefore marks the end of the story of tyranny in premodern political thought told in this volume.