Sublime

By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s subseq

philosophers, called tyranny. They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit. Much of the succeeding political debate in the United States has concerned the problem of tyranny within American society: over slaves and women, for example.

When you consider how natural it seems to us that the power over the lives of others resulting from great wealth should be hereditary, you will understand better how men like Sir Robert Filmer could take the same view as regards the power of kings, and how important was the innovation represented by men who thought as Locke did.

Margaret Canovan a bien résumé la position de ces auteurs libéraux des années 1950 : « avertis par les découvertes de la théorie des sociétés de masse, ils avaient peur des ravages que les masses pourraient causer si elles participaient en effet à la politique57 ». Elle aurait cependant pu préciser que cette peur du peuple n’est pas confinée aux tr

Athenians were not rational at all, merely selfish and shrewd. What guided their decisions was their base emotions—hunger for power, attention, and money. And for those purposes they could be very tactical and clever, but none of their maneuvers led to anything that lasted or served the overall interests of the democracy.

“Is the immune system at the heart of a new incarnation of social Darwinism that allows people of different ‘quality’ to be distinguished from each other?” asks the anthropologist Emily Martin.

Princes had the right, but they had neither the means nor the desire, of doing whatever they pleased. But what now remains of those barriers which formerly arrested the aggressions of tyranny?

e.g. that power is the foundation of right; or that a monarch has a divine right to govern well or ill; or that virtue is self-love or the love of power; or that war is the natural state of man; or that private vices are public benefits.

Indeed, Foucault regarded our conception of “man” – that is, the liberal humanist vision of the individual as the possessor of certain inalienable natural rights – as a very recent invention.