Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T02:49:34.833Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Absolutism, Tyranny and the Minimum Conditions of Constitutional Rule1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

L. J. Macfarlane
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

HISTORICALLY AND CONCEPTUALLY CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT IS presented as the antithesis of absolute sovereignty and the prophylactic to tyrannical oppression. The paradigm form for absolute sovereignty is rule by one man and, since everything turns on the character of that man, such rule is inherently liable to collapse through incapacity, or to degenerate into tyranny. Tyranny is an ill against which necessarily there can be no protection under conditions of absolute sovereignty. Constitutional government may, therefore, be conceived as an attempt to provide built-in safeguards to prevent, or at least reduce the chances of, absolute sovereignty assuming the corrupt and perverted form of tyranny. Such safeguards inevitably restrict the absolute nature of sovereign rule.

Type
Original Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1977 , pp. 212 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1977

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Footnotes

2 Absolute sovereignty may, of course, be vested in the hands of a collective body, but the notion of a collective sovereign is analytically derivative from that of a single-person sovereign and raises complex problems about the nature of such sovereignty which do not arise with a personal sovereign. I have, therefore, confined my analysis to the latter since it meets my needs and purposes. In the same way I have considered only a personal not a collective tyranny.

3 Dubs Homer H., Hans-shu Vol. III, p. 103, quoted in Herrlee G. Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China: Vol. I The Western Chou Empire, University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 45.

4 It might, of course, be cogently argued that modern western representative government has, through its adoption of the principle of popular sovereignty, revealed the conditions and dangers of absolutism in a new form. The problem, however, is not the concern of this paper which restricts itself to minimum constitutionalism.

5 To avoid confusion the term sovereign has been used in this paper to refer only to the ruler of an absolute sovereign state.

6 See for example Gibbon’s treatment of Commodus and Caracalla in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I.

7 It is the crude personal nature of the ends served which distinguishes classical tyranny from totalitarian rule, with its dedication to ideological ends. Indeed I would argue that terror and forcible oppression are not inherent and integral features of totalitarianism, but are rather indicative of an early stage of development. A model totalitarian state would be one in which all the members do what is required of them without any coercion, other than that of the pressure and authority of mobilized universal opinion. In these terms Maoist China had greater claims to be considered totalitarian than Stalinist Russia.

8 There are, of course, often forces acting on a tyrant in a particular polity which seek or serve to moderate the iniquities of his rule; but that is only to say that in practice tyranny is often diluted. The model tyranny is a maximum tyranny with minimum concessions to the concern and needs of others. History shows that, given a combination of audacity and terror, no concessions are required except to the tyrant’s own henchmen.

9 Although the minimum constitutional model is suggestive of an embryonic parliamentary, form of constitutional monarchy, rather than a constitutional presidency, this is simply because it is derived from an absolute sovereign model. A presidential executive, moreover, can only exist within an existing framework of constitutionalism of a more developed form than that discussed in this paper.

10 Howe Lybyer, Albert, The Government of the Ottoman Empire In The Time Of Suleiman The Magnificent, New York, Russell and Russell, 1966, p. 26.Google Scholar

11 The Politics of Aristotle, trans. Ernest Barker, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1946, Bk. V Ch. xi S. 10, p. 245.

12 Ibid. S. 15 and 16, p. 246.

13 As suggested earlier (p. 3) the absolute sovereign, too, may in practice have to operate within fairly restricted limits in choosing a successor; but, in so far as he is absolute in this area, the restraints are not formalized or enforceable.

14 It is an open question, however, whether the establishment of a legislature independent of the ruler should be regarded as a procedural or a substantive restraint.

15 An outstanding modern example of this is the failure of the Far Eastern army commanders in the Soviet Union to take steps to protect themselves against Stalin’s bloody purges of the army in 1938, even though the officer corps elsewhere in Russia had already been decimated.

16 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, 1651, Ch. XXVI Of Civil Laws

17 The problem of safeguards during emergency government in constitutional states is cogently discussed in Rossiter, Clinton, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies, 1948, Harbinger Books edit. New York, 1963, pp. 298–306.Google Scholar

18 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1698, s. 168.