Democracy and Tyranny in Modern and Recent Times

Abstract

One of the dominant tendencies in the history of mankind throughout the entire course of its development has been the struggle between two opposing principles—democracy and tyranny. The very concepts, born in antiquity, reflected the clash and constant rivalry of two principles in the organization of the political order of the states of antiquity. In the narrow sense democracy was understood to mean a form of the state based on the recognition that the people [narod] are the source and at the same time the bearers of power, which they realize by implementing their civil rights and freedoms. Tyranny was taken to mean a form of state power that was established through force and based on one-person rule. An important peculiarity of the genesis of tyranny (distinguishing it from all other forms of authoritarianism) is the circumstance that it arose in a transitional period in the struggle of the people (the demos) against the ancestral nobility (the aristocracy) and found support in the people for a struggle against the aristocratic opposition. Scholars see the social purpose of the power of tyrants in the implementation of reforms aimed at improving the situation of the demos, developing a new social hierarchy, and forming a strong state. The authors of antiquity—Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius—who drew a clear distinction between democracy and tyranny, nonetheless saw the possibility of one form of rule turning into the other. They therefore considered both these forms of rule imperfect or even as the worst of all possible forms, and instead they saw the ideal to lie in a mixed form of government that theoretically eliminates (or minimizes) the flaws of each of the extreme or pure forms.