Key Arguments

• Under human conditions, the alternative to power is not strength (which is helpless against power) but force, exerted by one or a few via means of violence.
• Violence can destroy power but never substitute for it, producing impotent forces that expend themselves futilely and fail to leave lasting monuments or stories.
• Montesquieu identified tyranny’s essence as isolation—of the tyrant from subjects and subjects from one another—contradicting the condition of acting and speaking together.
• Tyranny prevents power from developing in the public realm and is unable to remain in the space of appearance; it develops its own destruction upon inception.

Source Quotes

Conversely, aspiration toward omnipotence always implies—apart from its utopian —the destruction of plurality. Under the conditions of human life, the only alternative to power is not strength—which is helpless against power—but force, which indeed one man alone can exert against his fellow men and of which one or a few can possess a monopoly by acquiring the means of violence. But while violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it.

Under the conditions of human life, the only alternative to power is not strength—which is helpless against power—but force, which indeed one man alone can exert against his fellow men and of which one or a few can possess a monopoly by acquiring the means of violence. But while violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it. From this results the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerlessness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves, often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility, leaving behind neither monuments nor stories, hardly enough memory to enter into history at all.

More important is a discovery made, as far as I know, only by Montesquieu, the last political thinker to concern himself seriously with the problem of forms of government. Montesquieu realized that the outstanding characteristic of tyranny was that it rested on isolation—on the isolation of the tyrant from his subjects and the isolation of the subjects from each other through mutual fear and suspicion—and hence that tyranny was not one form of government among others but contradicted the essential human condition of plurality, the acting and speaking together, which is the condition of all forms of political organization. Tyranny prevents the development of power, not only in a particular segment of the public realm but in its entirety; it generates, in other words, impotence as naturally as other bodies politic generate power.

Tyranny prevents the development of power, not only in a particular segment of the public realm but in its entirety; it generates, in other words, impotence as naturally as other bodies politic generate power. This, in Montesquieu’s interpretation, makes it necessary to assign it a special position in the theory of political bodies: it alone is unable to develop enough power to remain at all in the space of appearance, the public realm; on the contrary, it develops the germs of its own destruction the moment it comes into existence. Violence, curiously enough, can destroy power more easily than it can destroy strength, and while a tyranny is always characterized by the impotence of its subjects, who have lost their human capacity to act and speak together, it is not necessarily characterized by weakness and sterility; on the contrary, the crafts and arts may flourish under these conditions if the ruler is “benevolent” enough to leave his subjects alone in their isolation.

Key Concepts

• the only alternative to power is not strength—which is helpless against power—but force
• violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it.
• rested on isolation—on the isolation of the tyrant from his subjects and the isolation of the subjects from each other
• contradicted the essential human condition of plurality
• develops the germs of its own destruction the moment it comes into existence.

Context

Section 28; analysis of the relation between power, strength, and violence, and Montesquieu’s account of tyranny’s structural isolation.