The Tyranny of the Moderns

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, University of Notre Dame, November 11, 2017

In his keynote address at the 18th Annual Fall Conference of Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, James Hankins explores historical concepts of tyranny and various practical forms it has taken over time, culminating in an indictment of its peculiarly modern manifestation, which he calls ideological tyranny.

In Hankins's view tyranny is "a particular form of political dysfunction that has been repeated over and over again in Western history in more or less severe forms … Its marks are a kind of moral paralysis among the political class; citizens are under surveillance and live in fear of denunciation; the government lies and deceives as a matter of policy; there is an absence of free open and debate; an absence of philia, of friendship among the political elite, which Aristotle thought was the real basis for a healthy polity."

To show how the West managed to diminsh the specter of tyranny for a time, he traces the development of civil society, religious freedom, and tolerance in medieval and early modern Europe. Going against the grain of standard narratives, he contends that it was Christian thought as formed in the crucible of the religious wars of the sixteenth century – and not the tradition of modern secularism – that laid the foundation for the freedoms we still enjoy today. Indeed, "it is the secular intellectuals who turned into new totalitarians in the 19th and 20th centuries."