Universal Tyranny: The Socratic Attack on Tyrannical Psychology

My first book, Universal Tyranny, is forthcoming with the State University of New York Press in June of 2026. It provides an analysis and a critique of tyranny by studying the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon, who not only first conceptualized the idea of tyranny but most fully explored the psychology of the tyrant. These ancient thinkers, I show, provide the most probing analysis of political ambition, or the desire to rule, and how it can easily become tyrannical ambition. More profoundly, they reveal a difficult truth: everyone finds attractive the power, wealth, and freedom that lone rulers attain. To some extent, we all want to be free, to have our desires satisfied, to be praised by those around us, and to be in charge. There’s a little bit of a tyrant in us all.

The Socratics are the only thinkers to confront the problem of tyranny on its own terms, as a permanent and plausibly attractive option in politics. They consider honestly the greater honors, pleasures, and possessions acquired by the tyrant, and ask in a genuinely open spirit if such goods make tyrannical life choiceworthy. But they do so in a candid and direct manner shorn of the complex modern philosophic premises that have been used justify communist, fascist, or other modern authoritarian states. In doing so, the Socratics cut right to the heart of the issue, elucidating the confusions of tyrannical ambition and the disastrous form of politics to which it leads. Their philosophic openness results in a cutting critique of authoritarian rule, which this book argues is an important normative tool for our contemporary political moment.