Fear of Tyrants

What the argument against it says

Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, both legal scholars, examined the phenomenon in a 2009 paper titled Tyrannophobia. Their position is direct: it is an irrational political attitude, and it has interfered with institutional reform that was needed, and it continues to do so. That makes this one of the few fears in this catalogue where the charge is not that it harms the person holding it but that it harms everybody else.

The concept has been taken up elsewhere, including by the radio programme BackStory, which examined how perceptions of authoritarianism in the United States have changed over time.

What the fear displaces

Much of the discussion concerns attention. The fear directs it toward perceived threats to democratic institutions and away from the social and economic problems underneath, and on that reading dealing with the causes of political dissatisfaction would achieve more than concentrating on the possibility of dictatorship.

What it is made of

Three things, interacting:

• historical experience
• cultural narrative
• political dynamics It has produced a vigilant political culture, which is not nothing, and the case for assessing its effect on policy and on social progress critically rests on the fact that vigilance and paralysis look similar from inside.

Aoife O'Donoghue's 2021 volume On Tyranny and the Global Legal Order carries a chapter setting it beside its neighbours, under the title Tyrannicide, Tyrannophobia and Tyrannophilia.

Why the checks and balances count

Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule spell out what a tyrannophobic constitution looks like in The Executive Unbound, published in 2011. Tyrannophobic constitutional designers, they write, set up elaborate vetogates, legislative and judicial oversight, and other checks and balances, all with an eye to minimising the risk of executive dictatorship.

That describes the United States constitution, and it is meant to. The argument is not that some Americans are unusually anxious; it is that the machinery of the state was built by anxious people and still runs on their anxiety. Their objection follows: if the fear hampers useful grants of power to the executive, it creates social costs, and the cost they name is an entrenched reluctance to transfer necessary powers.

The catalogue records that this is a position in an argument rather than a finding. Posner and Vermeule are making a case for executive power and the word is doing work for them, in the way hoplophobia does work for a firearms writer.

Which question has not been tested

Tom Ginsburg put the question the right way round in Comparative Constitutional Design in 2012: if the aim is to minimise the risk of dictatorship, or simply to take optimal precautions against it, tyrannophobia might be counterproductive.

He then says why he cannot settle it. His data set is cross-sectional, so it cannot directly test whether a democracy with a tyrannophobic population is less likely to become a dictatorship. That is the whole empirical question about this fear, stated plainly, and left open by the person best placed to close it.

Which opposite the word has

The term is older than the American argument. Hans Maier, writing on totalitarianism and political religions in 2007, describes the traditional tyrannophobia as Thomas Hobbes's and notes that it had been partially set out of joint, adding that tyrannophilia had not yet set in.

That pairing is what separates this from most entries here. Very few phobia words have an antonym in active scholarly use, and this one does: Aoife O'Donoghue's chapter in On Tyranny and the Global Legal Order, published in September 2021, is titled Tyrannicide, Tyrannophobia and Tyrannophilia, and treats all three as positions a society can take towards the same figure.

A word with a working opposite is a word describing an attitude. Nobody has proposed arachnophilia as a public stance.