Tyrants

"The world is currently engulfed by all sorts of strongmen, authoritarians, and totalitarians. Are they all alike? Not always. In an engaging review of some 2,500 years of tyranny - drawing on a considerable knowledge of Western history and literature - Waller Newell masterfully sorts out tyrannies, ancient and modern, to remind us how they rise and why they fall - again and again. Tyrannies are the existential enemies of democracies - but not always in the same manner and to the same degree. And why that it is true makes fascinating reading."
Victor Davis Hanson, Martin and Illie Anderson Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

"If I could think of one book for a young lover of democracy, or democratic politician to read about tyranny - supposedly a thing of the past - it would be Waller Newell's eloquent, approachable, fascinating Tyrants. Based on an astoundingly broad knowledge of history, from ancient times to the present, from high culture to pop culture, this book penetrates into the soul of the tyrant … This is the biography of tyranny we have been waiting for."
Norman Doidge, MD, Columbia University and University of Toronto, and author of The Brain That Changes Itself

"This is a wonderful book, learned and insightful, acute and often brilliant. It is both a monument of scholarship and a call to action. Newell's Tyrants is as morally serious as a work of political philosophy and as sparkling with wit as an evening with the Marx Brothers."
Barry Strauss, Cornell University

"Waller Newell is the most brilliant interpreter of tyranny now alive. His stories of ancient and traditional tyranny, often left to narrow scholars, are absorbing, sometimes funny, but it is the accounts of Soviet Communism and Nazism that are most intellectually compelling and passionate. Newell can sweep untidy piles of facts into elegant phrases - 'the beautification of violence' - that capture their hidden meaning. At a moment when tyranny is coming back, everyone alert to the strangeness of our world ought to be reading this book."
Charles Fairbanks, The Hudson Institute

"Waller Newell's Tyrants is a profound and original assessment of the evolution of the mass psychological basis evolving techniques of imposition of tyrannical government from ancient to modern times. It is a reinterpretation of Machiavelli's impact on the 500th anniversary of his The Prince, and attacks the relatively benign assessment of that writer as a perceptive and amoral cynic. It is a brilliant updating of the characteristics of tyranny, including its ever more pervasive banality and its comparatively recent exploitation of false ideologies and the adaptation of technology to impose totalitarian control and disguise the false and often absurd nature of the regime. This is a valuable and important book that will make a durable contribution to the vast, but not entirely up-to-date literature on the subject."
Lord Conrad Black

"In a time when tyranny is resurgent all over the globe, in a bewildering variety of forms - military and civilian, theocratic and kleptocratic, ideological and tribal - this book provides a synoptic historical and philosophic perspective that does full justice to the manifold phenomenon in all its range and complexity."
Thomas L. Pangle, Joe R. Long Endowed Chair in Democratic Studies, University of Texas, Austin

"Tyranny remains the oldest and most durable political phenomenon. Tyrants provides a stunning refutation of those who still believe that the historical process or the logic of the market will bring about a more peaceful democratic world. This book is a must-read for any serious student of political science."
Steven B. Smith, Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science, Yale University

"At the highest levels of government, diplomacy and academia, are otherwise intelligent people who have convinced themselves that tyrants and tyrannies are anachronisms bound to be replaced by more enlightened forms of government. They apparently believe in a 'clock of human progress' and that the 'arc of the moral universe bends toward justice'. This rosy scenario is unsupported by the historical evidence as Waller R. Newell makes clear in his timely exploration of the durability and persistent appeal of repression."
Clifford D. May, President, Foundation for the Defence of Democracies