It is especially appropriate to discuss these two books together since they feature a common theme: the connection between a particular kind of regime, on the one hand, and a particular kind of human being, on the other. To get our bearings here, we can turn to Books VIII and IX of Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates shows us a series of regimes—each emerging from, and worse than, the previous—and also the series of men who go along with each of these regimes. The pairing of each kind of political community with a particular kind of person shows that we cannot understand the one without understanding the other.

Paul A. Rahe’s project in The Spartan Regime is to help his reader “to see the Spartans whole” (p. xii) In order to see the Spartans in this fashion, we must understand their political community in the broadest sense: the form and development of its institutions, the internal and external pressures under which it labored, and the kind of human being it produced. We cannot understand the political community that was Sparta without understanding the kind of person who was a Spartan.

To this end, Rahe begins by discussing the aspects of the Spartan regime that were devoted to shaping the character of its citizens. As he shows, more than other Greek communities—perhaps more than any other political community—the Spartan regime conditioned its citizens to give “absolute primacy to the common good” (p. 7). This was accomplished through a virtually all-encompassing system of education, custom, ritual, censure, and compulsion that began in childhood and ended in death. The most popularly recognizable part of this system—think of the film 300—is the regimen of hardship and privation to which male Spartan children were subjected. But the Spartan character was also shaped, from boyhood, by religious practices and popular superstition, as well as through aesthetic education: music, poetry, and dance. Moving from boyhood to manhood, this citizen-shaping education did not cease but simply changed; throughout their lives, Spartan men were subject to extreme regimentation at every step, alongside unceasing competition on an unforgiving public stage.

Following his account of the formation of Spartan character, Rahe discusses the particular institutions that made up Sparta’s mixed system of government (combining monarchic, aristocratic, and popular elements). In tracing the development over time of both these governing institutions and the Spartan political community as a whole, Rahe also shows us the development of the Spartan human being alongside the Spartan regime, as the regime shaped its citizens to meet its necessities. This harsh molding of “the adult male Spartiate” into “an almost entirely public being,” in the author’s account, was necessary both for maintaining the mixed system of Spartan governmental institutions and for ensuring the security of the Spartan political community and way of life (p. 28). Nowhere is this more clear than in his discussion of the challenge that the Spartans faced in reducing their Messenian helots to servitude and keeping them there, a task that required the Spartans to both adjust their strategy vis-à-vis other Greek cities and, perhaps most importantly, shape themselves into different kinds of men than other Greeks.

Rahe tries to paint as full a picture as possible of a regime that has long vanished from the earth. In contrast, Waller Newell begins Tyrants by asserting that “tyranny is a permanent feature on the human landscape” (p. v). It is not the case, says Newell, that the forward march of history has brought, and will bring, ever greater freedom and democracy; rather, tyranny is, and will remain, “a permanent alternative in human affairs” (p. vi). If we care for freedom and democracy, we ought therefore to learn as much as we can about tyranny—because it is not going anywhere. Newell’s project is to provide this education.

Newell begins with Homer’s Iliad, and with the rage of Achilles as he chafes against the unjust Agamemnon. By starting a discussion of tyranny with an examination of two more or less tyrannical characters, he shows his intention to examine tyranny not simply as a “variety of government” but also as a “category of human psychology” (p. 8). Just as we cannot understand Sparta without understanding the kind of man who was a Spartan, we cannot understand a tyrannical regime without understanding the tyrannical human being who goes along with such a regime.

In the confrontation between Achilles and Agamemnon, we find much that is of value for understanding tyranny and the tyrannical human being as they move through history. Agamemnon seems like an example of what Newell calls a “garden-variety” tyrant: appetitive, prideful, mercurial, ruling over his political community as a terrible father (which, in fact, he was) might rule over a family. This kind of tyranny has a long history, and it is certainly not difficult to find contemporary examples. In Achilles’ rage, on the other hand, we find a prefiguring of what Newell identifies as the exclusively modern, “millenarian” sort of tyranny, which will manifest fully in the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror to follow.

From these Homeric beginnings, Newell takes us through the Greek confrontation with the Persian Empire—often framed, as in (again) the film 300, as an archetypical clash between freedom and tyranny—and the Peloponnesian War. Throughout, our attention is drawn to the interplay, often murky and multilayered, between freedom and tyranny. For instance, what are we to make of Pericles’ identification of democratic Athens, in Thucydides’ account, as a tyrannical city? We would not call the Spartan regime tyrannical—as Rahe points out, the Spartans were seen by other Greeks, at least for a time, as dedicated “enemies to tyranny”—but what about the brutal tyranny that Sparta exercised over its helots (p. 116)? This certainly does not undermine the distinction between free government and tyranny, but it does raise the point that free societies may at times behave tyrannically. One of the strengths of the author’s narrative is that it is able to capture, and do justice to, these kinds of complexities without obscuring the broader distinction between freedom and tyranny.

As we move forward, we begin to encounter another of Newell’s tyrannical types: the “reformer.” Reformist tyranny does not necessarily do away with the appetites and excesses of its garden-variety cousin; instead, it marries these tyrannical trademarks with a passion for building, ordering, consolidating, and strengthening the political communities over which it rules. Hence, the tyranny of the reformer confronts us with one of the book’s stickiest questions: What are we, as partisans of freedom and democracy, to make of the fact that tyranny, in its reformist incarnation, sometimes produces a great deal of good? Should we condemn Augustus for the murderous violence with which he seized power, or should we praise him for the desperately needed peace, stability, and level-headedness he brought to Rome? Where should Henry VIII—reforming tyrant, state builder, and glutton—stand with us? How about Ataturk? The truth, says Newell, is that “some of the darker, more aggressive qualities that drive the soul of the tyrant can also be found in the inner make-up of great statesmen,” a “paradox” that might be illuminated by reflecting on leaders like Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, both of whom may have saved American constitutional liberty by fiddling with its limits (p. 230). Part of the goal of Tyrants, says Newell—returning again to the connection between regime and character—is to prompt us to think about how outsized ambition might be channeled into the service of free government.

The connection between regime and character returns us to millenarian tyranny, and to Achilles’ rage. At the heart of millenarian tyranny, for Newell, is the white-hot desire for justice that emerges from Achilles-like anger at injustice, coupled with the sense that perfect justice could be actualized on earth if only particular impediments—aristocrats, compromisers, class enemies, race enemies, nonbelievers—could be destroyed. Millenarian tyranny is, of necessity, a modern sort of tyranny, because it follows from the modern project of conquering nature: the modern notion that nature and human nature are infinitely malleable, and can be shaped and reshaped by human effort and will. Thus, millenarian tyrants see themselves as “sculptors” or “engineers” of “human souls,” reshaping man and nature for an infinitely brighter future through terror and genocide in the here and now (pp. 164, 166). For Newell, the right–left distinction we often draw between examples of millenarian tyranny (Hitler’s Nazis and Mao’s Communists, for example) obscures more than it clarifies; despite the different flavors of their rhetoric, these regimes are examples of the same phenomenon, and the instructive distinction is between free government and tyranny, rather than between styles of millenarianism.

In both Rahe’s account and Newell’s, purposeful character formation—soul shaping—turns out to be a difficult, not to say paradoxical, activity. Rahe’s Spartans, shaped from cradle to grave into the kind of self-denying warriors required by the regime in which they lived, were a living demonstration of the remarkable plasticity of the human animal; at the same time, “the contradiction between . . . human nature and the needs of the pólis” was such that the same Spartans, so known for their devotion to their community while under the gaze of their fellow citizens, were known also for a tendency toward individual avarice in private (p. 29). Newell’s millenarian tyrants, so committed to the project of shaping souls for the earthly paradise to come, seem as often to wind up exterminating the great many souls not susceptible to proper refashioning. What, then, are the possibilities and limits of soul shaping or character formation? Newell ends Tyrants with a call for the kind of education that might inoculate against the emergence of tyrannical character, and that might turn outsized ambition and even Achilles-like rage to productive ends.

In tracing the connections between kinds of regimes and kinds of human beings, both Newell and Rahe raise provocative questions of interest to lawgivers, tyrants, and educators alike.