In his mini-treatise On the Government of a City, the great Italian lawyer-commentator Bartolus (Bartolo de Sasseferrato) begins with a fairly conventional typology of the six regime-types of classical constitutional theory. The city may be ruled by the many, the people; by the few, the optimates; or by one man. Any of these forms of rule may or may not be tyrannical. We thus have six categories, named respectively polity or regimen ad populum (good rule by the many) and democracy (bad or, in Bartolus’ preferred term, “perverse” rule by the many); aristocracy (good rule by the few) and oligarchy (bad); kingship (good rule by one) and tyranny (bad).
The last name, tyranny, is slightly confusing, for any of the regime types might be devoted to private interests rather than the common good and thus tyrannical in the classical sense. The tyranny of one man, however, is in Bartolus’ view the worst type of all, just as, conversely, true kingship is the best type of all; hence the name of tyrant and its full force was reserved for the sole despotic ruler. The tyranny of many, while falling far short of true political justice, at least “knows something of the nature of the common good” just in virtue of aggregating the private interests of most of the polity. The tyranny of one man, however, “recedes entirely from the common good.”
Having laid out this typology, the classical constitutional lawyer might then offer praise of mixed government — either taken to be a seventh regime-type, or to stand outside the ordinary classification — in which the one, few and many are combined in some sort of harmonious joint rule for the common good. Bartolus instead offers something far more interesting, and darker: a sort of horrid counterpoint to mixed government. This is “a seventh mode of government, the worst one, which now exists in the City of Rome,” which Bartolus will repeatedly call “monstrous.” The defining feature of the monstrous government is a multiplicity of quasi-independent tyrants dominating a weak public authority:
For, throughout the different regions there, there are many tyrants there so strong that one ⟦can⟧not prevail against the other. For there is a common government of the whole city so weak that it cannot ⟦prevail⟧ against any of the tyrants, nor against anyone adhering to the tyrants, except only so far as they allow it. Aristotle did not discuss (posuit) this government, and fittingly so, for it is a monstrous thing. What, indeed, if someone sees one body having one common ⟦and⟧ weak head, and many other common heads stronger than it, and all opposed to one another? Certainly it would be a monster. This government, therefore, is called monstrous.
This raises any number of questions. If the gravamen of the monstrous regime is a multiplicity of tyrants, how does it differ from tyrannical government by the many, that is, democracy? (One might also justly ask how it differs from a system of separation of powers with checks-and-balances, in which multiple institutions aim for their own institutional good or those of their members, but not for the common good. In the latter case, however, liberal theory claims we have an “invisible hand” arrangement that is supposed to conduce to the common good indirectly and at the level of the overall system, through institutional competition. I think the claim is baseless but that is, at least, a separate discussion). Why exactly is the monstrous regime even worse than the tyrannical mob? The answer is that in the monstrous regime, the tyrants need not have a common end, even a wicked end, and need not act in conjunction:
The thing which was said above, that a government of many evil men is not as evil as a government of one tyrant, ought to be understood as if those many men aim for one ⟦end⟧ and cannot ⟦do anything⟧ except all together. It is different if each one cultivates tyranny through himself and the one does not care about the other—as I said above about the monstrous government, which now exists in the city of Rome. For, just as if one corrupt humour exists that predominates in the whole body, it is evil; if, nevertheless, all humours were corrupted and they are each opposed to one another, it would be far worse. Woe, therefore, to the city that has many tyrants not aiming for one ⟦end⟧!
The core evil of the monstrous regime, then, is not the same as the evil of democracy, in which the perverse many, acting together, at least pursue a common end, albeit a wicked end; nor is it the same as tyranny, in which one man acts purposefully for private advantage. Rather the core evil of the monstrous regime is a kind of incoherence, a political chaos, in which there is no purposive rule of any kind. The nominal ruling authority is enfeebled and great powers, nominally “private,” act independently but tyrannically within their separate spheres, like a hydra whose heads move independently and war with one another. This confusion of public and private authority is, for Bartolus, the worst possible state of civic affairs.
I will leave it to the reader to decide whether the type-image of the monstrous government has real-world applications today. One mustn’t, of course, make glib analogies to a world in which any of hundreds of federal district judges can, acting independently, block any government program nationwide (or even require the government to exercise its enforcement discretion in certain ways), with only intermittent and seemingly random oversight from the Supreme Court; or in which any of several gigantic social-media firms with monopoly power in a given space can, acting independently, delete prominent voices from the public sphere with the press of a button, while funding minor intellectuals who loudly declaim that the masters of what may be said are, after all, “just private firms”; or in which any of several mega-moguls can, acting independently, powerfully shape electoral politics merely by opening a checkbook. That sort of casual translation of Bartolus’ grim vision into very different circumstances wouldn’t do at all. And even if some version of monstrous government were upon us, the remedy would be clear enough, at least in principle: it would be for the public authority to dare to take purposive action for the common good, to dare to rule.
Adrian Vermeule
