Xenophon's Hiero shows that a despot is merely the owner of a contested type of property and thus subject to greater cares and narrower constraints than the poet, Simonides. But this would also be true of the local money-lender or wealthy tradesman. Having money in a place where lots of people will happily slit your throat to make off with your dough causes anxiety and heartache. Indeed, even the Mob boss spends sleepless nights worrying which of his lieutenants is planning to bump him off. A hereditary monarch, on the other hand, may feel more secure.
Still, at least for Aristotle's most famous pupil, an even better option was to be a God-King, and therefore beyond every mortal type of anxiety while wholly engaged in an endless campaign of conquest or laying waste. A God, after all, can go anywhere and do anything and experience what was forbidden to even the most licentious or antinomian of poets.
Suppose the Despot is doing something for his people which is essential for their survival or conducive to their material and moral advancement. Then, a Hiero would say to Simonides- 'I get less pleasure than you from food or sex. But when I accomplish what no one else can to ensure that every mother, every child, every person in this realm is safe and able to retain the fruits of their own labor and the cellared wine of their rightly guided passions, then- Simonides- I know a joy, but in a conscious and heightened degree, you yourself may have known serving your aged parents or routinely safeguarding your homestead so the voice of innocence rises only in merriment not the horrible screams of defilement and hideous death.'
Little can be said about Xenophon's Hiero. It is stupid shite of only philological interest. Leo Strauss, however, pretended otherwise and then Kojeve commented on Strauss's misprision and then Vogelin got in on the action and thus a worthless academic availability cascade has trundled down to our own day.
Strauss began by pretending that sensible people hadn't run the fuck away from Stalin or Hitler or whatever. He says-
when we were brought face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past—our political science failed to recognize it
The fact is, those who could run away did so with vim and vigor. Those who couldn't- or those who had a hard on for that evil shit- stayed. True there were some deluded cunts. But they weren't all 'political scientists'. Sabina Spielrein, Jung's patient, went back to the USSR. Oddly, but for Hitler, she might have survived. Still, sensible peeps ran off to England or America or other such places where the term 'political philosophy' was considered an oxymoron.
It's true that ex-Catholics like Schmitt & Heidi stayed on under Hitler- but Strauss doesn't get that them guys really didn't like Jews. They stuck around coz they enjoyed seeing Jews suffer.
Strauss said there was a 'classical political science' which he understood coz...urm... he had a couple of shite sheepskins from shite German Schools. The truth is he was shit at Greek philology and knew shit about Western philosophy- which is first Christian and then Mathematical- and thus didn't get that the mot-theme, the key-word, in Hiero is logizomenos.
For a Christian who learnt a little Greek at the sort of schools Strauss attended, the 'dhvani' assonance is with 2 Corinthians 5.19.
Briefly, this term- which, in Hiero, is translated by Dakyns as 'moral algebra' and which has the connotation in Aristotle etc. of a reckoning up, or calculation, for a particular purpose- is linked to the notion of all interpersonal 'trespasses' being, very usefully, 'netted out' by the Lord in a 'reconciliation' whose good news we can all give each other.
India's God-Kings- Rama, Krishna etc- may have predated those of the Greeks- Alexander- or the Romans- Caesars of various stripes. Moreover, the 'netting out' and 'reconciliation' is done by karma. But, the West never fully embraced this doctrine. Nor, like the Chinese Utilitarian Sage, Moh Tzu, did they accept a pragmatic Dialethia whereby the ubiquity of ghosts is posited, ad captum vulgi, to keep the peasants honest.
Once an Alex or Augustus is shown to work fine as a Deity, and 'netting out' or 'reconciliation' is seen as enhancing productivity and promoting superior non-coercive equilibria, coz obvs, neither Crowned head nor a Pontiff purveying Christ's bread need be a despot or tyrant of Mob Boss or whatever.
Strauss doesn't get this. Why? He was miscued first by Cohen's Neo-Kantian careerism and then by Heidi's failed Catholic vocation. Thus he thinks political science is a 'fact' the way advances in natural sciences are a 'fact'. But if political science is a fact then so is fartological or socioproctological science or just grinning inanely and then eating your own shit. Sure, you could have a philosophy of political science separate from that stupid shite, but so could you have a philosophy of eating your own shit separate from actually doing so. For Catholics, spoiled or just silly, like Heidi & Schmitt- or marginally more sensible Austrians, like Voegelin or Kuehnelt-Leddihn- philosophy was sublatable- not a stable career path engaged in a Baconian 'negotiation' betwixt 'Athens & Jerusalem'.
The sad truth is, even for LSE spawned Hindu intellectual coolies like me, William Buckley's 'God & Man at Yale' has prevailed. Paul de Man is reviled. Those of my peers who got scholarships and became Professors equate tyranny with 'woke' shitheads. Some twenty years ago I began a novel with a Straussian hero. The fact is, I'm a kid from the English Section of Al Mansoor School, Baghdad, circa '68-70. I didn't like the way the West was fucking over- not my peeps exactly coz I iz Hindu bleck- but my peeps exactly coz I is a fuckin' Hindu bleck wot loves Iraq & Iraqis. I may mention the first really posh, really super-rich, guy who was nice to me was Iraqi. I was working at KPMG and ended up tagging along with an Old Etonian colleague to a party at an elegant Belgravia Mansion. Everybody else had done each other at Skool or Collidge or Skiing trips. I was decidedly de trop. I collared a bottle of wine and headed for the library. An elderly retainer- Assyrian? Lebanese?- came forward and showed me its glories. I apologized for bringing wine into the library. He looked at me strangely. I confessed I was just a stupid Hindu who worked with somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody which is why I was in this posh house. But, I'd been a child in Baghdad. I'd soon return to India to be that child again. The scholar's ink is worth more than the martyr's blood. I brought wine into the library. I apologize.
The old Jew was awed by my truly simian stupidity. Perhaps, the Quran- not to mention Karl Jaspers- was right. Some human beings can turn into monkeys or pigs. But, it turned out, the polite little man had heard of my Dad- who, on instructions from our Ambassador (a Muslim I.N.A officer) , had done much for Baghdadi Jews in '68. Back then, people in the Levant thought that Indian Muslim Diplomats were just window dressing. The real power must lie with the 'Brahmin'.
I mention all this to ask one simple question. Why is Israel not a tyranny? How come nobody is claiming to be its Messiah nor even saying that it has had any such thing despite its survival against the odds?
I recall bumping into a bunch of Iraqi refugees at the old Slug & Lettuce circa '98. The good looking, upper middle class, English speaker- who was my age- suddenly declared his passionate love for Saddam. He wanted to explain the contradiction. But I got it. Saddam was the protector of the otherwise 'raped' and 'dishonored' Motherland. I mentioned an Indian film called 'Deewar'. One brother says "I have money, I have power, I have reputation- what do you have?'. The other brother replies "I have Mother'. It turned out that this dialogue is famous in Middle East. I was called 'Amitabh Bachchan' and wasn't permitted to buy a round because the Iraqis had 'mother' though, or because, they were refugees from its most murderously protective son- or tyrant.
Strauss & Kojeve's vaudeville act re. Tyranny- when the thing, quite obviously, was about Motherlands being raped & c- and their refusal to accept that it was God as King or Mummy as Daddy which defeats all that stupid shite about rape and defilement and the fact that I- as a proud bleck man am currently being fucked over by Turko-Brittanic slave trading Pashas like BoJo- not to mention the Aryan Atilla, Priti Patel- Rishi Sunak however is okay- and, anyway, I might actually be a girl but J.K Rowling is denying me a vagina and the chance to pleasure myself with the various sorts of vibrators which, bizarrely, all the big A.I driven Tech companies, incessantly bombard me with advertisements and special offers for.
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