Since Newton first described the movements of extended bodies in terms of forces, and Darwin described speciation in terms of natural selection, belief in final causes is no longer suitable for scientific discussion. Defining the purpose or the grounds of political legitimacy of states in terms of ideals either degenerates into an irreconcilable dispute about values or proliferates contested definitions about terms like consensus and rule of law. To avoid making terms meaningless we must define words in terms of what they describe, as in science, not in terms of values. Tyranny when meaningfully used either refers to (a) a description of historic relationships between the state and individuals subordinate to it which were irreproducible; or (b) a prediction, that can be empirically falsified, that the relationship between the state and individuals subordinate to it are such that they are not reproducible.

1. Tyranny as an Internal Relationship Between the Individual and State

However we define tyranny, it must distinguish between the internal relationship the individual may have to a state, and any external relationships it has. The negative actions and consequences (e.g. violating some ideal or consent) of the state which one belongs to is different to those of other states. Laws which expressly target minorities and negatively affect their property rights are different to economic sanction by a foreign nation, or pillaging from a country one is at war with. For analytic clarity, Tyranny must be definitionally constrained to the internal relationship between an individual and a state.

2. State as Natural and Prior to the Individual

Humans relate to the state as the subordinate parts of an organic whole. A State is a political association between social animals. To say that humans are social animals, is not to say that they have a preference for the community of others, but that their health and existence (both in instantiation and perpetuation) relies upon a social network, or political community. Humans have an extended childhood compared to other mammals (meaning they are necessarily contingent for many years on other humans even after birth), specialise (increasing contingency on other humans to meet their needs), and rely upon written knowledge of humans from past generations to make incremental gains in power and knowledge through time. Moreover, the state is prior to any individual—much like how a person is made up of a head, limbs and a torso (or of a brain, a heart and lungs or human cells and a microbiome of non-human cells), and how the whole (the person) is prior to any of these parts. Thus, the relationship the individual has to the state is one of necessity.

3. Force as the Relationship between the State and the Individual

States relate to individuals by means of force in the form of laws. Laws require sanction for breach, whether that is arbitrarily issued by a political superior, or the logical consequence of a contravention of natural rights. For Collingwood, punishment (the sanction for breach of law) is the immediate frustration of the criminal will by “society’s will” when they come into conflict: the negation of the individual’s negation of society’s will. Collingwood notes that not all conflicts of will constitute a breach of law. As an example, conflict between political parties, between prices for vendors and purchasers, and between any sports teams are not breaches of law, because they do not constitute a breach of constitution. Whereas the violation of a provision of the criminal code, accepted by the subjects of the constitution, is a violation of a law given authority by the constitution. The constitution is significant for Collingwood, since he sees laws as requiring two things: firstly, that a sovereign (the constitution) will it; secondly that the subjects accept it. Merely that a law is passed with the authority of the constitution as its basis, without the acceptance of the subjects is insufficient; mere consensus does not necessarily frustrate the will of the dissident individual. Laws, therefore, represent the will of the state, not the sovereign nor the subjects. Crime is a failure to overcome the collective will of society: that is, state force is natural to the relationship between the state and the individual.

4. Internal Force to Dissidents does not constitute Tyranny

Since the relationship between the state and the individual is one of necessity, and one of force, either all states are tyrannical and individuals should avoid all associations, or the mere fact of force from the state to the individual cannot constitute tyranny. Moreover, either all state force does not constitute tyranny and there can be no meaning in the word tyranny or state force is tyrannical on some grounds. However, I began this essay critiquing the pursuit for and discourse around grounds for political legitimacy. Yet rather than selecting for an ideal, which depending on external circumstances may vary in meaningfulness, a descriptive negative selective criterion infers no purpose to human individuals, nor to states.

5. A Negative Selective Criterion for Political Legitimacy

All positive grounds for political legitimacy are purposive. To say that political legitimacy is grounded in consent is to say that state actions are for the purpose of adhering to the subordinate individuals; to say that political legitimacy is grounded in the common good is to say that state action is for the natural end of the individual. Yet nothing in the natural world is purposive. If we look at fish, we might be tempted to say that they have fins for the purpose of swimming faster, but a natural selection explanation would indicate that fins emerge because less hydrodynamic morphologies have a lower survival and, consequently, reproduction rate, than those which have fins. In the same way, those qualities which seem natural to humans and states (whether consent, to be socially engaged, to protect rights… etc.) cannot reasonably have a purpose (final cause) for appearing but are explainable by a negative selection criterion: that is, those laws which states relate to their individuals by, are not conducive to the reproduction of the state. For example, the collapse of the French aristocracy during the French revolution indicates that the laws around tenure were not reproducible for the relationship between individuals and the state.

6. Final Synthesis

For force to be used by the state on the individual, in a way that is not tyrannical, requires that there be a distinction between tyrannical and non-tyrannical uses of force. The uses of force are not purposive but immediate frustrations of dissident wills. We can describe purposive behaviour in organic beings by recourse to natural selection, and states being organic entities comprised of humans (just as humans are organic entities comprised of cells) can have their legitimate grounds described by a negative selective criterion. In this way we can initially define tyranny as the description of the use of force (the relationship) between the state and the individual which was not conducive to reproduction. However, threats to state reproduction can come from external sources, as in a war, and these as defined in (.1) do not constitute tyranny. Additionally, just as in a scientific theory historic data can be used to make prediction, tyranny must also have the capacity to be used predictively to describe irreproducible internal relationships between the state and the individual. Thus, we arrive at the definition I gave in the introduction: Tyranny means (a) a description of historic relationships between the state and individuals subordinate to it which were irreproducible; or (b) a prediction, that can be empirically falsified, that the relationship between the state and individuals subordinate to it are such that they are not reproducible.