Volume 33, Number 20 · December 18, 1986
Are Tyrants Necessary?
By W.G. Runciman
At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State
by Eli Sagan
Random House/Vintage, 420 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The story is told about Herbert Spencer that when T.H. Huxley discovered that in his youth Spencer had written a tragedy, he remarked that he knew what the plot must have been: 'a beautiful theory killed by a nasty, ugly, little fact.' It is a story which comes immediately to mind on reading the back jacket of this book by Eli Sagan, who teaches at Berkeley and has previously published books on cannibalism and on violence in ancient Greece. There we find the following astonishing comment by Professor Robert N. Bellah on Sagan's thesis about the origins of the state:
Review, 2538 words
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