François vanden Zype (or in Latin: Franciscus Zypaeus) was born in Mechelen in 1580. A son of Henri vanden Zype and Claire du Carne, he grew up in a devout Catholic aristocratic family. His father was lord of Kauwendael (near Mechelen) and Audermeulen (near Berlaar). In the roaring times of the 1580s, when Catholic liturgical celebrations were prohibited in Mechelen, Henri and Claire had been forced to travel to Antwerp to get François baptized in the Catholic Church. François’s parents succeeded in transferring their faith to their offspring. Out of eight children, no less than four chose an ecclesiastical career. Franciscus’s brothers Henri and Philippe entered the Benedictine order. The latter was a religious in the abbey of Saint John in Ypres; the former even became abbot of the Saint Andrew monastery in Bruges and was known for his theological books. Franciscus himself and his brother Rombaut opted for the secular clergy, and both were promoted to the canonicate. Another brother, Pierre, became bailiff of the margraveship of Lede.

If the name of Edouard Ducpétiaux (1804–1868) still rings a bell for some people today, it is without any doubt for his role as a reformer of the Belgian prison system, having influenced reflection on this theme all over Europe. But although there is surely a link between the law and the existence of prisons, his role was more what we today would call that of political activist, journalist, and senior civil servant, rather than that of a jurist in the more classical sense of the word.

Tyranny’s lengthy history in European debate lends itself to a linear narrative, and this chapter inserts, into that frame, debates over tyranny from archaic Greece to the contemporary era. Linearity often presents a false picture of continuity, progression and coherence, none of which can be bestowed upon tyranny. Rather, there are controversies and contingencies: the rise and fall of empires, the emergence of the Catholic Church, colonialism, constitutionalism, democracy and individual and collective roles contribute to contemporary tyranny’s complexity. Progressing through a history of Western thought – including its imperialism – highlights how changing attitudes towards governance affected accounts of tyranny. This account reveals how Roman hatred of monarchs, attitudes towards gender, the invention of race, the emergence of contemporary democracy and consequent concerns over majority tyranny demonstrate a consistent concern built into a European tyrannical theory subsequently projected onto the rest of the world.

Based on the manner in which Arnoldus Gheyloven refers to himself in his works, that is, Arnoldus Theoderici de Hollandia de Rotterdam, one may believe that Arnoldus was born in the city of Rotterdam, probably around 1375, but the exact date of birth remains unknown. Hardly anything is known about his younger years or the social environment in which he spent his childhood. After having studied in Vienna for a while, Gheyloven moved to Bologna around 1393 in order to study canon law under the supervision of Gaspar Calderini (†1399), a subtilis canonista according to Gheyloven, and son of the even more famous canonist, Giovanni Calderini (†1365). Arnoldus stayed for six years in the house of Calderini, where he was nourished by him as if he was his own son. But when Calderini died from the plague in 1399, Gheyloven moved to Padua, as a baccalaureus decretum, to continue his canon law studies, between 1401 and 1403, under the supervision and sponsorship of the great Italian canonist, Francesco Zabarella (†1417).

Zeger-Bernard van Espen was born in Leuven 8 July 1646 as son of the legal practitioner Joannes van Espen and his wife Elisabeth Zegers. He was the youngest of nine children. In 1656 he began attending the college of the Oratorians in Temse. In 1663 he entered ’t Varken (Pig College) in Leuven to study Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts. In 1665 he assumed clerical status, received a scholarship at the Heilige-Geestcollege (Holy Spirit College) and pursued his studies at the Faculty of Law. In 1670, after five years of studying canon law, he obtained the licentiate in both laws. In 1673, he was ordained priest and one year later he was appointed to the chair of the so-called ‘six weeks lectures’, an extraordinary professorship, meant for teaching an annual course during the academic holiday (August and September). In 1675 van Espen took his doctoral examinations and was promoted to doctor in both laws. From 1677 until 1703 he also delivered a weekly lecture in Church History in the Pauscollege (Pope’s College).

Jules Storme was born in 1887 in Gentbrugge, near the city of Ghent, the son of Marcel Storme, an intellectual who had not been able to receive a higher education and had compensated by becoming very active as founder, president, and board member of many local and regional Catholic organizations. Jules went to grammar school in Ghent and studied at the university there. He started at the Arts faculty, where he obtained a doctorate with a thesis on the dictionary in Dutch of the sixteenth-century humanist Cornelis Kiliaan, for which the Royal Flemish Academy of Dutch language and literature awarded him a prize. Although he could easily have become a philologist, Jules Storme studied law in Ghent and also went abroad in order to develop himself. In 1915 he obtained his doctorate in law, but although he was only an apprentice lawyer during the war, he had already made an impression, as some people wanted to recommend him for a chair at the ‘von Bissing University’. However, Jules Storme himself did not want to be associated with this institution established by the German occupiers in Ghent.

Across the works of William Blake Urizen is at once Jupiter, Jehovah, an Assyrian warrior and George III.1 Urizen uses guises of temperance, prudence, justice, fortitude and, occasionally, madness, to preserve his power.2 Urizen employs an array of tyrannical techniques but in each manifestation is a tyrant. Orc confronts Urizen in each of these guises, challenging tradition and nostalgia with revolution and revival. But the cycle of tyranny and tyrannicide must end, and we only find a resolution in a new order unrestrained by nostalgia for former tyrannical structures. Nostalgia for a history ensconced in authority and power must be replaced by a broad and complex public sphere filled with contestation and a governance order that heeds and responds to those it governs. To end Urizen’s tyrannical authority, we must pose unaskable questions. This book has therefore posed one such question: does tyranny lurk within the global legal order? The answer is yes. International law is not uniquely immune from tyranny. But having made that determination, international law must remove itself from any nostalgia for its (tyrannical) past and entrench contestation into a novel structure that takes both the scale(s) of its operation and its embeddedness into the everyday lives of individuals as fundamental to its self-understanding.

The Dutch anti-revolutionary and Protestant thinker, historian, jurist, and politician Guillaume (Willem) Groen van Prinsterer (Voorburg, 21 August 1801 – The Hague, 19 May 1876) played an important role in the Netherlands after 1813, the period after the Batavian–French era. He came from an enlightened–conservative family from Holland. His father was a doctor and court physician and his mother was very wealthy. After finishing his studies at Leiden University, he graduated as a doctor of literature and law, and in 1823 became a lawyer in The Hague. He was a very gifted child who grew up to become a gentleman and mingled in high society, attending balls and parties. In 1827, he started working in Brussels and later became secretary to King William I (1829–1833). He married Betsy van der Hoop in 1828, a well-educated and pious woman. Groen van Prinsterer was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, the same church as the royal family of the House of Orange-Nassau.

Pieter Paulus was born 9 April 1753 at Axel, in the part of Zelandic Flanders which was governed by the States of the Province of Zeeland. It belonged to the Republic of the Seven Provinces, a confederation of Provinces, each of them governed by an Assembly of States, considered to be sovereign. The Provinces shared common institutions, representing the Republic as such. The most prominent was the assembly of the States-General, composed of representatives from all Provinces. A central political figure was the pensionary of the Province of Holland. Next to these, let us say, aristocratic institutions, the Republic also embodied a monarchical element in the person of the stadtholder. The incumbent was from the very beginning of the Republic a Prince of the house of Orange-Nassau. In 1747, the stadtholdership had become hereditary. The Republic had no official state church, although the Reformed Church enjoyed many privileges. Depending on local policies, Protestant dissenters (Mennonites, Lutherans, Remonstrants), Roman Catholics, and Jews, had in many but not all cases, freedom of worship.

Tyrannicide is a political act, which Ford describes as ‘a circle within a circle within a circle’ limited to striking down illegitimate, capricious or impious rulers and constitutes the ‘only respectable link between ethics and political violence’.1 It is parasitic in nature, being reliant on extant illegitimacy for its legitimacy. Its history is also subject to the history of tyranny and is nearly as old; as soon as archaic Greece came to regard tyranny as negative, tyrannicide became legitimate. This chapter also considers two other concepts: tyrannophobia and tyrannophilia. Tyrannophobia, as defined by Hobbes, is an under-identified but simmering presence in tyrannical discourse which impacts on the ability to diagnose tyranny’s presence. Tyrannophilia, as defined by Mark Lilla, describes the interrelationships between theoretical discourse and political support of tyranny. Much of this book focuses on those discussing tyranny, rather than tyrants and tyrannophilia, but this chapter locates the connections between them.

Scale, as a geopolitical concept, incorporates a range of ideas relevant to governance and tyranny. Issues of core and periphery, large and small populations, majorities and minorities, linear and non-linear temporality and physical size – vast and confined as well as local, national, regional, global and universal spaces – feature across debates on the causes of and potential preventative measures against tyranny. Scale is also interspersed across the other elements of tyranny. For instance, the extent of a bureaucracy and its distance from the individuals it regulates can heighten the potential for it to become tyrannical. This chapter uses scale both as an aspect of tyranny and as an iteration of other tyrannical elements to consider how they and international law interact and what this means for potential remedies to tyranny in the global order.

In 1640, the Society of Jesus proudly, if somewhat defensively, celebrated the centennial anniversary of its official recognition by Pope Paul III. In order to make a lasting contribution to the anniversary, the Dutch-Flemish Province was asked to compose a commemorative volume, the copious, lavishly illustrated Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu, in which the many impressive achievements of the order and its more illustrious members were duly highlighted. One of them was the Flemish Jesuit Lenaert Leys or, to use the Latinate name under which he gained international fame during his lifetime, Leonardus Lessius (1554–1623). After his studies at Louvain, Douai, and Rome, Lessius was appointed professor of scholastic theology at the Jesuit college of Louvain in 1585. From 1600 onwards, he was released from most of his teaching and other obligations to focus as much as possible on writing and publishing learned treatises, beginning with the encompassing work On Justice and Right and the Other Cardinal Virtues (De iustitia et iure ceterisque virtutibus cardinalibus), which grew out of his previous lectures on the Secunda Secundae of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.

The English poet William Blake provides one of the keenest allegorical descriptions of tyranny. Urizen embodies reason and law using architects’ tools and nets to entrap society in webs of law and convention.1 Urizen believes himself holy and writes the law. The book of brass, brass being the metal of tyranny, forces peace through single rule.2 Urizen is also the creator of wrath and justice. Urizen binds people utilising law and convention to stultify imagination and rebellion. Orc, in contrast, embodies rebellion, revolution, passion and freedom, the very opposite of Urizen’s tyrannical god. But the two are intertwined.3 Urizen uses law to enforce reason, peace and oppression which Orc rebels against with creativity and revolution, but Orc also demonstrates a potential to descend into tyranny if Urizen’s tyrannical tools are not entirely discarded once he is overthrown.4 Blake’s complicated mythology mirrors tyranny’s complexity. Tyranny uses law and reason to establish that absolutism is necessary for peace. Tyrannicide recognises the necessity of rebellion, the false restraint of both rule by law and fear of anarchy, but, as such, tyrannicide is only legitimate if it does not replicate the tyranny it seeks to overthrow.

Dionysius Godefridus van der Keessel was born in Deventer on 22 September 1738 as the youngest son of the Reformed church minister Dionysius van der Keessel (1700–1755), himself the son of a physician in Dordrecht, and Johanna Wilhelmina Cabeljau (c. 1705–1775). To have a minister or physician in the family background was hardly extraordinary for a Dutch law professor in the eighteenth century. Van der Keessel senior had been rather combative in protecting the unity of the Reformed church. Separatists, pietists, quietists, enthusiasts, and mystics were but a few of the groups he attacked in the lengthy titles of his pamphlets. He published several against the Groningen preacher Wilhelmus Schortinghuis between 1744–1755, and had Schortinghuis’s book on ‘Heartfelt Christianity’ banned by the synod of Overijssel, embarrassing the theological faculty at Groningen, which had already given its approbation. The first son was stillborn but the second son, Samuel Rudolphus van der Keessel (1737–1799), followed in his father’s footsteps and became a minister of the Reformed church in Dordrecht. It seems Dionysius considered theology too, but chose law instead. Van der Keessel’s father and grandfather had both studied at Leiden University.

Léon de Lantsheere was born in Brussels on 23 September 1862 into a renowned Catholic family rooted in the region of Dendermonde. His grandfather was a physician, while his father Théophile-Charles-André de Lantsheere (1833–1918) studied law in Leuven, worked as a lawyer in Brussels, and became increasingly involved in several business companies. Théophile de Lantsheere had a remarkable public career as a member (1872–1900) and chair (1884–1905) of the Belgian Chamber of Deputies, Minister of Justice (1871–1878), chair (stafhouder) of the Brussels Bar (1887), vice-governor (1899–1905) and governor (1905–1918) of the Belgian National Bank, and as a senator (1900–1905). In 1890 he was granted the title of Minister of State, and in 1913 he was raised to the nobility with the hereditary title of viscount. Léon de Lantsheere was his oldest son. Léon’s older sister Nathalie (1861–1931) would enter the so-called ‘English Convent’ in Bruges as a regular canoness of Saint Augustine. The second sister, Alice (1864–1944), married the Brussels notary Louis Vergote (1861–1907), and his younger brother Auguste (1870–1932) came to be governor of the Société Générale and lord mayor of Meldert.