A truth almost universally acknowledged, reiterated in Chapter 3, is that Aristotle's Politics has profoundly influenced all political thinkers engaged in comparative analysis. Using multifarious political and social empirical data and differentiating the systems and societies he examined, Aristotle postulated a number of concepts, including those of tyranny and despotism. He was the first major thinker to compare his West, the land of the Greeks, with the East, that of the Persians and non-Hellenes. Building on Aristotle's theories, Western European writers increasingly went beyond treating the concepts of tyranny and despotism as abstractions, and attempted to relate those concepts more specifically to the real political structures, rules, and social and cultural behavior in Western and non-Western, essentially Oriental regimes.

Gradually, a concept, if unsystematic, of Oriental despotism, usually in Islamic societies, emerged to depict a specific type of political system and a set of relationships between the ruling power and the ruled that was distinguishable from concepts of tyranny or autocracy, forms of government long familiar in Europe. Niccolo Machiavelli contrasted the Ottoman state with West European monarchies, Jean Bodin differentiated Western monarchies from Eastern despotism, Francis Bacon wrote of the different kind of aristocracies in Western and Eastern systems, Algernon Sidney discussed the idea of virtu in Eastern systems, and James Harrington analyzed and compared, in general, the economic foundations of political systems.