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Since late antiquity and till Early Modern time tyranny had been an issue of a great importance for any set of ideological concepts as well as for any system of political philosophy. During this millennium-long period theories of tyrannical rule had stimulated the development of political philosophies and caused paradigmatic shifts of political and legal reasoning in general. In its initial point (i.e. since IV AD)a conventional understanding of tyranny had framed itself within a Platonist(Patristic) description of a tyrant as a degenerated person who subjected his own reason and will to perverted passions. So to prevent tyranny a ruler ought to re-subject his passions and carnal impulses to the reason embodied in divine and human laws. The earlier versions of this theory (e. g. presented by Alcuin or Agobard of Lyons) had focused on the need for spiritual perfection of rulers while the later ones (e. g. those of John of Salisbury and Aquinas) noted the legal aspects of anissue first of all. The development of this so to say normative paradigm of theorizing had reached its peak in writings of John of Salisbury and Thomas Aquinas on the right of subjects to resist tyranny. A set of inner antinomies had prevented a successful accommodation of those theories to legal & political practice while the need for such an accommodation increased. A shift to a new paradigm of political thought had begun in the theories of state of Bartolo da Sassoferrato and Azzo and continued in the political philosophy of Italian civic humanists and Machiavelli. According to them a tyranny emerges from a conflict between the needs of political systems & rulers and the lack of available resources (both natural and societal) rather than from a moral perversion of the ruling persons. An adequate analysis of a tyrannical – and vice versa of a good – government thus required empirical circumstances (not just eternal laws) to be taken into account.

Tatar philosophy has a long history and dates back to the ancestors of the Tatars, i. e. the Volga Bulgars, who fi rst laid the foundations of philosophical knowledge in the Middle Ages in the X century. Medieval Tatar literature of the X — third quarter of the XVIII centuries is one of the foundations of Tatar social and philosophical thought (A. Yasavi (XII century), Qul- Gali (XIII century), Qutb (XIV century), S. Sarai (XIV century), Muhammadyar (XVI century)). Most of the works of Tatar thinkers of the X–XVIII centuries are syncretic. Works at the same time were both a literary source, and a book on ethics, and an essay that reveals the philosophical views of Tatar thinkers.

AbstractChris Wickham's important intervention in debates about the transformation of the Roman world from the fifth century onwards presents a vast array of evidence about the nature of social relations, the economy and the late-Roman and early-medieval state across the Mediterranean and Western-European world. Wickham is successful in taking into account both the high level of regional variation and differentiation across the Roman world and, at the same time, the various key unifying elements which bound these regions together. But, in arguing that the nature of the fiscal apparatus and structures of extraction, redistribution and consumption of surpluses of the late-Roman state were formative in the structure and appearance of the late-Roman élites in East and West as well as in the evolution of their early-medieval successors, a number of structural tensions in the model become apparent. This discussion highlights some of the issues at stake, while, at the same time, affirming the critical importance of the book, more especially its emphasis on the structural force of late-Roman institutions and social relations for the successor-states of the early-medieval West.

A review essay covering a book by Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (2014).