Plato: the political psychology of tyranny -- Aristotle: tyranny as unnatural -- Tacitus: tyranny as a politics of pretense -- Machiavelli: defeating princely tyrannies -- Montesquieu's two theories of despotism: fearing monarchs and merchants -- Tocqueville: the pleasures of servitude -- Marx: despotism of class and workplace -- Freud: the reproduction of tyranny -- Weber: the inevitability of bureaucratic domination -- Fromm, Neumann, and Arendt: three early interpretations of Nazi Germany.