To the ancients, tyranny was the projection of unfettered personal desire, and hence opposed to social existence. This definition remains apropos, writes Mohamed Soffar The notion of the public sphere that has become lately everybody's favourite stems from the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. In his seminal work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, he describes that space outside state control in the 18th century, where citizens exchanged opinions and acquired knowledge, that would eventually lead to the formation of a rationally based public consensus. Due to commercial mass media, the public sphere was eroded and transformed into a contest over public resources, and thus turned the public to passive consumers of mass culture. In this sense, the notion of public sphere was a passing wind and an ideal to be attained, rather than an existing reality, an ideal that Habermas critically used to uncover the deceptive nature of free institutions in the Western world. After the 2011 revolution in Egypt, many called for the reinstitution of a free public sphere � la Habermas as a basis for democratisation in a country that has been living under military rule since the very foundation of the republic in 1953. However, based on a lengthy and well-documented critique of Nasserist ideology, the bright Egyptian historian Sherif Younis shocks us in his work Nidaa Al-Shaab (The Call of the People) with a very precise historical judgement. There was actually no public sphere in pre-2011 Egypt to reinstitute or open up. For Younis, "the people" in Nasserist ideology was only a fabricated myth or an idol that called on if not begged military men to assume control of Egypt and as such established the legitimacy of their rule. With one man, "the leader", on top of power, the public sphere was firmly sealed off, confiscated, and liquidated, for all politics became paying tribute and homage to him who incarnates the spirit of "the people". The sign "Egypt-Mubarak, Mubarak-Egypt" that used to hang in several public places in Cairo as well as the famous military poster to be seen nowadays of the soldier carrying the child in his arms are but remnants of this authoritarian legacy. Younis's analyses and concepts bear the heavy scent of Sayed Qutb's ideas of Taghut and its worship, even if Younis does not acknowledge this. The historical analysis of both Habermas and Younis must provoke any serious scholar of political science to examine the relationship between tyranny and the public sphere, which is the main core of this article. However, a word needs to be mentioned about political science, especially in Egypt. Political science as a discipline is and was in crisis, even before the Arab Spring revolutions that only highlighted this crisis and even exacerbated it. Political science was not able to understand political reality, to recognise the direction and forces of change, but most comically even to recognise the nature of the event exploding in its face -- the revolution. By virtue of their training in the value-free behaviouralist tradition, objective political scientists had no scruples about joining the ex-ruling party and the corrupt machinery of government. Even worse, in the transitional period, where they are part of the problem and not the solution, they did not hesitate to jump in the wagons of warring political forces in search for a secondary role. Against this background, one can only repeat in all piety the words of Leo Strauss: "A social science that cannot speak of tyranny with the same confidence with which medicine speaks�ê� of cancer, cannot understand social phenomena as what they are. It is therefore not scientific." Thus, one is obliged to turn one's eyes to the classical tradition of political science, not for solutions but for guidance to answer our main question. Xenophon's Hiero or Tyrannicus can pave the way for our endeavour. It is a dialogue between the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides on the subject of tyranny; the main question is how the tyrannical life and the private life differ in joys and pains in terms of sights, sounds, smells, food and drinks, as well as sex. Though Hiero and Simonides differ about their evaluation of the tyrannical life in terms of pains and pleasures, the former laying the accent on pains and the latter on pleasures, both agree on the standard of evaluation, pleasures and pains, the measure of all things in private life. A step out of the dialogue shows that Xenophon considered the tyrannical form of government an extension or enlargement of the private life of one individual, ie the tyrant, hence private life becomes a muster for evaluation. Bearing this in mind, we may claim that a tyrannical form of government hinges in its consolidation and perpetuation on an endless process of dismantling of the public sphere, or to use a current term, privatisation in the ethical, political, military and even economic sense of the word. Having gone more profoundly into the analysis of tyranny than any other, Plato sets for us the golden rule: "They are either the masters or the slaves and never the friends of anybody; the tyrant never tastes true freedom or friendship." This is to be understood from two angles. First, the state in which people live under tyranny can only experience, metaphorically speaking, vertical social relations of authority but not the voluntary social relations of companionship or friendship. Second, the tyrant, which in this quote signifies not a person in specific but a character shared by both rulers and ruled alike, lost the ability to taste human kinship and trust. What strikes us most in Plato's analysis of the tyrannical state is the ethical-political perspective, for tyranny is much more than one person taking control of the government machinery and rendering it subservient to his desires. Rather, tyranny is a class or type of people that after growing in number, power and awareness chooses from among them the one who is "most tyrannical in his soul" and they make him "their tyrant". For such a class of people, slavery or subservience to tyranny is an act of political choice not of coercion; they want to be slaves. This political choice, though distasteful and miserable, is yet understandable as a reflection of another choice, which is ethical. The tyrannical man, as Plato calls him, is the real slave, as he submitted to himself, or to the bestial part of his soul. He has become the slave of desires and wants, and he has more than anyone, and therefore he is unable to satisfy them. Tyranny is therefore the projection of private -- meaning bestial -- desires of the soul on the relationship with others, hence the privatisation of public life and the inability to taste human closeness. But above all, the permanent bondage of the tyrannical man to his desires will lose him the very taste of freedom, having lost his human side of existence in the first place. In tyranny, there can never be a public space, not just because this form of government seals off or liquidates venues for public debate, but more importantly because it devours the very foundations of public or social existence. The writer is associate professor at Cairo University's Faculty of Economics and Political Sciene.
