tyrannophobe

plural tyrannophobes

1. One who fears or distrusts dictatorship.

   On the margin of harm, the question is whether the tyrannophobe rationally considers the evidence about the costs and benefits of dictatorship.

   2012, Tom Ginsburg, Comparative Constitutional Design, →ISBN, page 320

   2 more examples

   Per contra, Hobbes, who was no tyrannophobe, declared instead that political citizens were as a God to one another, while non-political men were to one another as arrant wolves (II, h).

   1934, John Laird, Hobbes, page 66

   The tyrannophobe may fear dictatorship in the extreme sense we have identified—the endpoint of the continuum, where the leader faces no legal checks at all, neither elections nor the consent of others for lawmaking—or else the tyrannophobe may fear dictatorship in the weaker sense, such as abuses by an elected executive.

   2011, Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule, The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic, →ISBN, page 179

comparative more tyrannophobe · superlative most tyrannophobe

1. Synonym of tyrannophobic.

   Note how the correction suppresses the tyrannophobe and immoderate expression 'tyrannical oppression' with the more neutral 'usurpation'.

   1996, David Hume, David Reid, David Hume of Godscroft's The History of the House of Douglas

   2 more examples

   The Sidney of the civic humanist school had his mind firmly set on its tyrannophobe rhetoric which defined liberty above all in terms of the absence of tyranny or a tyrannical threat and equated tyrannical rule with the rule of vice and corruption.

   2014, Prof Dr Dirk Wiemann, Dr Gaby Mahlberg, Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism, →ISBN, page 57

   Most tyrants on seizing power start off by murdering the aristocracy; so conservatives are as tyrannophobe as democrats, and Dion was all that they admired.

   2015, Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo: A Virago Modern Classic, →ISBN

   Synonyms: tyrannophobic