Mario Turchetti

This study hinges around two perspectives: the first one concerns the inner work accomplished by Thomas More through the writing of his prison letters, in which the author’s “conscience” is often solicited and ends up playing the role of a tribunal. The second examines the interrogations conducted by the King’s Tribunal and during More’s trial for high treason. The death sentence inflicted on More still elicits many debates among scholars. We wish to contribute to such a debate by analyzing the cogency of the pre-trial investigation and of the hearings which would lead to capital punishment. Even admitting that the sentence was the result of a legal procedure, there is cause for wondering whether it was also legitimate. Judging from an analysis of the documents based on English jurisprudence, many are the flaws inherent in the trial which lead us to conclude that its legal inconsistency forged a death sentence. Therefore, the word “assassination” is no longer an exaggeration but a rigorous repositioning of the trial as the travesty of a trial. This assassination then becomes the work of a tyrant and his accomplices, forming a tyrannical system which manipulates law regulations to its convenience.

Terms such as 'despotism' and 'tyranny' which proved efficacious in clarifying political debate until the beginning of the 19th century, have been eliminated from the vocabulary of political science because of a confusion that has muddled their sense. This vocabulary has thus become impoverished to the advantage of terms like 'autocracy', or yet others, especially 'dictatorship', equally vague and imprecise. This article demonstrates (through the adventures of the term 'despotism' during 23 centuries) that we have forgotten a distinction between these two 'conceptual terms' which was clear in the past, and it attempts to understand at which moment in history the confusion occurred and why. There is no question of restoring the distinction in contemporary political vocabulary. This work would simply like to encourage people to reflect on the political terminology inherited from tradition, on the correct use of concepts and of their definitions, in order to reintegrate political vocabulary and render it more useful in decrypting contemporary reality, which remains often complex and even undecipherable