From Multitude;

The idea of Republican virtue has from its beginning been aimed against the notion that the ruler, or indeed anyone, stands above the law. Such exception is the basis for tyranny and makes impossible the realisation of freedom, equality and democracy.

I would add prosperity to this list too.

The rule of law is a constant theme on South Sea Republic. For this reason an Australian Republican, as should any Republican, rejects that a state of exception exists when a nation is at peace, at war, or under external pressure of any kind. The rule of law is more precious than the ability of a government to act outside of the law.

The best example of not giving into despotic passions is James Madison in the war of 1812. Despite great pressured to do so, he would not relent his principles or the nations Republican virtue. He was firmly of the belief that doing so would make America and its people weaker. It was only through the embrace of Republican virtue that the American people were stronger than the invading British. History proved him correct.

Western governments faced with the problem of terrorism have quickly cast aside their virtue and plunged headlong into a permanent state of exception. As Giorgio Agamben argues, it has become a governing paradigm, rather than a temporary anomaly as the story of Cincinnatus tells us.

Gary Sauer-Thompson calls this method of governing the national security state as this embrace of security which can jump outside the rule of law allows for externally and internally focused exceptions of law. Government exceptionalism becomes all pervading. Agamben writes;

... the state of exception is not defined as a fullness of powers as pleromatic state of law, as in the dictatorial model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law.

James Madison was able to reject this vice when he was President of the United States and facing war against the biggest super-power of the time. He was true to his Republican principles. The fall into governing in a state of exception as has happened in Australia and other Western democracies is a perversion.

It is anti-republican and anti-democratic.

The meaning of the word security has changed in the last decade or so. Where once it meant stability in defence from the Hobbesian nature of international relations; it has been turned inward to focus on domestic security. So much so that recent op-eds in the Washington Post have made the claim that a city that is not secure - is a failed one. Where once war was deemed an emergency period, with terrorism, Governments have claimed a permanent domestic emergency. This is at odds with Australian Republicanism.

John Locke is one of the most influential writers of Liberalism. His writings directly influenced the founding of the first post-enlightenment Government in the Unites States of America. At the James Madison's Montpelier , one of the most prominent displays is a glass encased copy of Locke's Two Treatises of Government .

Arbitrary Government and Tyranny

Locke's second book contains sections on tyranny and resistance.

... whenever legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves in a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience, and left to the common refuge, which god has provided for all men, against force and violence.

The keyword in that paragraph is arbitrary . The point of liberal democracy is law and order. Once government acts in an arbitrary manner toward those under its jurisdiction then it has broken the bounds of the constitution which describes the limits of executive and legislative authority.

Tyranny does not need to be absolute to be destructive; it only needs to be insidious to pollute the polity, society and economy. Recent legislation from the Australian government has placed into law the ability for Ministers in the Executive Cabinet to act in an arbitrary manner.

An example is the Migration Act ;

Minister not under duty to consider whether to exercise power

(4) The Minister does not have a duty to consider whether to exercise the power under subsection (2), whether he or she is requested to do so by any person, or in any other circumstances.

Minister to exercise power personally

(5) The power under subsection (2) may only be exercised by the Minister personally.

When that prerogative is exercised we cease to become a nation of laws, and instead become a nation of men. Arbitrary government inevitably leads to tyranny and kleptocracy, the two most destructive forms of social organisation .

If The Constitution Is Breached

Locke writes that if the government succumbs to the negative passions of arbitrary government then resistance is permissible;

by this breach of trust they [legislators] forfeit the power, the people have put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves the people, who have a right to ensure their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.

In that paragraph he advocates establishing a new legislature as the old one which has fallen into arbitrary government has lost their authority by their actions.

The national security state is an alignment of the executive, legislative and judicial that can act outside of the constitution and normal legal processes when the government believes an emergency exists that threatens the complete political and social order.

Giorgio Agamben has called this homo sacer ; when an individual is reduced to bare life, without legal or civil rights. The Tampa Affair is an Australian example of the national security state and homo sacer combining to produce an inferior and arbitrary outcome.

Refugees were pitched to the electorate as not only an emergency, but also a security issue. The media images conferred with this political portrayal of the event by a five hundred million dollar Australian Navy frigate pulling refugees out of the water.

The threat to Australia's sovereignty by this small number of refugees was so high that we paid large sums to neighbouring nations and islands to keep them outside of Australia. As part of the Pacific Solution in 2002 we payed 48 million to Nauru and 29 million to the PNG.

The refugee issue also led to the Migration Act Amendment which was quoted above in the article describing arbitrary powers being conferred on the minister overseeing immigration.

Australian Republicanism and homo sacer

Australian Republicanism is predicated on legal equity amongst all individuals under the jurisdiction of the government. It does not discriminate between citizens and non-citizens, or minorities and majorities. If you are an individual under the jurisdiction of the government your legal and civil rights are not only secure, but uniform amongst all individuals.

This philosophy can be seen in Avocadia's Australian Bill of Rights ;

I have the right to all rights expressed herein if I am an individual who is a citizen of Australia, if I am an individual within the jurisdiction of Australia, or if I am an individual held by, or in the charge of any individual, group or organisation that is a citizen of Australia, incorporated within Australia, trades within Australia, or is commanded by the Australian government.

While liberalism defines rights as natural and a component of being human - which they are - they can still suffer under the coercive and corrosive power that government wields with its monopoly on power. Republicanism seeks to formalise the legal and civil rights in not only the constitution but the political framework of government. This is the Madisonian and Harpurian republic at work.

Under Australian Republicanism a failed government is one that;

• does not dictate the rights of all individuals from arbitrary government in the constitution. (See Avocadia's Bill of Rights)
• whose legislative does not stop the executive from acting outside of the constitution.
• whose executive does not stop the legislative from acting outside of the constitution.
• impedes individuals from stopping the legislative and executive acting outside of the constitution.

In all these areas the Australian and State governments are not constructed to provide for these outcomes.

Charles Harpur believed fully in the virtue of humanity and for the faith that is in them . Harpur saw the inequity, kleptocracy and burdens that governments place on the people, banishing them from achieving from their full potential.

For instance in a kleptocracy simply travelling requires paying bribes galore. In an aristocracy there is a tax burden simply to maintain the aristocrats and their non-meritorious social and political structure. Even liberal democracy carries its burdens when implemented inefficiently which we are starting to see with governments acting under an overly-centralised national security state.

The impositions are real and significant.

Australian republicanism believes that political, social, cultural and economic prosperity is achieved at the point of highest interdependence between individuals. That point is maximum liberty.

Australian Republicans seek our political, social and economic structures to align as maximum liberty so individuals can achieve individually or collectively as they choose without harm, imposition or coercion.

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Giorgio Agamben's thesis in his books have been that the state of exception has become a common form of governance to get around constitutionalism. The most recent excuse for governing under a state of emergency has been terrorism. This subversive form of governance has not been limited to national or state governments.

Washington DC is a rather large city that is run as a city council form of government with an elected mayor and eight representatives chosen from the wards and five other elected positions. The other issues facing the DC Council is that their budgets can be vetoed by the national Congress.

The Council has been adopting emergency procedures to get legislation through council. This requires a majority of nine instead of seven, but avoids the legislation having to go through a process of public comment.

About one-fourth of the bills before the D.C. Council became law this way during the current two-year legislative session, including a package of anti-crime measures that alarmed civil rights groups and contentious legislation authorizing pricey parking garages for the new Washington Nationals baseball stadium.

At last Tuesday's meeting, legislators determined emergencies existed to pay multimillion dollar sums to mental health and developmental disabilities contractors, to authorize tax breaks and to move forward on a public-private partnership to build a controversial economic development project.

A $48,000 pay raise for the mayor and the council chairman first came to the council as emergency legislation but was withdrawn after several council members noted the lack of public scrutiny. Permanent pay raise legislation received preliminary approval last week after public hearings.

Most governments like to reserve the right to act absolutely even though it is in contradiction to democratic principles. Usually war is used as the excuse for an executive to act absolutely, commonly with the excuse of having to suspend the constitution to save it.

Often constitutional bodies will put in emergency powers so that the executive and legislative can act in an absolute manner without contradicting the constitution or law. A good example of this is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These are not an inalienable listing of rights as the government reserves the right to come first and act in emergency to suspend those very rights. Three sections: 2,7 and 15 can be overridden by an act of the legislature for a maximum of five years - before requiring renewal.

33. (1) Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included

in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter. ...

3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.

There is no reason for government to have exceptions or emergency legislative powers. Government can act quickly, and gain people's agreeance on the necessary speed of action without having to resort to a state of emergency or a state of exception.

John C. Halez has a thought provoking article on Gary's site where he writes: "no legal system is autonomously self-subsistent and self-regulating, but rather all legal systems will contain areas of indeterminacy, unpredictable and depending on historical circumstances and conditions, which must be 'supplemented' by political decisions."

One of the hard things about discussing Schmitt and Agamben is the definition of the 'political'. Both arguments hinge around that. Schmitt described the political as the singular and absolute authority, while Agamben describes it as where the nexus between violence and law is broken.

The Killfile has an interesting article on the issues surrounding Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley and the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. Killfile writes that he suspected there was not enough evidence in the case to overcome reasonable doubt and this may have been why the Queensland DPP did not move to prosecute. So from a legally administrative point of view, and the use of public funding in what was pre-determined to be a case that was unwinnable, the decision was a rational one. However:

There is another factor to take into account in this case, which is that the deceased was an Aboriginal man who died in police custody. Given the history of Aboriginal deaths in custody in Australia, particularly in the North, it is important that justice not only be done in this case, if possible, but be seen to be done.

The seen to be done matches John's description of the legal system's indeterminacy. A political decision was made which gazumped the administrative probabilities of a legal outcome.

Hobbes in Leviathan calls the liberty of an individual under the sovereign, and free from the tyranny of all against all violence as an artificial commonwealth man. In modern language we would probably call it political rights. It is interesting to compare Hobbes' artificial man with Agamben's Homo Sacer , in Hobbesian terms, homo sacer is a man entirely under the sovereign yet denied the just bonds of the artificial commonwealth man.

From Chapter 21 of Leviathan :

But as men, for the attaining of peace and conservation of themselves thereby, have made an artificial man, which we call a Commonwealth; so also have they made artificial chains, called civil laws, which they themselves, by mutual covenants, have fastened at one end to the lips of that man, or assembly, to whom they have given the sovereign power, and at the other to their own ears. These bonds, in their own nature but weak, may nevertheless be made to hold, by the danger, though not by the difficulty of breaking them.

Agamben discusses Homo Sacer in terms of the all against all meme, and comes to the conclusion that the state of nature is a state of exception. Homo sacer is unique in that the individual cannot be sacrificed by the sovereign, but it is bare life, one that is without political rights and denied judicial redress, yet totally and entirely under the power of the sovereign who has judged them as a life not worth living, but at the same time unable to remove their physical life.

In Hobbesian terms homo sacer has been denied the artificial chains through the actions of the sovereign (executive) while still being under the whim of the sovereign. Homo sacer has been deemed a life not worth living by the state, yet is in the judicial no man's land as the sovereign does not kill the individual, nor grant them judicial relief. This is the origin of the camp that is outside of Leviathan's description of the sovereign and commonwealth man.

Rome did not have a written constitution as the United States or Australia do. It did not even appear to have a Westminster style one such as Britain's or Tasmania's which exists across multiple non-contiguous acts. It seems to be purely a mix of convention and tradition. Which was probably why it was easy for Sulla, Caesar and Augustus to subvert it.

We mainly know the Senate as the Roman political body, but prior to 510BC Rome was ruled by a monarch until (King) Tarquin was run out of town. This led to a fear of unitary or supreme power and Roman political institutions established themselves to stop such an outcome. What replaced it was effectively a Senate led oligarchy. For most of Rome's early history approximately twenty families dominated the Senate and it was rare that outsiders were able to establish themselves sufficiently to become Senators - Cicero was one of those rarities.

Since Montesquieu it has been firmly established that the three branches of government are executive, legislative and judicial. The Roman system does not really fit into those categories; the Senate being problematic again; but the Roman institutions are near enough that modern Australians would recognize executive, legislative and judicial functions in the Roman political bodies.

The main Executive position was the Consul. Rome solved the issue of absolute power and sovereignty in this position by electing two Consuls each term who would alternate month to month. A Consul's term was twelve months and they could not be re-elected Consul after serving in the position.

This pluralistic or power-sharing aspect of Roman politics may have been why would-be emperors such as Caesar, Augustus, Antony, Pompey, Crassus, Lepodus etc were happy dividing the Roman Empire up and ruling it as triumvirates - however transitory the arrangements were; ie Caesar crushed Pompey, and Augustus crushed Antony.

After a Consul's term was up they became a Proconsul and were sent off to govern a province such as Spain, Africa, Macedonia, Cisalpine Gaul etc. Anywhere that was far away from Rome. For the Proconsuls there was the added advantage of being able to extort the provinces for money as Roman elections were usually quite expensive - what with all the bribing and whatnot.

There was no civil service or bureaucracy in Roman times, that was a technology that was invented during English and French dominance in the 1700s as they required organisational technologies to support their highly militaristic and capital intensive war machines; such as a navy and continental army.

Roman politicians carried the burden of the civil service as they would take their own people with them to their appointed position and the cost tended to be defrayed by the wealth that a Roman could make in such a position. There was also no tax department either; especially not in the provinces. Tax collection was sold off, or bidded for. Tax Farmers were a wealthy and politically influential special interest group that rivalled the merchants for the ears of Roman politicians.

The Roman system carried checks and balances everywhere, and achieving the position of Consul required serving in several political positions first. An aspiring Roman public figure had to first serve as a Quaester. These were like provincial tax collectors. Cicero, for instance, served his period as Quaester on Sicily.

After serving as a Quaester the individual was eligible to become an Aedile of which they were only four in Rome. This wasn't absolutely necessary to become a Consul as it was an expensive position to hold. Most of the civic improvements came out of the Aedile's own pocket. Crassus apparently made the comment in his later life that you "Weren't rich unless you could afford to pay an army." Which gives an idea of how oligarchic the Roman system was. Only the Bill Gates, Warren Buffet's etc of Rome could afford politics; George Bush would be too poor to be part of the Roman oligarchy.

The final position before Consulship was as a Praetor. This position held real executive power as they executed the law in provinces and stood as judges. The Roman judicial system is different to our form. For instance all cases, criminal or civil, were brought by individuals against another. Again, there was no civil service, no police force, and no real penitential system. So most decisions were fiscal in nature. Capital punishment was extremely rare even in times of emergency.

The Roman lawyers used to act like TV attorneys. They would be the interviewer, the detective, the collector of evidence and then would represent their client in the Forum, defending their case with a speech full of rhetoric, innuendo and facts. This would be done infront of a public audience, who would react to the speech with cheers and boos. It is hard to believe that mob justice didn't have an influence on Roman law cases in such an environment.

The Senate was an unusual body. It wasn't really legislative, as it didn't make laws, however it controlled money supply and made policy. It also reviewed any legislation that came from the Assemblies, effectively giving it the yay or nay. Probably the closest analogy to their function in a modern democracy is the committee system in the Australia. But even that is a bad analogy.

Senators were appointed for life, and because of the high turnover of Consuls and their power-sharing requirements, the real power of Rome was in the Senate. It dominated what an executive could do, what was political achievable in the system, and how policy was conducted. It was a permanent institution, consequently it was very conservative in its political operation.

The Consuls and Tribunes were far more temporary institutions and it is a not a surprise that most radicalism came from those bodies such as Sulla, Caesar and Augustus. Than again Caesar during his period as dictator/tyrant managed to appoint so many Senators that it became a body pliant to his executive will.

The other positions in the Roman executive were the Censors and the Tribunes. The Censors were like public servants, they conducted administrative functions such as keeping the census up to date, enrolling citizens, purging the Senate of deadwood (!). There were only two Censors and the individual had to have been a Consul to become one.

The final position is the Tribune. This position came into being when the people (plebs) removed their labor from Rome in 493BC and basically conducted a strike over debt relief by camping en-masse on a nearby hill. To placate the plebs and have them return to Rome a voice of the people, the Tribune, was established. The Tribunes could propose legislation and could convene a Senate meeting to respond to the concerns of the people, but their main power was the veto.

The veto was the ultimate Roman power of check and balance. Consuls could veto, Praetors could veto and Tribunes could veto. The veto was final too, and only required one Consul, Praetor or Tribune to shoot down a proposal. It seems the idea was that it covered an executive veto, a kind-of judicial veto and a popular veto to place a check on absolute power.

One of the criticisms of the Roman system was that this overlapping check and balance created stasis in the system such that good governance could not occur; and consequently a unitary executive was required to come in and plow through these obstructions to government. When Caesar established himself as dictator he basically did an end-run around these checks and balances, however he made the other positions weak or pliant to his executive will. Augustus did similar. So this is not necessarily a good argument.

There is an argument that all the overlapping made the constitution and conventions difficult to change. Which was an issue successive Roman reformers discovered. The loophole in the Roman constitution was the position of dictator, and this is what reformers such as Sulla, Caesar and Augustus used to get around the Senate. The Dictator was a formal position, established through law, where a Consul had supreme power for six months.

This law was enacted through the Final Act which the Senate would vote into being. This would establish tumultus where civil law falls down and laws becomes the arbitrary whim of the Dictator. This is where the state of emergency and state of exception, as well as Agamben's work on homo sacer come from.

Roman politics were militaristic. Consuls and Senators were expected to be generals as much as they were required to be politicians. A quick method for an aspiring Roman politician to become a public figure was to be a successful general. For instance Pompey rose to public prominence through raising an army illegally and leading it to success during a civil war. He was twenty-three when he did that.

There were two legislative bodies in the Roman system during Cicero's time, or its most powerful age. There was the Centuriate Assembly which was a military body, and the General Assembly which was tribally based and called comitia tributa in Latin. The General Assembly approved bills, but it didn't debate them. It could also declare war. The General Assembly was territorially based rather than the oligarchic nature of the Senate which only included the wealthy families. But all democracy was constrained in Rome by transport and communications.

Enfranchisement in Rome was for male citizens and elections were held in Rome, so only those that were within travel distance of Rome could vote. Given the size of the Roman Empire, and the lack of a representative system of government, this meant that citizens in Rome wielded a great deal of power over the politics of the Empire.

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One of the results of an exception being created is that the politics become unitary. Essentially the politics around the exception or emergency become the executive and executive's alone. The health of liberal democracy is dependent upon political competition, discussion and deliberation. Removed of its liberal component democracy is reduced to the mechanical action of voting.

An establishment of a state of exception requires several a priori: precaution against a plausible catastrophe, the executive taking over judicial expression and a submissive legislative who is willing to legitimize the exception in legislation.

Parliaments are on the backfoot in this area anyway, as the executive dominates the legislative and decides what bills are pushed through or hit the floor. With the recent dominance of the party-machines in Australia and the United States at the federal level we have seen the deliberative process destroyed entirely in the legislative.

In the United States the recent round of legislation which legitimizes exception governance is the Patriot Act. Amongst other things it allows the executive to avoid having Senate confirmation for US Attorney appointments. The recess clause in the US Constitution has often been used for exception appointments, that this got through in the Patriot Act is remarkable.

In Australia the Migration Act is the main source of legislative legitimization for exception governance. This is not new, the clause requiring fluency in multiple European languages from the 1950s is an example of legislation enabling adhoc and arbitrary executive and executive official's decisions.

There is an argument for Ministers and Executive Officials and Bureaucrats to have that power as individuals often use their representatives familiarity with the arcane behaviour of the modern state to navigate the bureaucracy. For instance my green card application was stalled until our local New Jersey Senator got involved. But this is a failure of the modern state's organisation and processes.

When an exception or emergency is established it makes the politics unitary. Unfortunately Carl Schmitt's description of all this is proving to be accurate. With the establishment of the exception the politics become us and them; not the competitive, deliberative and discursive nature of liberalism. Under an exception, the 'them' can be sacrificed to the politics.

As an example, in the United States in 2002 and 2004 during the Congressional and Presidential elections which were fought under the extended exception of the Great War Against Terrorism those that disagreed with politics of the executive were painted as traiters and treasonist.

The only reason this could be claimed was because the politics became unitary, and as a consequence the liberal nature of the system was removed and the politics of the state and election became the executive's.

Obviously civil libertarians and the political opposition can fight against this but they have to do so as a 'them' not as political competitors in a liberal political system.

So the establishment of exception drains the liberal out of liberal democracy.

Fortunately exceptions tend not to be absolute and are usually contained in small areas and for short periods of time, though they often threaten to became permanent emergencies.

It is interesting to note that the electoral season in the Australian federal system has already claimed two exceptions. The first was the Indigenous issues, and now the Haneef issue. Both cases absolutely required a justified level of government involvement; but they did not justify the establishment of exception.

In the Haneef issue, where the government was right to bring him in for questioning over his association with those that committed criminal acts in the UK, once the exception was established with the Migration Act and the gazumping of the judicial, the trial ceased to be in the ordered private space of the court room and instead became a political trial where guilt is still being fought over in the public political space.

The executive, the defendant and lawyer are arguing their cases in the media, not infront of an impartial judge. The executive has made the politics unitary and has taken over the judicial component of it as a political trial. It may be that Haneef should be locked up for association with known and active terrorists, but politics is not the way to determine it, the judicial is, lest it become tyranny of the majority.

In both cases of exception discussed above the political opposition acquiesced to the government. In the case of the national emergency over indigenous issues it was as a war cabinet. In the Haneef investigations the opposition agreed with the executive. Political dissent only came from the Democrats and Greens.

Anyone who thinks this form of exception governance is limited to conservative parties is kidding themselves. While it is a form of conservative governance (ie not liberal) the Labor Party is just as capable of using it to inform governance.

An example of this is the NSW Labor Government after the Cronulla Riots which passed the Law Enforcement Amendment that enables the confiscation of property and the isolation of an area. Effectively with police checkpoints. Again the civil libertarians and the judical become the political 'other'.

However this made the politics unitary as any dissent on the emergency becomes a 'them' or enemy of the emergency. Peter Debnam's only competitive movement without becoming a 'them' was to endorse stronger prohibitions within the emergency:

The Opposition supports rushing the bill through the House, but there are some difficulties about it. Opposition members do not oppose the passage of the bill but we wish to highlight a number of concerns with it. The bill simply is not strong enough in almost all its provisions.

That is how we get ludicrous speed legislation like the Law Enforcement Amendment and the Migration Act which never fall off the books and enable future exceptions.

Exception governance, apart from being repugnant to republicanism and trashing the liberal in liberal democracy, is actually becoming the norm at all levels of government as more and more executives see the value in exception becoming "a new rule of permanence, a new long-lasting condition of suspension of the rule of law, whereby politics could become the product of a succession of ad hoc decisions made by government officials and bureaucrats"

The binary differentiator in politics is now liberalism and conservatism. Exception governance manages to remove the liberal. In an election season it limits the scope of politics that can be liberally competed over as the areas of emergency effectively rope off the politics of the emergency from competition or deliberation. Unfortunately we are seeing exceptions increasingly being used as an electoral advantage.

Update - Ken Parish commented on troppo's missing link that this post did not mention Giorgio Agamben. State of Exception gets discussed often enough on South Sea Republic that I don't always explicitly mention that connection every time. Agamben mainly explored the legal nature of a state of exception where this post tries to explore the political aspects of it and the impact on electoralism and democracy.

The most famous tyrannicide in history is the killing of Caesar in the Senate at the hands of Marcus Brutus. Basically it is the killing of a tyrant in the name of the public good and to restore the democratic (or oligarchic) mores of state.

Most legal systems are premised upon the state having a monopoly on violence. Where any private violence is subject to the review of the state to determine its validity. Tyrannicide is outside of that system. It is based on the assumption that the state is no longer valid, usurped by the tyrant, and consequently tyrannicide is legitimate private violence against the tyrant. Lintott writes of Cicero's view on tyrannicide:

For us the disquieting features of this view are first the idea that a tyrant has no rights at all and no claim to justice, and secondly the extension of the principle to quasi-tyrants.

The quasi-tyrant in Cicero's view was a demagogue who had a 'lasting hold on the populace' even if the demagogue had not used violence or force. The other side of Cicero's view of quasi-tyranny was the use of limited violence outside of the state legal system in order to save and restore the state - in other words a classic state of exception.

There were legal positions in the Roman state, such as the Dictator, which existed in states of exception, so such principles were not unknown to the Roman system. It is unsurprising as Roman magistracy was a state based form of pater-familias and absolute power. Lintott continues:

Tyrannicide is therefore a permissible form of private violence (like that employed in defense of a tribune or against a thief) whose justification lies not only in political philosophy but in a specific legal provisio.

Cicero's view of tyrannicide is expansive and enables the defense of the senatorial and equestrian order's power from the plebians and their demagogic populaire leaders. Consequently private violence can be used to maintain the status quo of state; whether in the death of a dictator-for-life tyrant like Caesar or populists like the Gracchi.

This brings the use of private violence into the domain of politics. And like the state of exception becomes the line where politics and the judicial intersect. The use of violence for justice and redress becomes purely political.