Hannah Arendt claimed that the regimes of Hitler and Stalin represented varieties of a single type that was as unprecedented as it was appalling. Struggling against the universal human impulse to categorize the new in terms of what is familiar, she reflected at length on the difficulties of trying to understand phenomena that had “exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgement.” She was herself well aware, however, that some political commentators ever since the time of the French Revolution had been exclaiming over the novelty of modern forms of oppression, while others had found remote historical precedents for the apparently new. Edmund Burke had been first in the field with his warning that the Jacobin dictatorship represented a new and particularly dangerous kind of tyranny,5 but the phenomenon that had set off most rethinking among political theorists was the Revolution’s culmination in the regime of Napoleon Bonaparte.