The man whose name is shorthand for all that is ugly in politics was more nuanced than his reputation suggests. Christopher Celenza’s portrait of Machiavelli removes the varnish to reveal not just ...the hardnosed philosopher but the skilled diplomat, learned commentator on ancient history, comic playwright, tireless letter writer, and thwarted lover.
Niccolò Machiavelli, though best known as a teacher of princes, is also a teacher of republics. In his Discourses on Livy, he argues that republican liberty depends upon a contentious mixture of ...elitism and populism. Only the elite’s wily pursuit of domination, combined with the people’s spirited resistance to such domination, can produce that compromise between servitude and license known as liberty. The task of the founder and the statesman is to construct and maintain the appropriate “orders and modes” within which each party to the conflict can make its appropriate contribution. The elite, at its best, contributes prudence, military virtue, and the capacity to innovate, while the people contributes moral and political stability. David Levy explains and defends Machiavelli’s conception of liberty as conflict, and then uses that conception as the lens through which to understand his views on religion, war and imperialism, goodness and corruption, and the relation between republics and princes. Also discussed is Machiavelli’s own kind of wiliness: his artful and often ironic mode of writing. Levy shows that Machiavelli’s republican teaching as a whole remains persuasive today, and deserves careful consideration by all those concerned with the survival and the success of liberty. This book will be of interest both to beginning and more advanced students of Machiavelli, as well as to students of modern republicanism and of the history of ideas.
Niccolò Machiavelli Belliotti, Raymond Angelo; Belliotti, Raymond Angelo
2009., 2008, 2010-02-03, 20090101
eBook
Machiavelli is usually understood as a thinker who separated morality from politics or who championed Roman, pagan morality over conventional, Christian morality. Belliotti argues, instead, that ...Machiavelli's innovation is his understanding of the perhaps irresolvable moral conflicts that exist within political leaders who fulfill the duties of their offices while accepting the authority of absolute moral principles. Machiavelli is a moral pessimist who insists that politicians must 'risk their souls' when performing their public responsibilities. Politicians and military leaders must dirty their hands in service to their constituents.
"Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare's political outlook by comparing some of the playwright's best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccolao ...Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. This ultimately reveals the materialist principles that underpin Shakespeare's imaginary states."--
I begin this essay with a mini-genealogy of Maimonidess negative theology (which declares that we can only endlessly say what God is not, but not what God is), which traces it to a specific and ...recurring talmudic source. I then argue that Machiavelli, one of the great theorists of power in the Western intellectual tradition, structured his argument about power in a manner that was directly analogous to Maimonidess argument about God. I will draw the practical implications of this association throughout the essay. My starting point for the development of this argument is arbitrary. One can trace the argument of negative theology to numerous Greek, Islamic, and rabbinic sources. However, the vein of interpretation that I am mining here is relatively underdeveloped, so I think that it deserves special attention.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Machiavelli in America traces the influence of the Florentine thinker on American politics, from the Founders (c. 1770s) through today's rough-and-tumble political panorama. Machiavelli's ideas have ...been re-interpreted internationally as 'real-politik.' He proposed that the 'ends justify the means,' and that any manner of fraud, violence or corruption must be utilized in attaining and retaining power. People, he assured us, are so mean, small and selfish that they will only act under necessity, so the successful prince must force the population, through whatever means necessary, to follow his dictates. He maintained that the most powerful form of fraud was the appearance of religiosity and said that the successful prince must hold no art higher than that of war. In this disturbing, erudite and highly readable book, America is shown to be a surprising example of Machiavellian politics, utilizing all of the post-modern methods of information distribution and "legal" fraud and corruption. Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, George W. Bush, the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission (2010) and the Super PACs it spawned, the massive amounts of money ("power's master key"), the intermingling of the language of religion and war, and the 90% negative advertising of the 2012 Presidential campaign (channeling Machiavelli's dictum that the adversary must be "assassinated," though in contemporary America by character assassination) and even Barack Obama's Machiavellian machinations are looked at in light of the Renaissance political philosopher's ideas. The last section of the book offers a response to this kind of thinking, with a specific, implementable program that will begin to devolve the power of American democracy back to the people and away from the shrinking numbers of oligarchs who control the political system through Machiavellian
means and vast amounts of money.
The main argument of the book is that for French philosopher Louis Althusser it was essential to reflect on how the conjunctural understanding of history and reality could offer a theoretical ...starting point for a subversive political strategy and intervention.
William J. Landon reveals Strozzi's influence on Machiavelli through wide-ranging textual investigations, and especially through Strozzi's Pistola fatta per la peste for which Landon has provided the ...first ever complete English translation and critical edition.
The Art of Power offers up a challenge to traditional political theory. Diego A. von Vacano provides original interpretations of Machiavelli's oeuvre and of Nietzsche's relationship to politics.
Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza explores Spinoza's political philosophy by confronting it with that of Niccolò Machiavelli. Filippo Del Lucchese conducts a study of the ...relationship between Machiavelli and Spinoza from a perspective at once philosophical, historical and political. The book begins by showing how closely tied the two thinkers are in relation to realism. Del Lucchese then goes on to examine the theme of conflict as a crucial element of an understanding of Machiavelli and Spinoza's conceptions of modernity. The book concludes with an examination of the concept of 'multiplicity' and 'plural' expressions of politics, namely Machiavelli's popolo and Spinoza's multitudo. Overall, the Machiavelli-Spinoza axis offers a fruitful perspective through which to analyse the relationship between contending ideas of modernity from a historical point of view, and provides an original point of departure for discussing some key theoretical, political and juridical notions that have resurfaced in contemporary debates.
