The machiavellian moment Pocock, J.G.A; Pocock, J.G.A
2003., 20090411, 2009, 2003, 1975, 1975-01-01
eBook, Book
The Machiavellian Moment is a classic study of the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness of the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of ...Renaissance Italy. J.G.A. Pocock suggests that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, and which he calls the "Machiavellian moment." After examining this problem in the thought of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, Pocock turns to the revival of republican thought in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. He argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance. He relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in the thought of the eighteenth century.
Intensifying economic and political inequality poses a dangerous threat to the liberty of democratic citizens. Mounting evidence suggests that economic power, not popular will, determines public ...policy, and that elections consistently fail to keep public officials accountable to the people. McCormick confronts this dire situation through a dramatic reinterpretation of Niccolò Machiavelli's political thought. Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today. It reassesses one of the central figures in the Western political canon and decisively intervenes into current debates over institutional design and democratic reform. McCormick proposes a citizen body that excludes socioeconomic and political elites and grants randomly selected common people significant veto, legislative and censure authority within government and over public officials.
Modern republicanism - distinguished from its classical counterpart by its commercial character and jealous distrust of those in power, by its use of representative institutions, and by its ...employment of a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances - owes an immense debt to the republican experiment conducted in England between 1649, when Charles I was executed, and 1660, when Charles II was crowned. Though abortive, this experiment left a legacy in the political science articulated both by its champions, John Milton, Marchamont Nedham, and James Harrington, and by its sometime opponent and ultimate supporter, Thomas Hobbes. This volume examines these four thinkers, situates them with regard to the novel species of republicanism first championed in the early 1500s by Niccolò Machiavelli, and examines the debt that he and they owed the Epicurean tradition in philosophy and the political science crafted by the Arab philosophers Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroës.
InRedeeming "The Prince,"one of the world's leading Machiavelli scholars puts forth a startling new interpretation of arguably the most influential but widely misunderstood book in the Western ...political tradition. Overturning popular misconceptions and challenging scholarly consensus, Maurizio Viroli also provides a fresh introduction to the work. Seen from this original perspective, five centuries after its composition,The Princeoffers new insights into the nature and possibilities of political liberation.
Rather than a bible of unscrupulous politics,The Prince, Viroli argues, is actually about political redemption--a book motivated by Machiavelli's patriotic desire to see a new founding for Italy. Written in the form of an oration, following the rules of classical rhetoric, the book condenses its main message in the final section, "Exhortation to liberate Italy from the Barbarians." There Machiavelli creates the myth of a redeemer, an ideal ruler who ushers in an era of peace, freedom, and unity. Contrary to scholars who maintain that the exhortation was added later, Viroli proves that Machiavelli composed it along with the rest of the text, completing the whole by December 1513 or early 1514.
Only if we readThe Princeas a theory of political redemption, Viroli contends, can we at last understand, and properly evaluate, the book's most controversial pages on political morality, as well as put to rest the cliché of Machiavelli as a "Machiavellian."
Bold, clear, and provocative,Redeeming "The Prince"should permanently change how Machiavelli and his masterpiece are understood.
Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation uses original readings of Machiavelli’s texts to develop a new theoretical model of democratic practice. Christopher Holman identifies two unique ...ideas in Machiavelli through his rearrangement of Machiavellian concepts. The first, drawn primarily from The Prince, is an image of the individual human being as a creative subject that seeks the exteriorization of desire via political creation. The second, drawn primarily from The Discourses on Livy, is an image of the democratic republic as a form of regime in which this desire for creative self-expression is universalized, all citizens being able to affirm their psychic orientation toward innovation through their equal access to political institutions and orders. Such institutions and orders, to the extent that they function as media for the expression of a fundamental human creativity, must be arranged so that they are capable of continual interrogation and refinement.
Machiavelli in the British Isles reassesses the impact of Machiavelli's The Prince in sixteenth-century England and Scotland through the analysis of early English translations produced before 1640, ...surviving in manuscript form. This study concentrates on two of the four extant sixteenth-century versions: William Fowler's Scottish translation and the Queen's College (Oxford) English translation, which has been hitherto overlooked by scholars.
Alessandra Petrina begins with an overview of the circulation and readership of Machiavelli in early modern Britain before focusing on the eight surviving manuscripts. She reconstructs each manuscript's history and the afterlife of the translations before moving to a detailed examination of two of the translations.
Petrina's investigation of William Fowler's translation takes into account his biography, in order to understand the Machiavellian influence on early modern political thought. Her study of the Queen's College translation analyses the manuscript's provenance as well as technical details including writing and paper quality. Importantly, this book includes annotated editions of both translations, which compare the texts with the original Italian versions as well as French and Latin versions.
With this volume Petrina has compiled an important reference source, offering easy access to little-known translations and shedding light on a community of readers and scholars who were fascinated by Machiavelli, despite political or religious opinion.
A new, critical introduction to Machiavelli's thought for students of politics and philosophy
All students of Western political thought encounter Niccolò Machiavelli's work. Nevertheless, his writing ...continues to puzzle scholars and readers who are uncertain how to deal with the seeming paradoxes they encounter.
The Political Philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelliis a clear account of Machiavelli's thought, major theories and central ideas. It critically engages with his work in a new way, one not based on the problematic Cambridge-school approach. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Machiavelli's ideas, it is the ideal companion to the study of this influential and challenging philosopher.
Key FeaturesIntroduces Machiavelli's life and the historical and theoretical context within which he developed his ideasDetailed examinations Machiavelli's most commonly encountered texts, includingThe Prince,The Discourses,The Florentine HistoriesandThe Art of WarCritically analyses Machiavelli's most important concepts and shows how they continue to reverberate within Western political philosophy Pays particular attention to Machiavelli's language and central themes such as Virtue, Fortune, Conflict, History and Religion
Dispelling the myth that Florentine politics offered only negative lessons, Mark Jurdjevic shows that significant aspects of Machiavelli's political thought were inspired by his native city. ...Machiavelli's contempt for Florence's shortcomings was a direct function of his considerable estimation of the city's unrealized political potential.
Between Friends Najemy, John M
2019, 20190115, 1993, 2019-10-04, Volume:
5272
eBook
Between Friends offers the first extended close reading of the most famous epistolary dialogue of the Renaissance, the letters exchanged from 1513 to 1515 by Niccolo Machiavelli and Francesco ...Vettori. John Najemy reveals the literary richness and theoretical tensions of the correspondence, the crucial importance of the dialogue with Vettori in Machiavelli's emergence as a writer and political theorist, and the close but complex relationship between the letters and Machiavelli's major works on politics. Unlike previous and mostly fragmentary treatments of the correspondence, this book reads the letters as a continuously developing, collaborative text in which problems of language and interpretation gradually emerge as the critical issues. Najemy argues that Vettori's skeptical reaction to Machiavelli's first letters on politics and provoked Machiavelli into a defense of language's power to represent the world, a notion that soon become the underlying assumption of The Prince. Later, and largely through an apparently whimsical exchange of letters on love and the foibles of eros, Vettori led Machiavelli to confront the power of desire in language, which opened the way for a different, essentially poetic, approach to writing about politics that surfaces for the first time in the pages of the Discourses on Livy. John M. Najemy is Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400 (North Carolina).
Originally published in 1993.
ThePrinceton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Certain English writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, whom scholars often associate with classical republicanism, were not, in fact, hostile to liberalism. Indeed, these thinkers ...contributed to a synthesis of liberalism and modern republicanism. As this book argues, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the co-authors of a series of editorials entitled Cato's Letters, provide a synthesis that responds to the demands of both republicans and liberals by offering a politically engaged citizenry as well as the protection of individual rights. The book also reinterprets the writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes to show that each contributed in a fundamental way to the formation of this liberal republicanism.
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