Machiavelli's The Prince is an important modern work of political science, but it is also one that has been often misinterpreted by students and scholars. This work helps the reader to better ...understand Machiavelli's consequentialism and realism by using examples from modern films and television series to illustrate his messages.
Machiavelli's experience in organizing a Florentine militia shaped the composition of his Art of War (1521), a book that is now less well known than The Prince, but that had a huge impact on ...sixteenth-century cultures of warfare.
The significance of Machiavelli's political thinking for the development of modern republicanism is a matter of great controversy. In this volume, a distinguished team of political theorists and ...historians reassess the evidence, examining the character of Machiavelli's own republicanism and charting his influence on Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, David Hume, the Baron de Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. This work argues that while Machiavelli himself was not liberal, he did set the stage for the emergence of liberal republicanism in England. By the exponents of commercial society he provided the foundations for a moderation of commonwealth ideology and exercised considerable, if circumscribed, influence on the statesmen who founded the American Republic. Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy will be of great interest to political theorists, early modern historians, and students of the American political tradition.
Beginning with a sustained analysis of Seneca's theory of monarchy in the treatise De clementia, in this 2007 text Peter Stacey traces the formative impact of ancient Roman political philosophy upon ...medieval and Renaissance thinking about princely government on the Italian peninsula from the time of Frederick II to the early modern period. Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince offers a systematic reconstruction of the pre-humanist and humanist history of the genre of political reflection known as the mirror-for-princes tradition - a tradition which, as Stacey shows, is indebted to Seneca's speculum above all other classical accounts of the virtuous prince - and culminates with a comprehensive and controversial reading of the greatest work of renaissance political theory, Machiavelli's The Prince. Peter Stacey brings to light a story which has been lost from view in recent accounts of the Renaissance debt to classical antiquity, providing a radically revisionist account of the history of the Renaissance prince.
Alexander Hamilton rose from his humble beginnings as an illegitimate West Indian orphan and emigrant to become the premier statebuilder and strategic thinker of the American Founding generation. ...This is the first detailed narrative study of his foreign policy role and ideas to appear in more than thirty years. It focuses on Hamilton's controversial activities as a key member of President George Washington's cabinet and as an aspiring military leader in the 1790s, a decade of profound division over the shape and powers of the Federal government, and US policy toward the warring powers of Europe. Drawing parallels between Hamilton and the Florentine diplomatist and thinker, Niccolò Machiavelli, prize-winning historian John Lamberton Harper offers an insightful and accessible account of the origins of Hamilton's outlook, his bitterly personal rivalries with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and his indispensable part in designing and implementing US foreign policy.
From an intensive academic study based primarily on Machiavellis works, critical arguments arise in this text that undermine not only the current-day political mind-set, framework, and practices, ...but also the views established academically, up to the point where the body politic formed by the Western classical tradition is dissipated and dispersed. Comprised in a contrary unconventional manner similar to Machiavelli, the basic essential factors of history, religion, power, and authority we.
This book offers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Prince as a masterwork of ironic writing with a moral purpose: to teach readers how to recognise hidden dangers in political conduct that appears ...great or praiseworthy, and in misleading promises of quick and easy solutions to their troubles. The Prince uses irony to hint at the problematic character of many princely actions it seems to praise. At the same time, it provokes readers to work out more prudent ways to gain political power and build effective defences. Far from eroding ancient contrasts between good and evil, tyranny and freedom, Machiavelli’s ‘little book’ shows readers the dire consequences that ensue when our language and practices fail clearly to distinguish them. In setting out this reading, this book pays close attention to ironic forms of writing that were well known to Machiavelli’s humanist contemporaries, but seem obscure today. Machiavelli’s Prince helps readers see beyond surface appearances in the text by learning to identify signs of ironic dissimulation. It outlines Machiavelli’s most important ironic techniques, including the use of normatively coded words to signal praise or blame. Once recognised, these methods provide clues to the Prince’s less obvious messages – and help explain why Rousseau and other early readers considered it ‘the book of republicans.’
Il est commun, aujourd’hui, d’associer la démocratie au consensus, et ce d’une double manière : d’une part en admettant qu’elle est le meilleur régime politique possible, d’autre part en considérant ...que l’accord vaut intrinsèquement mieux que le désaccord, et l’entente que le conflit. La qualité de la démocratie tiendrait à ses débats publics, qui à la fois rendent possible la confrontation des points de vue, tout en y mettant fin par l’obtention de consensus éclairés et légitimés par la règle de la majorité. Et si le conflit, au contraire, dans certaines conditions, devait servir de principe à la vie politique ? Il ne suffit pas de vivre en démocratie pour rendre la démocratie vivante. La démocratie n’est pas un régime mais un questionnement. Elle exige des citoyens une interrogation continue sur le bien commun à suivre. Machiavel n’était pas un démocrate. Mais c’est étrangement en actualisant sa pensée, dans le sillage des travaux de Lefort, qu’il est possible d’associer le conflit civil avec l’imaginaire social pour redynamiser la démocratie par la tension conflictuelle entre l’idéologie et l’utopie. Penser la démocratie à partir de ce que donne à penser Machiavel : voilà ce que s’efforce de faire Sébastien Roman, pour proposer dans une perspective républicaine le modèle d’un espace public dissensuel.
Mikael Hörnqvist challenges us to rethink the overall meaning and importance of Machiavelli's political thinking. Machiavelli and Empire combines close textual analysis of The Prince and The ...Discourses with a broad historical approach, to establish the importance of empire-building and imperial strategy in Machiavelli's thought. The primary context of Machiavelli's work, Hörnqvist argues, is not the mirror-for-princes genre or medieval and Renaissance republicanism in general, but a tradition of Florentine imperialist republicanism dating back to the late thirteenth-century, based on the twin notions of liberty at home and empire abroad. Weaving together themes and topics drawn from contemporary Florentine political debate, Medicean ritual and Renaissance triumphalism, this study explores how Machiavelli in his chancery writings and theoretical works promoted the long standing aspirations of Florence to become a great and expanding empire, modelled on the example of the ancient Roman republic. This is a distinctive and important work.
