Download or read book Machiavellian Democracy written by John P. McCormick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Machiavellian Democracy written by John P. McCormick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. John P. McCormick confronts this dire situation through a dramatic reinterpretation of Niccol- 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. Machiavellian Democracy fundamentally reassesses one of the central figures in the Western political canon and decisively intervenes into current debates over institutional design and democratic reform. Inspired by Machiavelli's thoughts on economic class, political accountability and popular empowerment, 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.
Download or read book Democracy Against the State written by Miguel Abensour and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” the young Marx elliptically alludes to a "true democracy" whose advent would go hand in hand with the disappearance of the state. Miguel Abensour’s rigorous interpretation of this seminal text reveals an “unknown Marx” who undermines the identification of democracy with the state and defends a historically occluded form of politics. True democracy does not entail the political and economic power of the state, but it does not dream of a post-political society either. On the contrary, the battle of democracy is waged by a demos that invents a public sphere of permanent struggles, a politics that counters political bureaucracy and representation. Democracy is "won" by a people forewarned that any dissolution of the political realm in its independence, any subordination to the state, is tantamount to annihilating the site for gaining and regaining a genuinely human existence. In this explicitly heterodox reading of Marx, Miguel Abensour proposes a theory of "insurgent" democracy that makes political liberty synonymous with a living critique of domination.
Download or read book Reading Machiavelli written by John P. McCormick and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new reading of Machiavelli’s major works that demonstrates how he has been previously misread To what extent was Niccolò Machiavelli a “Machiavellian”? Was he an amoral adviser of tyranny or a stalwart partisan of liberty? A neutral technician of power politics or a devout Italian patriot? A reviver of pagan virtue or initiator of modern nihilism? Reading Machiavelli answers these questions through original interpretations of Machiavelli’s three major political works—The Prince, Discourses, and Florentine Histories—and demonstrates that a radically democratic populism seeded the Florentine’s scandalous writings. John McCormick challenges the misguided understandings of Machiavelli set forth by prominent thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and representatives of the Straussian and Cambridge schools, and he emphasizes the fundamental, often unacknowledged elements of a vibrant Machiavellian politics. Advancing fresh readings of Machiavelli’s work, this book presents a new outlook on how politics should be conceptualized and practiced.
Download or read book Nietzsche s Machiavellian Politics written by D. Dombowsky and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-02-27 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exciting new study, Don Dombowsky proposes that the foundation of Nietzsche's political thought is the aristocratic liberal critique of democratic society. But he claims that Nietzsche radicalizes this critique through a Machiavellian conversion, based on a reading of The Prince , adapting Machiavellian virtù (the shaping capacity of the legislator), and immoralism (the techniques applied in political rule), and that, consequently, Nietzsche is better understood in relation to the political ideology of the neo-Machiavellian elite theorists of his own generation.
Download or read book The Machiavellians written by James Burnham and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Burnham describes in details the history of Machiavelli and the modern Machiavellians who have been using his ideas to influence modern political liberty.
Download or read book Machiavellian Rhetoric written by Victoria Kahn and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1994-07-05 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of political thought have argued that the real Machiavelli is the republican thinker and theorist of civic virtù. Machiavellian Rhetoric argues in contrast that Renaissance readers were right to see Machiavelli as a Machiavel, a figure of force and fraud, rhetorical cunning and deception. Taking the rhetorical Machiavel as a point of departure, Victoria Kahn argues that this figure is not simply the result of a naïve misreading of Machiavelli but is attuned to the rhetorical dimension of his political theory in a way that later thematic readings of Machiavelli are not. Her aim is to provide a revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism, particularly in England: one that sees the Machiavel and the republican as equally valid--and related--readings of Machiavelli's work. In this revised history, Machiavelli offers a rhetoric for dealing with the realm of de facto political power, rather than a political theory with a coherent thematic content; and Renaissance Machiavellism includes a variety of rhetorically sophisticated appreciations and appropriations of Machiavelli's own rhetorical approach to politics. Part I offers readings of The Prince, The Discourses, and Counter-Reformation responses to Machiavelli. Part II discusses the reception of Machiavelli in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England. Part III focuses on Milton, especially Areopagitica, Comus, and Paradise Lost.
Download or read book Beasts and Gods written by Roslyn Fuller and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy does not deliver on the things we have assumed are its natural outcomes. This, coupled with a growing sense of malaise in both new and established democracies forms the basis to the assertion made by some, that these are not democracies at all. Through considerable, impressive empirical analysis of a variety of voting methods, across twenty different nations, Roslyn Fuller presents the data that makes this contention indisputable. Proving that the party which forms the government rarely receives the majority of the popular vote, that electoral systems regularly produce manufactured majorities and that the better funded side invariably wins such contests in both elections and referenda, Fuller's findings challenge the most fundamental elements of both national politics and broader society. Beast and Gods argues for a return to democracy as perceived by the ancient Athenians. Boldly arguing for the necessity of the Aristotelian assumption that citizens are agents whose wishes and aims can be attained through participation in politics, and through an examination of what “goods” are provided by democracy, Fuller offers a powerful challenge to the contemporary liberal view that there are no "goods" in politics, only individual citizens seeking to fulfil their particular interests.
Download or read book Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict written by David Johnston and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers from a conference held 6-7 December 2013 at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Prince.
Download or read book Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation written by Christopher Holma and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a detailed reinterpretation and reconstruction of the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation uses original readings of Machiavelli's texts to develop a new theoretical model of democratic practice. The book critically and creatively juxtaposes certain concepts drawn from Machiavelli's work in order to produce new political insights. 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. In the final instance, a new ethical ground for the normative defense of democratic life is constructed, one grounded in the orientation of individual beings toward novelty and innovation.
Download or read book Democracy s Discontent written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-02-06 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On American democracy
Download or read book Machiavelli in America written by Thomas Block and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machiavelli advised us that people 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. This book 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. 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 with a specific, implementable program that will begin to devolve the power of American democracy back to the people.
Download or read book Machiavelli s Politics written by Catherine H. Zuckert and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machiavelli is popularly known as a teacher of tyrants, a key proponent of the unscrupulous “Machiavellian” politics laid down in his landmark political treatise The Prince. Others cite the Discourses on Livy to argue that Machiavelli is actually a passionate advocate of republican politics who saw the need for occasional harsh measures to maintain political order. Which best characterizes the teachings of the prolific Italian philosopher? With Machiavelli’s Politics, Catherine H. Zuckert turns this question on its head with a major reinterpretation of Machiavelli’s prose works that reveals a surprisingly cohesive view of politics. Starting with Machiavelli’s two major political works, Zuckert persuasively shows that the moral revolution Machiavelli sets out in The Prince lays the foundation for the new form of democratic republic he proposes in the Discourses. Distrusting ambitious politicians to serve the public interest of their own accord, Machiavelli sought to persuade them in The Prince that the best way to achieve their own ambitions was to secure the desires and ambitions of their subjects and fellow citizens. In the Discourses, he then describes the types of laws and institutions that would balance the conflict between the two in a way that would secure the liberty of most, if not all. In the second half of her book, Zuckert places selected later works—La Mandragola, The Art of War, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, Clizia, and Florentine Histories—under scrutiny, showing how Machiavelli further developed certain aspects of his thought in these works. In The Art of War, for example, he explains more concretely how and to what extent the principles of organization he advanced in The Prince and the Discourses ought to be applied in modern circumstances. Because human beings act primarily on passions, Machiavelli attempts to show readers what those passions are and how they can be guided to have productive rather than destructive results. A stunning and ambitious analysis, Machiavelli’s Politics brilliantly shows how many conflicting perspectives do inform Machiavelli’s teachings, but that one needs to consider all of his works in order to understand how they cohere into a unified political view. This is a magisterial work that cannot be ignored if a comprehensive understanding of the philosopher is to be obtained.
Download or read book The Capitol Hill Playbook written by Nicholas Balthazar and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-04-20 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In presenting the ideal skills, abilities, and qualities of a successful politico, The Capitol Hill Playbook speaks to today’s generation of staffers like no other book before it. Weaving together Renaissance-era political philosophies and contemporary illustrations, Nicholas Balthazar enlists the help of Niccolò Machiavelli, author of the venerable political treatise The Prince, and Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier—the authoritative account of Renaissance court life—to demonstrate two models of political life and their applicability today. Balthazar offers readers a path between these two methods, exploring the mechanics of working for elected officials but also discussing the philosophies behind contemporary political work. The Capitol Hill Playbook answers all the questions a newly hired staffer might want to ask: • Why do politicians run for office? • Why is devotion so important in politics? • Why must a staffer be a good communicator? • Why are friendships such an essential and elusive part of political life? • How do you win a political knife fight? • Why should a political staffer never wear a bow tie to the office? • And more! A provocative and informative read, The Capitol Hill Playbook will be indispensible to any political aspirant and, with an intriguing look back to the Renaissance, reveals how politics today has both changed and remained the same through the centuries.
Download or read book Inheriting the Revolution written by Joyce Appleby and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Details the experiences of the first generation of Americans who inherited the independent country, discussing the lives, businesses, and religious freedoms that transformed the country in its early years.
Download or read book Closing of the American Mind written by Allan Bloom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.
Download or read book Machiavelli written by Patrick Boucheron and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE In a series of poignant vignettes, a preeminent historian makes a compelling case for Machiavelli as an unjustly maligned figure with valuable political insights that resonate as strongly today as they did in his time. Whenever a tempestuous period in history begins, Machiavelli is summoned, because he is known as one for philosophizing in dark times. In fact, since his death in 1527, we have never ceased to read him to pull ourselves out of torpors. But what do we really know about this man apart from the term invented by his detractors to refer to that political evil, Machiavellianism? It was Machiavelli's luck to be disappointed by every statesman he encountered throughout his life—that was why he had to write The Prince. If the book endeavors to dissociate political action from common morality, the question still remains today, not why, but for whom Machiavelli wrote. For princes, or for those who want to resist them? Is the art of governing to take power or to keep it? And what is “the people?” Can they govern themselves? Beyond cynical advice for the powerful, Machiavelli meditates profoundly on the idea of popular sovereignty, because the people know best who oppresses them. With verve and a delightful erudition, Patrick Boucheron sheds light on the life and works of this unclassifiable visionary, illustrating how we can continue to use him as a guide in times of crisis.
