Download or read book Summary of John P McCormick s Reading Machiavelli written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-05-09T22:59:00Z with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Machiavelli’s use of Borgia is a puzzle for interpreters of The Prince. Those who denounced the scandalous quality of Machiavelli’s book argued that the laudatory presentation of Borgia proved that he cared little for piety, morality, good government, or basic decency. #2 Machiavelli argues that the people are the greatest authority in a state, and he believes that they should be the ones who decide who holds power. He associates himself with Cesare Borgia, who was called Duke Valentino by the people, and with the common people as a class. #3 The people are fascinated by appearances and outcomes, but since in the world abide none but the vulgar, appearances and outcomes may be all that count in the end. While this may be taken as a criticism of the people’s shallowness, it actually affirms their validity. #4 The Italian tradition, represented by Dante, recognizes the Roman Caesars as the heirs of Alexander. The question of whether Cesare Borgia is capable of maintaining and building upon the foundations he inherits from his Alexander is central to The Prince.
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 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 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 in Tumult written by Gabriele Pedullà and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructs the origins of the idea that social conflict, and not concord, makes political communities powerful.
Download or read book Machiavelli written by Mark Jurdjevic and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-07-12 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his life, Niccolò Machiavelli was deeply invested in Florentine culture and politics. More than any other priority, his overriding central concerns, informed by his understanding of his city's history, were the present and future strength and independence of Florence. This volume highlights and explores this underappreciated aspect of Machiavelli's intellectual preoccupations. Transcending a narrow emphasis on his two most famous works of political thought, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, Mark Jurdjevic and Meredith K. Ray instead present a wide sample of the many genres in which he wrote—not only political theory but also letters, poetry, plays, comedy, and, most substantially, history. Throughout his writing, the city of Florence was at the same time his principal subject and his principal context. Florentine culture and history structured his mental landscape, determined his idiom, underpinned his politics, and endowed everything he wrote with urgency and purpose. The Florentine particulars in Machiavelli's writing reveal aspects of his psyche, politics, and life that are little known outside of specialist circles—particularly his optimism and idealism, his warmth and humor, his capacity for affection and loyalty, and his stubborn, enduring republicanism. Machiavelli: Political, Historical, and Literary Writings has been carefully curated to reveal those crucial but lesser known aspects of Machiavelli's thought and to show how his major arguments evolved within a dynamic Florentine setting.
Download or read book Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence written by Yves Winter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niccolò Machiavelli is the most prominent and notorious theorist of violence in the history of European political thought - prominent, because he is the first to candidly discuss the role of violence in politics; and notorious, because he treats violence as virtue rather than as vice. In this original interpretation, Yves Winter reconstructs Machiavelli's theory of violence and shows how it challenges moral and metaphysical ideas. Winter attributes two central theses to Machiavelli: first, violence is not a generic technology of government but a strategy that tends to correlate with inequality and class conflict; and second, violence is best understood not in terms of conventional notions of law enforcement, coercion, or the proverbial 'last resort', but as performance. Most political violence is effective not because it physically compels another agent who is thus coerced; rather, it produces political effects by appealing to an audience. As such, this book shows how in Machiavelli's world, violence is designed to be perceived, experienced, remembered, and narrated.
Download or read book Machiavelli s Liberal Republican Legacy written by Paul A. Rahe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-14 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Essential Writings of Machiavelli written by Niccolo Machiavelli and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2009-07-08 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST--2008 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE In The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, Peter Constantine has assembled a comprehensive collection that shows the true depth and breadth of a great Renaissance thinker. Refreshingly accessible, these superb new translations are faithful to Machiavelli’s original, beautifully crafted writings. The volume features essays that appear in English for the first time, such as “A Caution to the Medici” and “The Persecution of Africa.” Also included are complete versions of the political treatise, The Prince, the comic satire The Mandrake, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, and the classic story “Belfagor”, along with selections from The Discourses, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories. Augmented with useful features–vital and concise annotations and cross-references–this unique compendium is certain to become the standard one-volume reference to this influential, versatile, and ever timely writer. “Machiavelli's stress on political necessity rather than moral perfection helped inspire the Renaissance by renewing links with Thucydides and other classical thinkers. This new collection provides deeper insight into Machiavelli’s personality as a writer, thus broadening our understanding of him.” –Robert D. Kaplan, author of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos “Constantine’s selection is not only intelligent; his translations are astonishingly good. Thoughtfully introduced by Albert Russell Ascoli, this edition belongs in everyone’s library.” –John Jeffries Martin, professor and chair, department of history, Trinity University “If one were to assign a single edition of Machiavelli's works, this most certainly would be it.” –John P. McCormick, professor, department of political science, University of Chicago
Download or read book The Radical Machiavelli written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-08-24 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy and Language, some of the finest Machiavellian scholars explore the Florentine’s thought five hundred years after the composition of his masterpiece, The Prince. Their analysis, however, goes past The Prince, extending to Machiavelli’s entire corpus and shining new light on his political, historical, and military works, with a special focus on their heritage in modern Marxist thought, the arena in which they reverberate most profoundly and originally. Rather than a neutral, comprehensive, and safe interpretation, this book offers a partial and even partisan reading of Machiavelli, the 16th-century thinker who continues to divide scholars and interpreters, forcing them to confront their responsibility as contemporary thinkers in a global society where Machiavelli's ideas and the issues they address still matter. Contributors are: Etienne Balibar, Banu Bargu, Jérémie Barthas, Thomas Berns, Alison Brown, Filippo Del Lucchese, Romain Descendre, Jean-Louis Fournel, Fabio Frosini, Giorgio Inglese, Mikko Lahtinen, Jacques Lezra, John P. McCormick, Warren Montag, Vittorio Morfino, Mohamed Moulfi, Gabriele Pedullà, Tania Rispoli, Peter D. Thomas, Sebastian Torres, Miguel Vatter, Stefano Visentin, Yves Winter, and Jean-Claude Zancarini.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli written by John M. Najemy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is the most famous and controversial figure in the history of political thought and one of the iconic names of the Renaissance. The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli brings together sixteen original essays by leading experts, covering his life, his career in Florentine government, his reaction to the dramatic changes that affected Florence and Italy in his lifetime, and the most prominent themes of his thought, including the founding, evolution, and corruption of republics and principalities, class conflict, liberty, arms, religion, ethics, rhetoric, gender, and the Renaissance dialogue with antiquity. In his own time Machiavelli was recognized as an original thinker who provocatively challenged conventional wisdom. With penetrating analyses of The Prince, Discourses on Livy, Art of War, Florentine Histories, and his plays and poetry, this book offers a vivid portrait of this extraordinary thinker as well as assessments of his place in Western thought since the Renaissance.
Download or read book A Great and Wretched City written by Mark Jurdjevic and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Flattery and the History of Political Thought written by Daniel J. Kapust and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates flattery's importance for political theory, addressing representation, republicanism, and rhetoric through classical, early modern, and eighteenth-century thought.
Download or read book Machiavelli s Ethics written by Erica Benner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-26 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machiavelli's Ethics challenges the most entrenched understandings of Machiavelli, arguing that he was a moral and political philosopher who consistently favored the rule of law over that of men, that he had a coherent theory of justice, and that he did not defend the "Machiavellian" maxim that the ends justify the means. By carefully reconstructing the principled foundations of his political theory, Erica Benner gives the most complete account yet of Machiavelli's thought. She argues that his difficult and puzzling style of writing owes far more to ancient Greek sources than is usually recognized, as does his chief aim: to teach readers not how to produce deceptive political appearances and rhetoric, but how to see through them. Drawing on a close reading of Greek authors--including Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch--Benner identifies a powerful and neglected key to understanding Machiavelli. This important new interpretation is based on the most comprehensive study of Machiavelli's writings to date, including a detailed examination of all of his major works: The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories. It helps explain why readers such as Bacon and Rousseau could see Machiavelli as a fellow moral philosopher, and how they could view The Prince as an ethical and republican text. By identifying a rigorous structure of principles behind Machiavelli's historical examples, the book should also open up fresh debates about his relationship to later philosophers, including Rousseau, Hobbes, and Kant.
Download or read book Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times written by Alison McQueen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From climate change to nuclear war to the rise of demagogic populists, our world is shaped by doomsday expectations. In this path-breaking book, Alison McQueen shows why three of history's greatest political realists feared apocalyptic politics. Niccol- Machiavelli in the midst of Italy's vicious power struggles, Thomas Hobbes during England's bloody civil war, and Hans Morgenthau at the dawn of the thermonuclear age all saw the temptation to prophesy the end of days. Each engaged in subtle and surprising strategies to oppose apocalypticism, from using its own rhetoric to neutralize its worst effects to insisting on a clear-eyed, tragic acceptance of the human condition. Scholarly yet accessible, this book is at once an ambitious contribution to the history of political thought and a work that speaks to our times.
Download or read book Florentine Political Writings from Petrarch to Machiavelli written by Mark Jurdjevic and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fifteenth-century republic of Florence, political power resided in the hands of middle-class merchants, a few wealthy families, and powerful craftsmen's guilds. The intensity of Florentine factionalism and the frequent alterations in its political institutions gave Renaissance thinkers ample opportunities to inquire into the nature of political legitimacy and the relationship between authority and its social context. This volume provides a selection of texts that describes the language, conceptual vocabulary, and issues at stake in Florentine political culture at key moments in its development during the Renaissance. Rather than presenting Renaissance political thought as a static set of arguments, Florentine Political Writings from Petrarch to Machiavelli instead illustrates the degree to which political thought in the Italian City revolved around a common cluster of topics that were continually modified and revised—and the way those common topics could be made to serve radically divergent political purposes. Editors Mark Jurdjevic, Natasha Piano, and John P. McCormick offer readers the opportunity to appreciate how Renaissance political thought, often expressed in the language of classical idealism, could be productively applied to pressing civic questions. The editors expand the scope of Florentine humanist political writing by explicitly connecting it with the sixteenth-century realist turn most influentially exemplified by Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini. Presenting nineteen primary source documents, including lesser known texts by Machiavelli and Guicciardini, several of which are here translated into English for the first time, this useful compendium shows how the Renaissance political imagination could be deployed to think through methods of electoral technology, the balance of power between different social groups, and other practical matters of political stability.
Download or read book Systemic Corruption written by Camila Vergara and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new approach to combatting the inherent corruption of representative democracy This provocative book reveals how the majority of modern liberal democracies have become increasingly oligarchic, suffering from a form of structural political decay first conceptualized by ancient philosophers. Systemic Corruption argues that the problem cannot be blamed on the actions of corrupt politicians but is built into the very fabric of our representative systems. Camila Vergara provides a compelling and original genealogy of political corruption from ancient to modern thought, and shows how representative democracy was designed to protect the interests of the already rich and powerful to the detriment of the majority. Unable to contain the unrelenting force of oligarchy, especially after experimenting with neoliberal policies, most democracies have been corrupted into oligarchic democracies. Vergara explains how to reverse this corrupting trajectory by establishing a new counterpower strong enough to control the ruling elites. Building on the anti-oligarchic institutional innovations proposed by plebeian philosophers, she rethinks the republic as a mixed order in which popular power is institutionalized to check the power of oligarchy. Vergara demonstrates how a plebeian republic would establish a network of local assemblies with the power to push for reform from the grassroots, independent of political parties and representative government. Drawing on neglected insights from Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolas de Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, Systemic Corruption proposes to reverse the decay of democracy with the establishment of anti-oligarchic institutions through which common people can collectively resist the domination of the few.
