Machiavelli is traditionally understood has a thinker who rejected Platonism in bulk. This book argues that even if it is correct to describe him as unsympathetic to Platonic thought, his philosophy addresses it in a deep and nuanced manner. In order to see this, one must first disentangle Machiavelli’s conversation with Plato from his criticism of Christian Florentine Neoplatonism. Once this is done, Machiavelli’s work reveals itself to engage key Platonic themes, such as love, the place of philosophical education in politics, and the relationship between policymaking and mythmaking. This engagement helps us further characterize and clarify essential concepts and axioms of Machiavellian thought, such as fortúna, virtue, the importance of self-reliance, and the proper sources of political knowledge.
There is no better way to understand our present world than by exploring the Great Books written by the great minds that have made it. There is no better way to study the beginning of modern political philosophy than by studying its foundations in Machiavelli's The Prince. There is no better way to study the Great Books than with the aid of Socrates, the philosopher par excellence. What if we could overhear a conversation in the afterlife between Socrates and Machiavelli, in which Machiavelli has to submit to an Oxford tutorial style examination of his book conducted by Socrates using his famous "Socratic method" of cross-examination? How might the conversation go? This imaginative thought-experiment makes for both drama and a good lesson in logic, in moral and political philosophy, in "how to read a book," and in the history of early modern thought. Thus this book is for readers looking for a thought-stretching "good read" and for use in college classes in logic, philosophy, ethics, political science, literature, communication, rhetoric, anthropology, and history.
The esteemed philosopher’s assessment of good, evil, and the value of Machiavelli. Leo Strauss argued that the most visible fact about Machiavelli’s doctrine is also the most useful one: Machiavelli seems to be a teacher of wickedness. Strauss sought to incorporate this idea in his interpretation without permitting it to overwhelm or exhaust his exegesis of The Prince and Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy. “We are in sympathy,” he writes, “with the simple opinion about Machiavelli [namely, the wickedness of his teaching], not only because it is wholesome, but above all because a failure to take that opinion seriously prevents one from doing justice to what is truly admirable in Machiavelli: the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.” This critique of the founder of modern political philosophy by this prominent twentieth-century scholar is an essential text for students of both authors.
Central to Niccolò Machiavelli's writing is the argument that a successful state is one that prefers to lose with its own arms (arma propriis) than to win with the arms of others (arma alienis). This book sheds light on Machiavelli's critiques of military force and provides an important reinterpretation of his military theory. Sean Erwin argues that the distinction between arma propriis and arma alienis poses a central problem to Machiavelli's case for why modern political institutions offer modes of political existence that ancient ones did not. Starting from the influence of Lucretius and Aelianus Tacticus on the Dell'arte della guerra, Erwin examines Machiavelli's criticism of mercenary, auxiliary, and mixed forces. Giving due consideration to an overlooked conceptual distinction in Machiavelli studies, this book is a valuable and original contribution to the field.
Before Machiavelli, political freedom was approached as a problem of the best distribution of the functions of ruler and ruled. Machiavelli changed the terms of freedom, requiring that its discourse address the demand for no-rule or non-domination. Political freedom would then develop only through a strategy of antagonism to every form of legitimate domination. This leads to the emergence of modern political life: any institution that wishes to rule legitimately must simultaneously be inscribed with its immanent critique and imminent subversion. For Machiavelli, the possibility of instituting the political form is conditioned by the possibility of changing it in an event of political revolution. This book shows Machiavelli as a philosopher of the modern condition. For him, politics exists in the absence of those absolute moral standards that are called upon to legitimate the domination of man over man. If this understanding lies open to relativism and historicism, it does so in order to render effective the project of reinventing the sense of human freedom. Machiavelli's legacy to modernity is the recognition of an irreconcilable tension between the demands of freedom and the imperatives of morality.
This insightful Handbook reviews the key frameworks guiding political scientists and historians of political thought. Comprehensive in scope, it covers historical methodology, traditions, epochs, and classic authors and texts, spanning from ancient Greece until the nineteenth century.
This book investigates the influence of Epicurean physics on the argument developed in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Towards this end, the full philosophical history and origins of atomist philosophy are investigated during the first three chapters. Plato’s critique of the atomist philosophy, from his dialogue the Parmenides, is a part of that investigation. In fact, Plato provides a refutation of the atomist philosophy in the Parmenides. A significant amount of scholarship has been accomplished that demonstrates the currents of Lucretian atomism in Machiavelli’s Florence. Evidence is supplied as to Machiavelli’s exposure to the Lucretian text, and the book then proceeds to investigate the transformational arguments of the Discourses On Livy itself. Machiavelli’s Discourses are saturated with terminology that is borrowed from physics: ‘materia’ (Matter), ‘corpo’ (body), ‘forma’ (form), ‘accidente’ (accident). English translators have usually employed some theory as to which tradition of physics Machiavelli is relying upon, in order to conduct their translations. By borrowing the terminology of Lucretian physics, Machiavelli becomes able to conceive of the people in a political society as something less than human: as ‘matter’ or materia without form. In my analysis of Machiavelli’s deployment of the concepts from Lucretian physics, it is attempted to unveil the brutality that is inherent in Machiavelli’s new definitions of the elements of politics, and the general hostility of his political science to the Aristotelian concept of the human being as political animal. The classical physics of Aristotle, which Machiavelli has rejected for a model, indicates the forward looking momentum of natural beings. For Aristotle, nature intends human political society as the arena for human fulfillment. In Aristotelian physics, nature aims at an end in generation, i.e. at a culmination of the natural being in its proper condition of excellence. For human beings, this is justice, the quality of relationships that makes happiness possible. In Machiavelli, a new politicized physics is revealed. In Machiavelli’s model, the human beings of formed matter are repeatedly sent, through new institutions and methods of government, ‘back to their beginnings’, i.e. to a condition of isolation, destitution, injury, and pain. The last chapter of the book concludes with an examination of the particular institutions and methods that Machiavelli holds out to us for employment, if his new vision of a republic is to be realized.
One of the outstanding thinkers of our time offers in this book his final words to posterity. Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy was well underway at the time of Leo Strauss's death in 1973. Having chosen the title for the book, he selected the most important writings of his later years and arranged them to clarify the issues in political philosophy that occupied his attention throughout his life. As his choice of title indicates, the heart of Strauss's work is Platonism—a Platonism that is altogether unorthodox and highly controversial. These essays consider, among others, Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche, Marx, Moses Maimonides, Machiavelli, and of course Plato himself to test the Platonic understanding of the conflict between philosophy and political society. Strauss argues that an awesome spritual impoverishment has engulfed modernity because of our dimming awareness of that conflict. Thomas Pangle's Introduction places the work within the context of the entire Straussian corpus and focuses especially on Strauss's late Socratic writings as a key to his mature thought. For those already familiar with Strauss, Pangle's essay will provoke thought and debate; for beginning readers of Strauss, it provides a fine introduction. A complete bibliography of Strauss's writings if included.
Machiavelli saw history in general as a way to learn useful lessons from the past for the present, and also as a type of analysis which could be built upon, as long as each generation did not forget the works of the past. In "Discourses on Livy" Machiavelli discusses what can be learned from roman period and many other eras as well, including the politics of his lifetime. This is a work of political history and philosophy written in the early 16th. The title identifies the work's subject as the first ten books of Livy's Ab urbe condita, which relate the expansion of Rome through the end of the Third Samnite War in 293 BC. Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) was an Italian diplomat, politician, historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer. He has often been called the father of modern political science. He was for many years a senior official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He served as a secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power.He wrote his most well-known work The Prince in 1513, having been exiled from city affairs.
This critical study of the influential political theorist dispels popular myths and reveals the inner logic of his varied and notoriously complex writings. Political theorist Leo Strauss was unexpectedly thrust into the media spotlight for his alleged influence on neoconservative politics. With The Truth about Leo Strauss, Michael and Catherine Zuckert challenged the many claims and speculations about this complex thinker. Now, with Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy, they offer a more comprehensive interpretation of Strauss’s thought, using the many manifestations of the “problem of political philosophy” as their touchstone. Strauss, they argue, sought to restore political philosophy to its original Socratic form. This is demonstrated through his critique of positivism and historicism, two intellectual currents that undermined his Socratic project. The authors also explore Strauss’s interpretation of both ancient and modern political philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Locke. Finally, they examine Strauss’s thought in the context of the twentieth century, when his chief interlocutors were Schmitt, Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy is the most in-depth treatment of this often misunderstood thinker, examining his ideas across his long career. It reveals Strauss’s overall intellectual project: to decode how ancient and modern theory attempted to solve the problem of political philosophy. And it shows why Strauss considered the ancient solution both philosophically and politically superior.
