Born around 1532 in Vienne, France, Innocent Gentillet was a Huguenot lawyer who fled to Geneva after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. In 1576, he published Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner & maintenir en paix un Royaume, ou autre Principauté, Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin, popularly known as Anti-Machiavel. Despite a papal ban in 1605, Anti-Machiavel went through twenty-four editions in French, Latin, English, German, and Dutch; it was read and used by Montaigne and Shakespeare. This edition presents Simon Patericke’s 1602 English translation, revised for modern spelling and grammar, and explores Anti-Machiavel’s connections with other works of the period.
Machiavelli's name came to evoke unscrupulous acts of the sort he advised most famously in his work, The Prince. He claimed that his experience and reading of history showed him that politics have always been played with deception, treachery, and crime.
'A gripping work, and a gripping translation' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian Niccolò Machiavelli's brutally uncompromising manual of statecraft, The Prince is translated and edited with an introduction by Tim Parks in Penguin Classics As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notorious and has remained controversial ever since. How can a leader be strong and decisive, yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? When is it necessary to break the rules? Is it better to be feared than loved? Examining regimes and their rulers the world over and throughout history, from Roman Emperors to renaissance Popes, from Hannibal to Cesare di Borgia, Machievalli answers all these questions in a work of realpolitik that still has shrewd political lessons for today. Tim Parks's acclaimed contemporary translation renders Machiavelli's no-nonsense original as alarming and enlightening as when it was first written. His introduction discusses Machiavelli's life and reputation, and explores the historical background to the work. 'Tim Parks's swift and supple new translation brings out all its chilling modernity' Boyd Tonkin, Independent
As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread through later editions. Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters. Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski "Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation." ---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead "Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power." ---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment "Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history." ---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley "Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice." ---Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review
This carefully crafted ebook: "The Prince + The Art of War (2 Unabridged Machiavellian Masterpieces)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. This eBook presents 2 Political Masterpieces by Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince & The Art of War. The Prince: Il Principe (The Prince) is a political treatise by the Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, written c. 1513, published posthumously 1532. The Prince is sometimes claimed to be one of the first works of modern political philosophy, in which the effective truth is taken to be more important than any abstract ideal. It was also in direct conflict with the dominant Catholic and scholastic doctrines of the time concerning how to consider politics and ethics. Machiavelli dedicated The Prince to the ruling Medici of the time, leading some today to still speculate whether the book was a satire. Niccolò Machiavelli asserted that The Prince (president, dictator, prime minister, etc.) does not have to be concerned with ethics, as long as their motivation is to protect the state. It is this questionable belief that in many ways had lead to the modern world as we know it. His assertion was that the head of state must protect the state no matter the cost and no matter what rules he or she breaks in the process. The Art of War: written between 1519 and 1520 and published in 1521. It was the only historical or political work printed during Machiavelli's lifetime. Voltaire said, "Machiavelli taught Europe the art of war; it had long been practiced, without being known." Machiavelli considered The Art of War his greatest achievement. This book teaches how to recruit, train, motivate, and discipline an army, shows the difference between strategy and tactics. Machiavelli does a masterful job of breaking down and analyzing historic battles.
