Machiavelli's Sisters: Women and "the Conversation" of Political Theory (original) (raw)
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Working Paper, 2023
In 1516, Niccolo Machiavelli, the advisor of tyrants already infamous for The Prince, joined a circle of humanist literati who met on the outskirts of Florence in the gardens of the Rucellai family. They called themselves the Orti Oricellari, and their discussions focused on classical republican texts-Cicero, Titus Livy, and others-and the applicability of Roman lessons to contemporary politics. Indeed, reports of participants in the Orti confirm that the primary concern of these learned men was the sustenance of precious liberties in fragile republican states, such as their recently toppled Florentine Republic. It was in this circle of learning that Machiavelli was drawn back towards the humanist pursuits which had formed the core of his own education, before he had entered the world of power politics as a Florentine emissary at the courts of some of Italy's great and terrible autocratic rulers. And it was because of these discussions that the bloody political realism which dripped from the pages of The Prince took on a new character, infused with a renewed love for liberty, and became the humanistic, republican doctrines of his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy. Yet, the standard scholarly interpretations of Machiavelli's two most famous works link them inseparably, as two sides of one coin, even going so far as to suppose that these two tracts with such different political ends were written at the same time, in 1513. Machiavelli is seen either as the "murderous Machiavel" of The Prince and his republicanism is discounted, or he is seen as the truly patriotic republican of the Discourses who regrettably erred (or wrote ironically, or deviously) when advising tyrants. But I have pursued another vein of interpretation here: there is credible textual and historical evidence that Machiavelli's Discourses were written later than The Prince, in a time when he was under the sway of the Orti and of classical thought. Furthermore, there is historical evidence that Machiavelli's humanist, republican thought did deepen as his years outside of government service passed. Jumping off from these textual and historical starting points, one can begin to see that Machiavelli's different views in his two main works are evidence of a true, growing concern for liberty. Nevertheless, despite the influence of the Orti, Machiavelli's liberty was not precisely that of his humanist, republican contemporaries. I argue that Machiavelli's republicanism has eluded explanation by historicist interpreters (who write histories of political thought by showing how a thinker fits within a "paradigm" of thought which was active in his time) precisely because he found the answers to his political preoccupations (and found intellectual kin to his realist politics) in Roman political thinkers, not necessarily in his interlocutors in the Rucellai gardens. Machiavelli's institutional thought as well as his psychology of founders, rulers, and citizens alike was deeply touched by the Romans on whom he discoursed. One cannot, then, understand Machiavelli without understanding Roman republican thought: he was engaged in recovering a Roman republican conception of liberty which was very different from the paradigms of liberty current in his own times (and most certainly different from the liberty of our times). As evidence of this claim, I argue here for a "Development Thesis" which traces Machiavelli's change from a power politician's negative view of the capacity of the subject for autonomy (befitting Machiavelli in 1513), to a politically-realistic, yet humanistically-informed view of the same capacity in the citizen (a role Machiavelli had embraced by 1516).
The Dialogical Element in Machiavelli's Works
2014
This dissertation will examine the dialogical element in Niccolò Machiavelli's works including his two dialogues Arte della guerra and Discorso intorno alla lingua, as well as those which do not belong to the dialogic genre, namely Il principe and Mandragola, but which display many of the key elements of the genre. This will be accomplished using contemporary theories, with the addition of Marshall McLuhan's work on the medium. By treating the dialogue not only as a genre, but also as a medium, this opens up a new avenue of study with which to analyze and evaluate not only some of Machiavelli's most celebrated works, but also how his legacy is tied to modernity. 2.10 Arte della guerra: 'hot' or 'cool' medium? Chapter 3: Il principe 99 3.1 How to re-fashion Il principe as a dialogue 3.2 The role of the reader in the dialogue of Il principe 3.3 Machiavelli's qualifications as advisor in Il principe: Letting the reader decide for himself 3.4 The cooling of a hot medium: from treatise to dialogue 3.5 De' Principati Misti: How to be an effective ruler 3.6 Common sense: La verità effettuale nell'essere laudato o biasimato 3.7 Cesare Borgia: vittima della Fortuna 3.8 Crudeltà 3.9 Fortuna-virtù 3.10 Chapter XXVI: A call to action 3.11 From Il principe to Mandragola Chapter 4-Mandragola 152 4.1 The dialogic elements in the commedia 4.2 The commedia as a medium 4.3 Machiavelli and his Mandragola 4.4 Callimaco: coolest of the cool 4.5 Nicia: hottest of the hot 4.6 Fra' Timoteo and Sostrata: the cynic and the gull, from hot to cool Conclusion 203 Works Cited 209 v List of Figures
MEDITATIONS ON MACHIAVELLI: SEX AND POLITICS
2021
Everyone knows something about Machiavelli’s political thought. It’s been a long time since his masterpiece, “The Prince”, was written and we are still confused about what he really wanted to say with his writings. His words are not always clear and he seems to be contradictory many times but his thought is the base of modern political thought. In this work, we are going to focus on the key words that we repeatedly find in the lines of his writings to try to better understand what he wanted to hand down to those who wanted to become a prince at that time. What really is “virtue”? And what about “Fortune”? Which type of relationship are there between these two? Why do we all love and hate at the same time this author?
Intellectual History Review, 2017
Niccolò Machiavelli looks at us with an ironic smile. He escapes us, deceives us and at times even mocks us: "For some time now, I never say what I think, nor do I think what I say, and even if I tell the truth sometimes, I hide it among so many lies, that it's hard to find it again." 1 That ironic smile hides a tragic figure. Usually well hidden, it reveals itself in the moments of deepest desperation. "So if I sometimes laugh or sing,/", he wrote soon after being tortured and imprisoned, "I do it because I have just this one/ Way of giving vent to my bitter cry." 2 I want to uncover what lies at the heart of this tragedy using Machiavelli's own interpretative technique. Uncovering a complex, at times deceitful figure is a problem that Machiavelli himself faced repeatedly in his years as Florentine Secretary. Whether it was Cesare Borgia or Caterina Sforza, Machiavelli had to interpret the gestures and words of statesmen that were masters of deception. The strategy he developed to uncover these statesmen's intentions was based on the analysis of human passions, on uncovering the fundamental trait that defined a man's character. I apply Machiavelli's strategy of interpretation to Machiavelli himself. I do so by relying extensively on his letters and his comedies. Machiavelli would have envied the wide access that we have to the most private works of our subject of study. Had he had access to similarly private works by Cesare Borgia, his job as the Florentine envoy would have been much easier. Through this work of interpretation of human passions, I will uncover the irreconcilable disconnect which shapes Machiavelli's tragedy. On one hand, he relates to his objects of desire by entirely abandoning himself to them, regardless of how unachievable they are. On the other, to obtain these objects of desire his analytical mind develops strategies which take pride in their adherence to what he called the "effectual truth of the matter." 3 His incapacity to reconsider his objectives in light of the means at his disposal and his tendency to transfer all of himself into his objectives determined Machiavelli's successes and failures. He repeatedly failed when he had to set his own goals, or when he approached a problem with empathy. He succeeded when he was given precise and limited objectives and when he understood that he did not share the goals of those he was studying. The next section discusses how other scholars have struggled to understand the fundamental disconnect at the heart of Machiavelli's tragedy, focusing on the final exhortation of The Prince. The third section describes Machiavelli's interpretative strategy. The fourth section applies this strategy to his personal writings in order to understand what passions animated him, and then uses these passions to interpret some famous passages of The Prince. The fifth section looks at his political successes and failures and explains them in light of this fundamental disconnect between goals and means. The final section asks whether Machiavelli was aware of this fundamental disconnect. Looking at his comedies and at his epistolary exchanges with Francesco Guicciardini, I conclude that he was ironically self-aware. How could a realist embrace such unrealistic goals? Machiavelli most famously embraced an unrealistic goal in the concluding exhortation of The Prince. This was far from being the only time he did so, but by focusing on the interpretations of The Prince's twenty-sixth chapter I can review the literature relating to my central problem. After being kicked out of power, exiled and tortured by the Medici, why was Machiavelli appealing to the Medici themselves to liberate Italy from the barbarians? Did he think that such an enterprise was feasible? If so, why did he reach a conclusion which, by virtually all accounts, was utterly implausible? We can identify three ways in which readers of Machiavelli have reacted to this puzzle. First, many scholars simply ignored the final chapter of The Prince. As early as 1523 the Aristotelian Agostino Nifo published De Regnandi Peritia, a heavily plagiarized version of the still unpublished The Prince. Nifo transformed The Prince into a scientific treatise on all forms of government. In such a scientific treatise, there was no space for an exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians. The final chapter was thus excluded from Nifo's plagiarised work. 4 Those who, like Nifo, interpreted Machiavelli as the founder of a neutral science of politics, could not explain why The Prince ends the way it does. For instance, the German scholar Hermann Conring, who
Confusion verging on chaos aptly describes Italian politics between any two points in time. That being said, the amount of outright violence, political backstabbing and social upheaval Machiavelli had to put up with - as a successful bureaucrat and diplomat first (1498-1512), and later as a disgraced citizen (1512-27) is, with few if any exceptions, virtually unmatched in the history of Italian philosophy. At any rate, it is conspicuous enough to put him in a league of his own (among political thinkers). All the more so since, in Machiavelli's own words, his claim to originality rested on a return to the things themselves and the 'real truth' they convey through experience, as opposed to the traditional proclivity towards speculation regarding 'imaginary things', most notably by portraying fanciful characters and devising political regimes that can only exist on paper. Indeed, philosophers had long been lecturing- either in flawless syllogistic fashion or in vivid rhetorical style - both rulers and subjects on how they should behave and interact. However, they had taken little notice of how they actually go about their business. Alternatively, what does unbiased, direct observation of the present and extensive, informed reading of the past teach us about the ways of the world?
2016
Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince is one of the most celebrated and notorious books in the history of Western political thought. It continues to influence discussions of war and peace, the nature of politics, and the relation of private ethics to public duties. Ostensibly a sixteenth-century manual of instruction on certain aspects of princely rule and behavior, The Prince anticipates and complicates modern political and philosophical questions. What is the right order of society? Can Western politics still be the model for progress toward peace and prosperity, or does our freedom to create our individual purposes and pursuits undermine our public responsibilities? Are the characteristics of our politics markedly different, for better or for worse, than the politics of earlier eras? Machiavelli argues that there is no ideal, transcendent order to which one can conform, and that the right order is merely the one that has the capacity to persist over time. The Prince's emphasis on the importance of an effective truth over any abstract ideal marks it as one of the first works of modern political philosophy. Machiavelli's Legacy situates Machiavelli in general and The Prince in particular at the birth of modernity. Joining the conversation with established Machiavelli scholars are political theorists, Americanists, and international relations scholars, ensuring a diversity of viewpoints and approaches. Each contributor elucidates different features of Machiavelli's thinking, from his rejection of classical antiquity and Christianity, to his proposed dissolution of natural roles and hierarchies among human beings. The essays cover topics such as Machiavelli's vision for a heaven-sent redemptive ruler of Italy, an argument that Machiavelli accomplished a profoundly democratic turn in political thought, and a tough-minded liberal critique of his realistic agenda for political life, resulting in a book that is, in effect, a spirited conversation about Machiavelli's legacy.
Accusations of "Machiavellianism" abound. The term is a forceful condemnation of a political opponent, suggesting unparalleled deceit and inevitable treachery. Despite this association, politicians ranging from Emmanuel Macron to Steven Bannon still refer to their knowledge of Machiavelli to imply political skillfulness. While Machiavelli has become an integral part of our everyday political vocabulary, we lack a sense of what he said and how it has been interpreted. Machiavelli has been called many things: master of statecraft, teacher of evil, quintessential republican, and radical democrat. These many Machiavelli's often tell us as much about the thinker engaging with the work of Machiavelli as they tell us about the Renaissance Florentine himself. This course reads Machiavelli's core political texts alongside debates that have unfolded through his work. We will follow the ways his thought has informed conversations about the role of the people in the polity, ideas of morality and politics, the nature of political knowledge, and the relationship between war, power, and authority, among other issues. Revisiting the debates around Machiavelli's political thought alongside the original text provides us not only with a chance to dispute earlier interpretations but also offers a map of major concepts in political theory. Drawing on the interventions of his many interpreters, we will consider how Machiavelli might speak to our contemporary political moment. Where do love and fear arise in our political life? How do we build a polity that can endure? Who is the new Prince, and what would it mean to apply this concept today?