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Wily Elites and Spirited Peoples in Machiavelli's Republicanism (Hardcover)
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Wily Elites and Spirited Peoples in Machiavelli's Republicanism (Hardcover)
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Total price: R2,568
Discovery Miles: 25 680
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Wily Elites and Spirited Peoples in Machiavelli's Republicanism is
one of few books that explicitly proposes Machiavelli's
republicanism, understood as a contentious mixture of elitism and
populism, as a model for our time. Based on a careful study of his
Discourses on Livy, this book shows how Machiavelli's principles
can provide both support for and constructive criticism of modern
liberal democracy. Recent scholars sympathetic to Machiavelli have
described him as an advocate of civic virtue or democracy, but
these interpretations are incomplete and insufficiently
Machiavellian. Machiavelli relies less on civic virtue than on
self-interest, properly channeled through an antagonism between the
elite (the great or grandi) and the people. Only the elite's wily
pursuit of domination, combined with the people's spirited
resistance to such domination, can produce that compromise between
servitude and license known as liberty. Machiavelli is not exactly
a democrat, since he believes that a prudent and far-seeing elite
is indispensable for counteracting dangerous popular enthusiasms.
On the other hand, he emphasizes that the people must vigorously
contest the elite's aggrandizements.And he explains how to
construct and maintain a political framework that will allow each
side to make its appropriate contribution. Machiavelli's arguments
should be particularly appealing today, when many of us distrust
the motives of our political and economic elites without being
ready to embrace untrammeled populism. This book uses the conflict
between the elite and the people as the lens through which to
understand the other major features of Machiavelli's republicanism:
his views on religion, war and imperialism, goodness and
corruption, and the relation between republics and princes. In sum,
this book demonstrates that still today, Machiavelli's principles
are extremely relevant to the survival and success of liberty.
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