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"
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