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"Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under, you've got
to knock her around some."--Niccolo Machiavelli
Hanna Pitkin's provocative and enduring study of Machiavelli was
the first to systematically place gender at the center of its
exploration of his political thought. In this edition, Pitkin adds
a new afterword, in which she discusses the book's critical
reception and situates the book's arguments in the context of
recent interpretations of Machiavelli's thought.
"A close and often brilliant exegesis of Machiavelli's
writings."--"The American Political Science Review"
Being concerned with representation, this book is about an idea, a
concept, a word. It is primarily a conceptual analysis, not a
historical study of the way in which representative government has
evolved, nor yet an empirical investigation of the behavior of
contemporary representatives or the expectations voters have about
them. Yet, although the book is about a word, it is not about mere
words, not merely about words. For the social philosopher, for the
social scientist, words are not "mere"; they are the tools of his
trade and a vital part of his subject matter. Since human beings
are not merely political animals but also language-using animals,
their behavior is shaped by their ideas. What they do and how they
do it depends upon how they see themselves and their world, and
this in turn depends upon the concepts through which they see.
Learning what "representation" means and learning how to represent
are intimately connected. But even beyond this, the social theorist
sees the world through a network of concepts. Our words define and
delimit our world in important ways, and this is particularly true
of the world of human and social things. For a zoologist may
capture a rare specimen and simply observe it; but who can capture
an instance of representation (or of power, or of interest)? Such
things, too, can be observed, but the observation always
presupposes at least a rudimentary conception of what
representation (or power, or interest) is, what counts as
representation, where it leaves off and some other phenomenon
begins. Questions about what representation is, or is like, are not
fully separable from the question of what "representation" means.
This book approaches the former questions by way of the latter.
This study seeks to resolve the paradox of Hannah Arendt's ideas;
that she intended her work to liberate and empower and to restore
our capacity for concerted political action whilst at the same time
developed a metaphor of "the social" as an alien, all consuming
monster appearing from outer space to gobble up human freedom.
Arendt blames it - not us - for our public paralysis and
depoliticization. The text traces Arendt's notion of "the social"
from her earliest writings to "The Human Condition" and beyond,
interpreting each work in its historical and personal context. The
answer considers language and rhetoric, psychology and gender,
authority and the nature of political theory itself. There are
repeated challenges on established interpretations of Arendt's
project, including the role in it of her teacher and lover Martin
Heidegger and her supposed neglect of economic concerns.
'[A] generous, careful and clearly argued book...[which] deserves a
very wide circulation, and could serve as the prototype for a whole
new genre of analysis in politically theory.'--Stephen E. Toulmin,
American Political Science Review
This study seeks to resolve the paradox of Hannah Arendt's ideas;
that she intended her work to liberate and empower and to restore
our capacity for concerted political action whilst at the same time
developed a metaphor of "the social" as an alien, all consuming
monster appearing from outer space to gobble up human freedom.
Arendt blames it - not us - for our public paralysis and
depoliticization. The text traces Arendt's notion of "the social"
from her earliest writings to "The Human Condition" and beyond,
interpreting each work in its historical and personal context. The
answer considers language and rhetoric, psychology and gender,
authority and the nature of political theory itself. There are
repeated challenges on established interpretations of Arendt's
project, including the role in it of her teacher and lover Martin
Heidegger and her supposed neglect of economic concerns.
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