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Why did Machiavelli write the Prince - and why did religious and political authorities find it so threatening? Five hundred years on, this book tries to answer these questions.
In the first detailed, chapter-by-chapter reading of the Prince in any language, Erica Benner shows that the book is a masterpiece of ironic writing. Machiavelli's style is deliberately ambiguous: he often seems to say one thing, but gives readers clues that point toward a very different message. Beyond its 'Machiavellian' surface, the Prince has a surprisingly moral purpose. It teaches readers how to recognize hidden dangers in political conduct that merely appears great or praiseworthy - and to mistrust promises of easy solutions to political problems.
This highly engaging new interpretation helps readers to see beyond the Prince's deceptive first appearances. Benner sets out Machiavelli's main ironic techniques at the outset, especially his coded use of words to signal praise or blame. Once readers become familiar with these codes, they will find it easier to grasp the Prince's surreptitiously pro-republican message - and its powerful critique of charismatic one-man rule and imperial politics.
- Sales Rank: #1425592 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-26
- Released on: 2016-01-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.00" h x .70" w x 9.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
Review
"In this powerful and provocative re-reading, Erica Benner, the author of Machiavelli's Ethics, boldly challenges conventional wisdom concerning Machiavelli's purposes in The Prince by revealing his artful and subtle use, informed by ancient philosophical techniques, of irony and dissimulation to make the text mean other than what it seems to say. Benner's stimulating reinterpretation is a 'must read' that will compel you to rethink everything you thought you knew about The Prince." --John Najemy, Professor of History, Cornell University
"This is a carefully constructed, chapter by chapter analysis of Machiavelli's Prince that will be the interpretation to beat for the next generation of scholars. Where criticism customarily distinguishes what Machiavelli is doing in the Prince from his Discourses, Benner's appreciation of Machiavelli's mastery of irony allows her to present them as woven wholly from the same cloth. The result is a deeply informed, innovative and thoroughly republican reading of Machiavelli's notorious handbook for tyrants." --Mark Philp, Professor of History and Politics, Department of History, University of Warwick
"Erica Benner's Machiavelli's Prince: A New Reading thoroughly lives up to its title. No other work before has so comprehensively interrogated the structure, rhetoric and sources of Machiavelli's infamous 'little book.' In particular, Benner draws upon the individual figures, classical and contemporary, invoked by the Florentine to shine new light on the ultimate purposes of Machiavelli's lessons. Moreover, Benner rigorously interrogates Machiavelli's use of irony to highlight his argumentative strategy in a novel way. Benner's work serves as a must-read during this 500th anniversary of the composition of Il Principe, and will continue to be required reading for many years to come." --John McCormick, Professor, Political Science Department, University of Chicago
"For Benner, Machiavelli's problematic passages have a purpose. They are the visible peaks of an iceberg of substantial ethical thought, intended to alert the reader to a thoroughgoing
moralizing irony that characterized all of Machiavelli's writing." -- William J. Connel, The Review of Politics
About the Author
Erica Benner is Fellow in Ethics and Political philosophy at Yale University. She previously taught at Oxford University and the London School of Economics. She is the author of Really Existing Nationalisms (OUP 1995), Machiavelli's Ethics (PUP 2009), and many publications in the ethics of nationalism and self-determination.
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How Machiavellian Was Machiavelli's "The Prince?"
By Wayne Lusvardi
Finally, someone, namely Erica Benner, has written a mature, nuanced, and contextual reading of Niccolo Machiavelli's classic book The Prince. Her reading of The Prince is devoid of the American pop depiction of the book as only an advice handbook of how to do evil. According to Benner's reading, Machiavelli posed his book as an advice manual in order to persuade princes to not rely only on one-man rule, which he called "principalities". Rather, Machiavelli's expressed intent in the very opening pages of The Prince was to differentiate and advocate the creation of a "republic" that diffused power by a council form of government and the rule of law.
Benner's reading states the obvious that is unobvious to the casual reader or those wanting to find in The Prince a classical example of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters or the disguised anti-semitic book The Protcols of the Elders of Zion.
Before Machiavelli wrote The Prince, he had just been released from prison by the Medici Family that had come back into power in the City State of Florence in a coup that ousted Girolamo Savonarola, who was leader of Florence from 1494 to 1498. Machiavelli had served as sort of Secretary of State of Florence under the Savonarola regime. His book was an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Medici's to hopefully win back his old job, or at least serve as their foreign affairs and military adviser.
How would you write a new business plan to a prior ruthless boss who had been fired under prior management and now was hired back to run a company under new management after you had also been fired under the recent past management? Might you write an advice manual on how to undertake devious marketing strategies while at the same time trying to persuade the new boss to hire you back and set up a more democratic work place and politically stable leadership? This is the sort of situation that Benner describes in her book. Only in Machiavelli's era, leaders weren't voted out of office and bosses weren't fired. Leaders like Savonarola were burned at the stake in the public square and their sycophants were put in prison and tortured on the rack.
As Benner points out, Machiavelli was a highly successful playwright far before he was ever a political advisor. He was accustomed to writing in specific genres: satires, comedies, farces, and ironic plays were his forte. As a statesman, Machiavelli also had to write communiqués and dispatches that might be intercepted that had to be impregnated with covert codes.
What Benner does is give us a taxonomy or classification of Machiavelli's ironic techniques and a set of coded words he used to communicate and persuade. That alone is worth the price of the book. But Benner goes much further and provides a chapter-by-chapter interpretation, or hermeneutic, of the entirety of Machiavelli's The Prince as a book of irony and dissimulation. Benner defines irony as a literature technique of contrasting "Appearance and Reality."
Irony, she says, is used when it is dangerous to express opposing political views openly. Irony is "teasing" and a "game" used by Machiavelli to communicate to those who had tortured him on the rack in prison just before he wrote The Prince. Irony cannot ever be interpreted literally. For those fundamentalists, whether sacred or secular, who want to read The Prince literally they will miss the entire subtlety and deeper meaning of The Prince. Benner's book offers a skeleton key to unlock Machiavelli's meaning of the book and exposes any preconceived notions about it.
Make no mistake The Prince is a skillful work of political deception and persuasion. But not in the way most American readers have been made to believe or have wanted to believe despite glaring evidence to the contrary. This is perhaps why Machiavelli's The Prince is a book about doing bad things but communicated in a way to persuade tyrants to do good things.
Benner quotes a letter Machiavelli wrote to his friend Francesco Guicciardini about how far he could express his true opinions:
"Here in the county I have been applying myself...to writing the history...and I would pay ten soldi - but no more - to have you by my side so that I might show you where I am, because, since I am about to come to certain details, I would need to learn from you whether or not I am being too offensive in my exaggerating or understating of the facts (le cose). Nevertheless, I shall continue to seek advice from myself, and I shall try to do my best to arrange it so that - still telling the truth - no one will have anything to complain about."
Benner calls this form of speech and writing "dissimulation," meaning concealment of one's thoughts, feelings, or character.
This is why Machiavelli writes that traditional distinctions of moral and immoral are of no help in guiding a prince or in understanding his book. For those who seek a sort of Sunday school understanding of The Prince they probably will happily be disappointed. After all, how would you teach an ironic and dissimulating book such as The Prince to children or adolescents? You would just have to say it is an evil book. But if you wanted to write to adults you would want to get beyond adolescent understandings of the book and of a preconceived perfect world.
I once emailed the author after reading her excellent prior book "Machiavelli's Ethics" (yes, Machiavelli had an ethical system based on realpolitik) that she should write a book on Machiavelli's library of the books that he cited in The Prince (the works of Xenophon, Sallust, Polybius, Livy and Plutarch). I'm sure this was not the stimulus for her current tour de force. But perhaps it planted a seed that has gone way beyond a suggestion from a mere commenter to her prior book.
Machiavelli was Machiavellian, meaning cunning and manipulative, toward princes and much less so toward the people (the popolo) and the plebians. Machiavelli's The Prince is Machiavellianism of the highest order but it was meant to out deceive the most tyrannical and ruthless leaders.
This doesn't deny that rulers have used The Prince for evil actions. Other books have also been re-interpreted for nefarious purposes. Christopher B. Krebs' "A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich" describes how Hitler and the Nazis appropriated Tacitus's book as a "bible" for the revival of an antisemitic Germany. The anti-semitic "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" has been recirculated for centuries. Benjamin Wilker's book "10 Books That Screwed Up the World" places The Prince at the top of the list.
Little known to Wilker and others, is that the Republicanism Machiavelli championed in The Prince eventually was the model for the structure of the American republican system of constitutional government used by its founders. It would be more accurate to say that Machiavelli's The Prince has been used for good and bad in the past 500 years since it was written. But to use it for good one has to start with an accurate reading and understanding of the book. And that is what Erica Benner has done. Thank you Dr. Benner. The world is indebted to your fine reading of Machiavelli's timeless classic "The Prince."
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