To transform a conference into a book is a heroic task that always deserves to be praised. The editors of Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict, David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati and Camila Vergara, deserve a special commendation for their Introduction that reconstructs the main interpretive trends since the celebrations of 1869, the fifth centenary of Machiavelli’s birth (1469). At that time, Italian scholars, inspired by the still vivid memories of the Risorgimento, acclaimed Niccolo Machiavelli as a fine citizen “imbued with a strong patriotism, albeit consciously inscribed within an ideal horizon that was European, not nationalist.” The editors stress that, for the…
Machiavelli, the Great Alternative to Plato: A Conversation with Catherine Zuckert
A portrait of Italian philosopher, writer and politician Niccolo Machiavelli (Florence, 1469-1527) by Antonio Maria Crespi. Professor Catherine Zuckert is one of America’s preeminent political theorists. The Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame University has written award-winning books including Natural Right and the American Imagination (1990) and Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (2009). Zuckert has edited the Review of Politics for 13 years, and she has contributed scholarly articles to other journals like the Review of Metaphysics, History of Political Thought, and the Journal of the International Plato Symposium.
Zuckert’s new book, Machiavelli’s Politics, is just out from the University of Chicago Press. For this first installment of Conversations, a new feature at Law and Liberty, Associate Editor Lauren Weiner recently put questions to Professor Zuckert about it. Here is our Q and A.
The Machiavelli We Deserve
Statue of Niccolo Machiavelli outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.The Quotable Machiavelli is a wry title for Maurizio Viroli’s new collection. Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) immediately became one of the most widely quoted handbooks on political prudence in Western history. The Prince’s twenty-six chapters organize pithy sayings and short lessons under titles such as “What a Prince Should Do Regarding the Military” and “Of Avoiding Contempt and Hatred.” The busy prince faces no more than one hundred pages of text in the typical edition of The Prince. Every reader of Machiavelli’s signal volume keeps memorable verses in mind, or can find them after a brief perusal of the volume.
Grasping at the Straws of Public Virtù
In response to: He Tried to Warn Us
Friedrich Hayek (1899 - 1992) with a class of students at the London School of Economics, 1948. (Photo by Paul Popper/Getty Images)Friedrich Hayek did not predict Donald Trump, and President Trump is not the central planner of Professor Hayek’s dark imaginings. The question is whether Hayek’s analysis of the central planner can help explain the Trump phenomenon. The claim of my February Liberty Forum essay was that it could. In assessing that claim, I have the privilege of thoughtful replies from distinguished interlocutors representing a broad and diverse range of perspectives. I am grateful for their incisive responses. Tom Palmer’s challenge to the thesis begins with a critique that it is unparsimonious: Simpler explanations, he observes, will do for Trump, including the…
More Responses
The Road to Serfdom’s publication was one of the intellectual and political turning points of the 20th century. The bloom was starting to come off the rose of socialism and Hayek explained why—in clear, crisp, and precise language and in a spirit of respect for those who had believed or still believed in socialism. I’m…
Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. Trump’s America is not Big Brother’s Oceania or Airstrip One. (Hillary Clinton’s America would not have been, either.) But however far Orwell’s dystopia is from becoming our reality, it’s good for Americans to reacquaint themselves with his warnings.…
In many key respects, F.A. Hayek’s fears that the modern social-democratic welfare state would lead to totalitarianism did not come to pass. Even soft despotism seems only to have been partially realized. However, rereading The Road to Serfdom in the opening days of Donald Trump’s presidency offers an uncomfortable glimpse of where our national politics…
Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois: A Conversation with Steven Smith
This discussion with Steven Smith, author of Modernity and Its Discontents, explores what it means to be modern and why an age that has produced so many gains and advances has also produced so many counter-enlightenments and apocalyptic responses. To love the modern age well, do we need to love it moderately?
The Sounds of Allied Evasion
Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr. speaks about the U.S. and Arab air strikes in Syria against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)Ruling class pundits make much of the fact that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates, Bahrain, and Jordan have joined the Obama administration’s campaign of bombing the Islamic State. Also noted by the same talking heads is that some 5,000 so-called moderate Syrians are being trained to fight against Islamic State next year. Most admit the obvious: no one can imagine how these air strikes—few, against structures, mostly when these are unoccupied—can inconvenience the Islamic State seriously, never mind destroy. Yes, Sunni Arab counties have decided to take military action against the Sunni Arab Islamic State. But what is consequential about actions that have illusory consequences? What explains our government’s pretense that an alliance to accomplish un-consequential things is itself consequential?
Remembrance of Things Past
How persistent is memory, politically speaking? Machiavelli argued that “the memory of ancient liberty,” possessed by republican peoples, is tenacious, presenting an obstacle for a ruler bent on tyrannizing those long used to self-government. In chapter 5 of The Prince, he counseled harsh measures like wiping out the entire population as the only sure mode to exterminate the remembrance of things past. Instead of Carthage-scale eradication, the society in The Giver has found a new mode—seemingly kinder and gentler—by which to neutralize memory, thereby creating a pliant citizenry.
Friday Roundup, November 8th
Comes now a discussion of an originalism that can sing! This month's Liberty Forum considers Mike Rappaport and John McGinnis's new book, Originalism and the Good Constitution. Rappaport and McGinnis offer their thoughts in a lead essay with responses from Richard Epstein and Ralph Rossum. The current Liberty Law Talk is with Mark Helprin on his latest novel In Sunlight and In Shadow. We also talk politics, war, and what's right and wrong in Mad Men. Walking The Wire and learning criminal procedure and constitutional law in the process. Tony Freyer and Andy Morriss: The structure and strategy of the Caymans as an…
