Northrop Frye and Niccolò Machiavelli

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Robert D. Denham

This essay seeks to answer the questions, how can we explain the numerous references in Frye’s notebooks and elsewhere to the political theory in Machiavelli’s The Prince? What in Machiavelli’s thought did Frye believe deserved our attention, and why? Toward this end the essay examines the Renaissance idea of the Machiavellian villain, the concept of virtù, and the idea of hypocrisy.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfin Falah Fahrezy ◽  
Rizal Al Hamid

The Umayyad dynasty was an Islamic caliphate regime after the khulafa urrasydin which managed to maintain its power for 90 years before being overthrown by the Abbasids. This dynasty is famous for its political stability from the beginning of his reign to a systematized public administration and military. Nevertheless, this dynasty raised pros and cons in terms of morality which were considered to deviate from Islamic teachings at least during the political revolution and post-Caliph Mu'awiyah. The author tries to examine the practice of such government using the political theory of Niccolo Machiavelli in which there are also thoughts about the ethics of power. This study tries to answer several questions, namely what is the ideal government practice in the book "Il Principe" by Niccolo Machiavelli? and whether the practice of Umayyad dynasty government can be said to be ideal in terms of administration and ethics of power in Machiavelli's perspective? This research is a qualitative research with primary sources in the form of historical literature about the Umayyad Dynasty and the books by Machiavelli mainly on "Il Principe". This study shows that in making political policies, for the sake of government stability, moral values do not need to be considered except in a pragmatic context. The stability of the state is also influenced by the ability and luck of the leader in managing the government. This study shows that the practice of the Umayyad dynasty has a correlation with the main goal of Machiavelli's political theory, namely state stability.


1956 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 75-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Hexter

Somewhere between 1510 and 1520, Niccolò Machiavelli composed the Discorsi sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio. The second chapter of that work contains what for Machiavelli is a rather elaborate theoretical disquisition. It deals with such arcane matters as the origin of civil polities, the beginnings of law, the forms of political rule, and the succession that those forms naturally follow in their historical sequence. Never before and never again did Machiavelli concern himself in so concentrated a way with the higher and more ghostly issues of political theory. Never before and never again was Machiavelli literally so un-Machiavellian. In Chapter 2 of Book I of the Discorsi he was literally un-Machiavellian in the simple sense that he cribbed most of that chapter without acknowledgement from another writer. In so doing he initiated a minor literary mystery—the Mystery of the Missing Translation or the Puzzle of Polybius vi.


Author(s):  
Quentin Skinner

Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction considers the life and impact of the Florentine Renaissance humanist, diplomat, historian, and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli taught that political leaders must be prepared to do evil so that good may come of it, and his name has been a byword ever since for duplicity and immorality. This VSI considers whether his sinister reputation is deserved, focusing on his three major political works, The Prince, the Discourses, and The Florentine Histories. This new edition discusses how Machiavelli developed his neo-classical political theory through engaging in continual dialogue with the ancient Roman moralists and historians, especially Cicero and Livy.


Author(s):  
Alan Ryan

This chapter examines Isaiah Berlin's political theory, with a particular focus on his argument for a kind of liberalism suited to a pluralist culture such as our own. It also asks why Berlin did not confront more directly the difficulty that all commentators have addressed: that pluralism is not particularly the natural ally of liberalism. After some biographical background, the chapter moves to Berlin as a historian of ideas, a student of distinctively Russian social and political themes, and a defender of a distinctively pluralist, anti-utopian liberalism. The division is artificial in the extreme, and the issues raised in each area of discussion are inextricably intertwined. The not particularly liberal Niccolo Machiavelli is invoked in aid of a liberal moral pluralism, as is the much more liberal Russian Alexander Herzen.


1995 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Rahe

On the face of it, there would seem to be little evidence suggesting that the political science of Thomas Jefferson owed much, if anything, to the speculation of Niccolò Machiavelli. The Virginian appears to have mentioned the Florentine by name but once, and he did so in a manner conveying his disdain for the author of The Prince. And yet, as I try to show in this article, Jefferson's commitment to limited government, his advocacy of a politics of distrust, his eager embrace of a species of populism, his ultimate understanding of the executive power, and the intention guiding the comprehensive legislative program that he devised for Virginia make sense only when understood in terms of the new science of republican politics articulated by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy.


Author(s):  
Stella Fletcher

Francesco Guicciardini (b. 1483–d. 1540) was a Florentine patrician and papal administrator who wrote numerous works on the history and government of his native city and recorded the era of the Italian Wars in his monumental Storia d’Italia. His writing was inspired not by abstract principles but by his own practical experience, whether as Florentine orator in Spain from 1512, or in the service of the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII, as governor of Modena and Reggio from 1516, as commissary general of the papal army (1521), as president of the Romagna (1524), and as a lieutenant general (1526). The sack of Rome by imperial forces in 1527 destroyed the political system in which he was so prominent a player. He was too close to the Medici to be trusted by the leaders of Florence’s “Last Republic,” from which he was exiled in 1530. His career never fully recovered and he devoted his final years to writing the Storia d’Italia. None of his works were published during his lifetime, meaning that his literary reputation has been an entirely posthumous creation, but his place in the pantheon of Italian Renaissance literary figures is now so secure that his name is readily linked with that of his friend and neighbor in Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli. How and when Guicciardini’s works were published, together with their subsequent impact, is the unifying theme running through this bibliography, which aims to guide the student through the maze of texts and toward the most appropriate editions, commentaries, and analyses. Reference Works acts as a prelude to the main biographical section, Lives and Letters. Guicciardini’s oeuvre is introduced in Collected Works, and then explored in the order in which it became available to the reading public, beginning with the Storia d’Italia, the Ricordi, and works on Florentine History and Politics, all three sections being subdivided into “Texts” and “Analysis.” Minor Works and Correspondence reflect an apparently insatiable desire to publish every word Guicciardini wrote, down to his marginal notes. The resulting body of work is so extensive as to put it well beyond the needs of most students, for whose convenience volumes of Extracts have been identified. Thereafter, the reader is guided through those Journals and Collections of Papers (whether Single-authored or Multi-authored) of greatest relevance for this subject. Guicciardini’s Reputation and Impact is apparent throughout the bibliography, but is nevertheless highlighted in its concluding section.


1995 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Walling

Many important scholars have seen significant similarities in the political thought of Alexander Hamilton and Niccolo Machiavelli, but the only two references to Machiavelli in Hamilton's papers suggest deep misgivings about the kinds of politics we now call Machiavellian. This essay attempts to clarify Hamilton's ambiguous relation to the sage Florentine by focussing on the problem of waging war effectively and remaining free at the same time in the thought of both statesmen. Although Hamilton understood at least as well as Machiavelli the necessity of dynamic virtù in princes and civic virtue in free citizens, he sought to establish a new order of the ages, a republican empire, which would supply an effectual moral alternative to the genuine Machiavellian regimes of his day.


1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 555-576
Author(s):  
George Feaver

AbstractOne way of seeing Machiavelli is as a literary artist who appreciated, in his figurative portraiture of princes, that an effective likeness will always reveal to the attentive eye, something of the prince, of his audience, and of the portraitist himself. And since politics is an activity in which, on his understanding, there is no absolute truth, but only multifarious effectual truths; a comprehensive depiction of political life must embrace irreconcilable points of view as diverse as those of individual princes, the people, and “each man.” The observer's task thus demanded perspectival powers that would test the fabled eyes of Argus. This article sets out the evidence supporting such an interpretation in individual texts of Machiavelli's works, while suggesting how each contributes to the completed literary artistry of his brilliantly evoked world of pictures in words of political aspiration, failure and achievement.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Langer

A comparison between The Teaching for Merikare and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il Principe produces some astonishing results. While Machiavelli’s treatise is generally thought to be representative of the dawn of modern Western political realism, its essential properties are already present in Merikare. This includes the firm belief in strong authority, the fallibility of man, the need to appease the masses, and, if necessary, the demand to repress any developing threat to the power of the elite. In terms of the history of political thought Merikare is placed between the works of the moral realism of Greek philosophers like Plato and the political realism of Thucydides and Machiavelli. With the latter being heavily influenced by ancient authors, questions regarding the genesis of Greek political thought can be asked. It may well be that Greek political thought was, at least indirectly, influenced by Egyptian political thought.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Mishurin ◽  

In the article, I try to refute an old and widespread superstition according to which the new political philosophy created by Niccolo Machiavelli breaks with classical political philosophy by taking a novel position toward the political; that is, that classics were idle “idealists” while Machiavelli is a coldblooded “realist”. To do that, I compare the most explicit part of The Prince (chapters XIV-XIX) with the end of the fifth book of Aristotle’s Politics and attempt to show that in the most pivotal chapters of his most famous work, the Florentine, in fact, often borrows Aristotle’s advice on how to preserve a tyrannical rule.


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