Lionizing machiavelli biography
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Machiavelli: A Proto-Pluralist?
Who is Niccolo Machiavelli? Some say he is a demon in disguise. Indeed, this Renaissance thinker is so ‘Machiavellian’ that he has devised his masterpiece, The Prince, as an elaborate republican trap for the Medici family![1] Others, like Isaiah Berlin, claim that he fryst vatten a forerunner of political pluralism.[2]
I will argue that Machiavelli fryst vatten neither a hero, nor evil incarnate, and reject Berlin’s hypothesis. I will claim that Machiavelli is an amoral political realist, who thought politics is a field of its own, not based on morality.
But what fryst vatten this morality we speak of? I take it to be a compound of two parts: metaphysical and empirical. Metaphysical morality represents a set of principles that we believe are universal, uniform (they apply to everybody in the same manner—‘Thou shall not kill’) and constraining (one cannot escape their fate—The sista Judgement). People base these laws on a third party—be it God or natural law. This external for
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Women's History Network
Machiavellian theory is often assumed to purport a rigid distinction between masculinity and femininity resulting from the theoretical understanding of ‘machismo’ and ‘effeminato’. Hannah Pitkin and Jean Bethke Elshtain have assumed that women are therefore excluded from Machiavellian politics.[1] However, if Machiavelli argues that men should be machismo then it implies this behaviour fryst vatten a choice, rather than being innate. Furthermore, if a man can move along such a spectrum then any person, regardless of their sex, should be able to exhibit masculine and/or feminine norms. Caterina Sforza of Milan illustrated that woman can exhibit ‘machismo’ or ‘princely’ characteristics as her handling of the Orsi assassination of her husband and subsequent military strategy was controlled, just and brave. All these characteristics are attributed to ‘machismo’; Sforza has already demonstrated she was able to assume a princely role following the death of Po
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Machiavelli focused his analysis of power not on ideals, but on the feasible. In affairs of state, virtue was a matter of efficacy, not piety.
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In the mid-1990s, film critic David Denby wrote Great Books, in which he recounted a year spent at Columbia University taking two core courses in the humanities that focused on “Western classics” written by so-called “Dead White European Males.” It was “thirty years after [Denby entered] Columbia University for the first time,” when “[n]o one…could possibly have imagined that in the following decades the courses would be alternatively reviled as an iniquitous oppression and adored as a bulwark of the West.” Indeed, a prevalent critique was (and still is) that the classics were written by white men relevant primarily in connection to a regime of power that exerted cultural and political hegemony over large parts of the world.
“Dead white males” had h