Machiavellian Democracy

Machiavellian Democracy PDF Author: John P. McCormick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139494961
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Intensifying economic and political inequality poses a dangerous threat to the liberty of democratic citizens. Mounting evidence suggests that economic power, not popular will, determines public policy, and that elections consistently fail to keep public officials accountable to the people. McCormick confronts this dire situation through a dramatic reinterpretation of Niccolò Machiavelli's political thought. Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today. It reassesses one of the central figures in the Western political canon and decisively intervenes into current debates over institutional design and democratic reform. McCormick proposes a citizen body that excludes socioeconomic and political elites and grants randomly selected common people significant veto, legislative and censure authority within government and over public officials.

Machiavellian Democracy

Machiavellian Democracy PDF Author: John P. McCormick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139494961
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
Intensifying economic and political inequality poses a dangerous threat to the liberty of democratic citizens. Mounting evidence suggests that economic power, not popular will, determines public policy, and that elections consistently fail to keep public officials accountable to the people. McCormick confronts this dire situation through a dramatic reinterpretation of Niccolò Machiavelli's political thought. Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today. It reassesses one of the central figures in the Western political canon and decisively intervenes into current debates over institutional design and democratic reform. McCormick proposes a citizen body that excludes socioeconomic and political elites and grants randomly selected common people significant veto, legislative and censure authority within government and over public officials.

Machiavellian Democracy

Machiavellian Democracy PDF Author: John P. McCormick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521823906
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Intensifying economic and political inequality poses a dangerous threat to the liberty of democratic citizens. Mounting evidence suggests that economic power, not popular will, determines public policy, and that elections consistently fail to keep public officials accountable to the people. John P. McCormick confronts this dire situation through a dramatic reinterpretation of Niccol- Machiavelli's political thought. Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today. Machiavellian Democracy fundamentally reassesses one of the central figures in the Western political canon and decisively intervenes into current debates over institutional design and democratic reform. Inspired by Machiavelli's thoughts on economic class, political accountability and popular empowerment, McCormick proposes a citizen body that excludes socioeconomic and political elites and grants randomly selected common people significant veto, legislative, and censure authority within government and over public officials.

Democracy Against the State

Democracy Against the State PDF Author: Miguel Abensour
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745650090
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In the "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” the young Marx elliptically alludes to a "true democracy" whose advent would go hand in hand with the disappearance of the state. Miguel Abensour’s rigorous interpretation of this seminal text reveals an “unknown Marx” who undermines the identification of democracy with the state and defends a historically occluded form of politics. True democracy does not entail the political and economic power of the state, but it does not dream of a post-political society either. On the contrary, the battle of democracy is waged by a demos that invents a public sphere of permanent struggles, a politics that counters political bureaucracy and representation. Democracy is "won" by a people forewarned that any dissolution of the political realm in its independence, any subordination to the state, is tantamount to annihilating the site for gaining and regaining a genuinely human existence. In this explicitly heterodox reading of Marx, Miguel Abensour proposes a theory of "insurgent" democracy that makes political liberty synonymous with a living critique of domination.

Reading Machiavelli

Reading Machiavelli PDF Author: John P. McCormick
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069121154X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A new reading of Machiavelli’s major works that demonstrates how he has been previously misread To what extent was Niccolò Machiavelli a “Machiavellian”? Was he an amoral adviser of tyranny or a stalwart partisan of liberty? A neutral technician of power politics or a devout Italian patriot? A reviver of pagan virtue or initiator of modern nihilism? Reading Machiavelli answers these questions through original interpretations of Machiavelli’s three major political works—The Prince, Discourses, and Florentine Histories—and demonstrates that a radically democratic populism seeded the Florentine’s scandalous writings. John McCormick challenges the misguided understandings of Machiavelli set forth by prominent thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and representatives of the Straussian and Cambridge schools, and he emphasizes the fundamental, often unacknowledged elements of a vibrant Machiavellian politics. Advancing fresh readings of Machiavelli’s work, this book presents a new outlook on how politics should be conceptualized and practiced.

Nietzsche's Machiavellian Politics

Nietzsche's Machiavellian Politics PDF Author: D. Dombowsky
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230000657
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
In this exciting new study, Don Dombowsky proposes that the foundation of Nietzsche's political thought is the aristocratic liberal critique of democratic society. But he claims that Nietzsche radicalizes this critique through a Machiavellian conversion, based on a reading of The Prince , adapting Machiavellian virtù (the shaping capacity of the legislator), and immoralism (the techniques applied in political rule), and that, consequently, Nietzsche is better understood in relation to the political ideology of the neo-Machiavellian elite theorists of his own generation.

The Machiavellians

The Machiavellians PDF Author: James Burnham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781839013959
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
James Burnham describes in details the history of Machiavelli and the modern Machiavellians who have been using his ideas to influence modern political liberty.

The Prince

The Prince PDF Author: Niccolo Machiavelli
Publisher: Wyatt North Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 164798145X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Written in the 16th century, The Prince remains one of the most influential books on political theory. Its author, Niccolo Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat and political theorist, and is considered the father of modern political thought.

Beasts and Gods

Beasts and Gods PDF Author: Roslyn Fuller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1783605448
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Democracy does not deliver on the things we have assumed are its natural outcomes. This, coupled with a growing sense of malaise in both new and established democracies forms the basis to the assertion made by some, that these are not democracies at all. Through considerable, impressive empirical analysis of a variety of voting methods, across twenty different nations, Roslyn Fuller presents the data that makes this contention indisputable. Proving that the party which forms the government rarely receives the majority of the popular vote, that electoral systems regularly produce manufactured majorities and that the better funded side invariably wins such contests in both elections and referenda, Fuller's findings challenge the most fundamental elements of both national politics and broader society. Beast and Gods argues for a return to democracy as perceived by the ancient Athenians. Boldly arguing for the necessity of the Aristotelian assumption that citizens are agents whose wishes and aims can be attained through participation in politics, and through an examination of what “goods” are provided by democracy, Fuller offers a powerful challenge to the contemporary liberal view that there are no "goods" in politics, only individual citizens seeking to fulfil their particular interests.

Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy

Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy PDF Author: Paul A. Rahe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139448331
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
The significance of Machiavelli's political thinking for the development of modern republicanism is a matter of great controversy. In this volume, a distinguished team of political theorists and historians reassess the evidence, examining the character of Machiavelli's own republicanism and charting his influence on Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, David Hume, the Baron de Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. This work argues that while Machiavelli himself was not liberal, he did set the stage for the emergence of liberal republicanism in England. By the exponents of commercial society he provided the foundations for a moderation of commonwealth ideology and exercised considerable, if circumscribed, influence on the statesmen who founded the American Republic. Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy will be of great interest to political theorists, early modern historians, and students of the American political tradition.

Machiavelli in America

Machiavelli in America PDF Author: Thomas Block
Publisher: Algora Publishing
ISBN: 1628940689
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Machiavelli advised us that people are so mean, small and selfish that they will only act under necessity, so the successful prince must force the population, through whatever means necessary, to follow his dictates. This book traces the influence of the Florentine thinker on American politics, from the Founders (c. 1770s) through today's rough-and-tumble political panorama. Machiavelli's ideas have been re-interpreted internationally as 'real-politik.' He proposed that the 'ends justify the means,' and that any manner of fraud, violence or corruption must be utilized in attaining and retaining power. He maintained that the most powerful form of fraud was the appearance of religiosity and said that the successful prince must hold no art higher than that of war. In this disturbing, erudite and highly readable book, America is shown to be a surprising example of Machiavellian politics, utilizing all of the post-modern methods of information distribution and "legal" fraud and corruption. Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, George W. Bush, the Supreme Court's 'Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission' (2010) and the Super PACs it spawned, the massive amounts of money ("power's master key"), the intermingling of the language of religion and war, and the 90% negative advertising of the 2012 Presidential campaign (channeling Machiavelli's dictum that the adversary must be "assassinated," though in contemporary America by character assassination) and even Barack Obama's Machiavellian machinations are looked at in light of the Renaissance political philosopher's ideas. The last section of the book offers a response to this with a specific, implementable program that will begin to devolve the power of American democracy back to the people.