Machiavelli Redeemed: Retrieving His Humanist Perspectives on Equality, Power, and Glory

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Lehigh University Press, 1998 - 264 страница
"The true Machiavelli is not to be found in extremist interpretations. The fault for these misperceptions is partly his own: he spoke in provocative paradoxes to challenge sacred truths, and this makes it easy for observers to ignore the obvious. In this portrait, the obvious dominates our vision, and he emerges as a Renaissance humanist. Like all of us, Machiavelli was a flawed being with strains of greatness mixed with baser ingredients. But his political insights and recognition of the emergence of a new reality qualify him as a political genius. Neither devil nor saint, Machiavelli has languished too long in the Purgatory of the human imagination and deserves redemption."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Садржај

A Humanist Worldview
33
Humanism and Empiricism A World Open to Human Effort
35
Human Nature and Potentials
57
Corruption and Nobility Maximizing Human Potentials
59
Machiavellian Morals
81
Creating Our Moral Obligations
83
The End Justifies the Meansin Corruption
114
Obeying Laws under a Good Constitution
128
Why Freedom May Require Princes
143
Ambition Corruption and Nationalism
164
Economics Equality and Justice
175
Machiavellis Place in the History of Western Political Thought
193
Chronology of Events Shaping Machiavellis Thought
219
Notes
228
Bibliography
251
Index
259

Economics Society and Politics
141

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Страница 201 - But the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society.
Страница 200 - Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable ; that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties ; and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.
Страница 201 - If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.
Страница 125 - Therefore, a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist.
Страница 43 - ... how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation.
Страница 200 - By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
Страница 200 - The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.

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