List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations and brief titles; Introduction: Machiavelli's liberal republican legacy Paul A. Rahe; Prologue: Machiavelli's rapacious republicanism Markus Fischer; Part I. The English Commonwealthmen: 1. Machiavelli in the English revolution Paul A. Rahe; 2. The philosophy of liberty: Locke's Machiavellian teaching Margaret Michelle Barnes Smith; 3. Muted and manifest English Machiavellism: the reconciliation of Machiavellian republicanism with liberalism in Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government and Trenchard's and Gordon's Cato's Letters Vickie B. Sullivan; Part II. The Moderate Enlightenment: 4. Getting our bearings: Machiavelli and Hume John W. Danford; 5. The Machiavellian spirit of Montesquieu's liberal republic Paul Carrese; 6. Benjamin Franklin's 'Machiavellian' civic virtue Steven Forde; Part III. The American Founding: 7. The American prince? George Washington's anti-Machiavellian moment Matthew Spalding; 8. John Adam's Machiavellian moment C. Bradley Thompson; 9. Thomas Jefferson's Machiavellian political science Paul A. Rahe; 10. James Madison's princes and peoples Gary Rosen; 11. Was Alexander Hamilton a Machiavellian statesman? Karl-Friedrich Walling; Index.
This book examines the significance of Machiavelli's political thinking for the development of modern republicanism.
Paul A. Rahe is Jay P. Walker Professor of American History at the University of Tulsa. His first book, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (1992) was an alternative selection of the History Book Club and was reissued in a three-volume paperback edition by the University of North Carolina Press in 1994. He co-edited Montesquieu's Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of Laws (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and has published chapters in numerous other edited works as well as articles in such journals as The American Journal of Philology, The American Historical Review, The Review of Politics, The Journal of the Historical Society, The American Spectator, and The Wilson Quarterly, among others. He is the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and various other research fellowships.
"This outstanding collection of essays examines the very important question of how Machiavelli's work influenced modern political thought and practice. Its excellent contributors consider a wide variety of issues in their several ways, making a powerful contribution to our understanding of the subject." Donald Kagan, Yale University "This important volume is the best and most accessible source for the 'Straussian' perspective on Machiavelli's influence over modern political thought. It suggests how Machiavelli's 'lowering' of classical moral-political standards (by supplanting the good, moderation and justice with necessity, appetite, and domination) was absorbed and transmitted during the English Commonwealth, Scottish Enlightenment and American Founding. Since the volume heralds Machiavelli's decisive break with Aristotelian and Ciceronian republicanism, it will assume a prominent place alongside Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1990), which posited the opposite, 'Cambridge School,' view of Machiavelli as a faithful conduit of civic republicanism into modernity. While the real Machiavelli very likely corresponds with neither of these two diametrically opposed interpretations, Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy is undoubtedly a major statement in this vibrant debate." John P. McCormick, University of Chicago "This deeply thought-provoking collection of original essays constitutes a major enrichment of our understanding of the sources and grounding of liberal republicanism. Machiavelli's subtle, complex, and manifold influence on our civic tradition has never before been explored in such range and depth." Thomas L. Pangle, University of Texas, Austin "This book is destined to takes its place among a small but distinguished shelf of works dealing with the role of Machiavelli in fashioning the world of Anglo-American republicanism. As such, it will garner readers for years to come. It will be of special interest to those wishing to understand the true, as opposed to the alleged, influence of Machiavelli on the generation of the American founders." Steven B. Smith, Yale University "Rahe and his collaborators attempt to supply a reading of the Machiavellian 'legacy' or tradition different from the one pioneered by J.G.A. Pocock some decades ago. They start from a different understanding of Machiavelli , explained subtly and intelligently in a lead-off essay by Markus Fischer, and end up seeing the Machiavellian tradition in richer and more modernist terms than Pocock did. Among other things, they avoid Pocock's untenable distinction between an antique Machiavellian republicanism and a modernist liberalism, a dichotomy which their treatment of Machiavelli's successors renders quite incredible. The volume, moreover, manages to combine the strengths of a single-authored book with those of a collection. The authors of the individual essays are expert in their subject, yet the collection as a whole has much of the unity of theme and manner of treatment one might expect in a single-authored book. Many of the individual essays are gems and the whole works as a book." Michael Zuckert, University of Notre Dame "I would strongly recommend this volume to all scholars who are interested in Machiavelli's influence on the evolution of that peculiar species of liberal republicanism that continues to survive and thrive in the United States." - Perspectives on Politics, John Langton, Westminster College
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