Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy

• Published in: Canadian Journal of History Vol. 42; no. 3; pp. 591 - 593
• Main Author: Kingston, Rebecca E
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Saskatoon University of Toronto Press 22.12.2007
• Subjects: English; Fraud; History; Ideology; Language history; Political power; Politics; Traditions; United States > US
• ISSN: 0008-4107

For Markus Fischer, who provides a prologue to the collection, as well as the authors of chapters on Machiavelli's influences on early modern political thought, Machiavelli is an original modern thinker whose work is best characterized as a repudiation of the classical ideal through a defense of fear, fraud, and calculated uses of political violence as laudable means to maintain political power as well as security as a prescribed end of political life. The volume is structured to suggest that this tradition underwent at least three main adaptations, namely in the English republican era of the 1640s, during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and in the American founding, and at each stage a core set of ideas was taken up but modified in various ways by a key set of political thinkers and political actors.