Machiavelli and the Modern State: The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, and the Extended Territorial Republic
Cambridge University Press, 2/11/2021
EAN 9781107693708, ISBN10: 1107693705
Paperback, 340 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
This book offers a significant reinterpretation of the history of republican political thought and of Niccolò Machiavelli's place within it. It locates Machiavelli's political thought within enduring debates about the proper size of republics. From the sixteenth century onward, as states grew larger, it was believed only monarchies could govern large territories effectively. Republicanism was a form of government relegated to urban city-states, anachronisms in the new age of the territorial state. For centuries, history and theory were in agreement: constructing an extended republic was as futile as trying to square the circle; but then James Madison devised a compound representative republic that enabled popular government to take on renewed life in the modern era. This work argues that Machiavelli had his own Madisonian impulse and deserves to be recognized as the first modern political theorist to envision the possibility of a republic with a large population extending over a broad territory.
Introduction
1. The Prince
2. The spaces of fortune
3. Necessity
the survival of the republic
4. Early modern and eighteenth-century transitions – from principality to republic and from colonies to extended republic
5. Envisioning an extended republic
Epilogue.