Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli
440 pages | 6 x 9 | 2004
ISBN 978-0-271-02388-5 | cloth: $105.00 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-02389-2 | paper: $44.00 sh
Re-Reading the Canon Series
Diplomat, bureaucrat, and practical politician, Niccolò Machiavelli served as Second Secretary to the Republic of Florence in the early sixteenth century and became the first major political thinker in the western tradition to make a complete break with the Aristotelian model of politics as a branch of ethics. While The Prince is his most famous work, grounding his reputation as the progenitor of “Realpolitik,” his many other writings have contributed to a more complex and broader image of the man and his political thought. Thus in recent years Machiavelli has come to be seen as a republican and a proto-liberal by some mainstream political theorists, and as an obfuscator of traditional values and ideologies, including gender roles, by feminists and non-feminists alike.
The contributors to this volume, grappling with questions about the position of women in political society, investigate whether or not Machiavelli was truly a misogynist and a proto-fascist or instead a proto-feminist and a democratic republican. Among the themes they explore are the implications of such dichotomies as Fortuna and virtù, the public and the private, nature and reason, ends and means, functionality and the common good, as well as the importance of the military to the socialization of citizens, particularly women, to civic life, and the social construction of gender. Some of the contributors even consider the possibility that Machiavelli’s approach to ethics provides a special insight that feminists, and women generally, might explore to their benefit.
Besides the editor, the contributors are Wendy Brown, Jane Jaquette, Donald McIntosh, Melissa Matthes, Vesna Marcina, Martin Morris, Cary Nederman, Andrea Nicki, Mary O'Brien, Hanna Pitkin, Arlene Saxonhouse, John Shin, R. Claire Snyder, and Catherine Zuckert.
Maria J. Falco is Professor Emerita of Political Science at DePauw University. She has published five previous books, including Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (Penn State, 1996).
Contents
Preface by Nancy Tuana
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Modernity of Machiavelli
Donald McIntosh
2 Meditations on Machiavelli
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
3 Niccolò Machiavelli: Women as Men, Men as Women, and the Ambiguity of Sex
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
4 Renaissance Italy: Machiavelli
Wendy Brown
5 The Root of the Mandrake: Machiavelli and Manliness
Mary O’Brien
6 Fortune Is a Woman—But So Is Prudence: Machiavelli’s Clizia
Catherine H. Zuckert
7 Machiavelli and the Citizenship of Civic Practices
R. Claire Snyder
8 The Seriously Comedic, or Why Machiavelli’s Lucrezia is not Livy’s Virtuous Roman
Melissa M. Matthes
9 Rhetoric, Violence, and Gender in Machiavelli
Cary J. Nederman and Martin Morris
10 Beyond Virtù
John Juncholl Shin
11 Machiavelli, Civic Virtue, and Gender
Vesna Marcina
12 Rethinking Machiavelli: Feminism and Citizenship
Jane S. Jaquette
13 Machiavelli and Feminist Ethics
Andrea Nicki
Appendix A - Summary of La Mandragola
Appendix B - Summary of Clizia
Index