An altogether new prince five centuries on: Bringing Machiavelli to bear on our present

TL;DRAbstract

Our situation demands a new encounter with Machiavelli, and this confrontation involves a simultaneous engagement with Machiavelli’s thought and our time. However, contrary to prevalent approaches, it is neither a merely textual or scholastic exegesis nor a ‘return’ to Machiavelli, but an attempt to put Machiavelli’s thought to work in our time, so as to try to take the measure of our situation and envisage possible effective interventions in it. Both aspects depend on a prior operation which consists in placing Machiavelli in its proper site: in the battlefront, confronting the grave problems we face. But this has direct consequences for us; it interpellates our own positioning and therefore questions the extent to which we desire to transform our situation or are attached to it.

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