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Historians of political thought have argued that the real Machiavelli is the republican thinker and theorist of civic virtù. Machiavellian Rhetoric argues in contrast that Renaissance readers were right to see Machiavelli as a Machiavel, a figure of force and fraud, rhetorical cunning and deception. Taking the rhetorical Machiavel as a point of departure, Victoria Kahn argues that this figure is not simply the result of a naïve misreading of Machiavelli but is attuned to the rhetorical dimension of his political theory in a way that later thematic readings of Machiavelli are not. Her aim is to provide a revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism, particularly in England: one that sees the Machiavel and the republican as equally valid--and related--readings of Machiavelli's work.


In this revised history, Machiavelli offers a rhetoric for dealing with the realm of de facto political power, rather than a political theory with a coherent thematic content; and Renaissance Machiavellism includes a variety of rhetorically sophisticated appreciations and appropriations of Machiavelli's own rhetorical approach to politics. Part I offers readings of The Prince, The Discourses, and Counter-Reformation responses to Machiavelli. Part II discusses the reception of Machiavelli in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England. Part III focuses on Milton, especially Areopagitica, Comus, and Paradise Lost.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction(p. 3)
• 1 the Prince(p. 18)
• 2 the Discourses(p. 44)
• 3 Rhetoric and Reason of State: Botero's Reading of Machiavelli(p. 60)
• 4 Reading Machiavelli, 1550-1640(p. 93)
• 5 Machiavellian Debates, 1530-1660(p. 132)
• 6 a Rhetoric of Indifference(p. 171)
• 6 Virtue and Virtù in Comus(p. 185)
• 8 Machiavellian Rhetoric in Paradise Lost(p. 209)
• Coda Rhetoric and the Critique of Ideology(p. 237)
• Appendix a Brief Note on Rhetoric and Republicanism in the Historiography of the Italian Renaissance(p. 243)
• Notes(p. 249)
• Index(p. 311)

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CHOICE Review

The reader is informed at the outset that the book is about how Machiavelli was read in the Renaissance, how he offered Renaissance writers a rhetoric for thinking about politics. Kahn conceives this to be an alternate reading of Machiavelli, opposed to his representation by historians of political thought (chiefly J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner) as the republican thinker and theorist of civic virt`u. She contends that "the Machiavel," i.e., the unscrupulous schemer, exponent of fraud and force, is the real Machiavelli, although these qualities are not unredeemed by more moral and humane aspirations. According to Kahn recent interpretations of Machiavelli have created an artificial bifurcation between his political thought and rhetorical practice. In proof of her thesis she provides a rhetorical analysis first of works of Machiavelli and then of representative readers of him on the continent and in England up to the time of Milton. Some interesting and little read texts are introduced, such as the Ragion di stato (1599, tr. 1956) of Giovanni Botero, a writer of the Counter-Reformation, and political treatises of Stephen Gardiner. Somehow the thesis does not seem to be as new as it is made out to be, and the style can be rather tortuous. The author displays a thorough familiarity with relevant work on the subject, but unfortunately does not provide a bibliography. C. Fantazzi; University of Windsor

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Victoria Kahn is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Cornell) and co-editor, with Albert Ascoli, of Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature (Cornell).