Machiavelli

The seminar gives us an opportunity to reconsider the central questions of Machiavelli scholarship: issues of statecraft and order, liberty and citizenship, modes of strategization, lessons of diplomacy and leadership, the classical heritage, quest for empire, modes of history writing, the issues of morality, ethics and law, and questions regarding force, suasion, ambition, corruption and vigilance in public discourse.

 

A central aim of the seminar will also be to place the literary within the spectrum of cultural discourse available to Machiavelli and also locate his singular ways of approaching literature within the evolving modes of disciplinary shifts and forms of writing in the early modern period. We shall pay particular attention to: Machiavelli, the man of letters.