The Garments of Court and Palace
Machiavelli and the World That He Made
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
A “serious and thoughtful” interpretation of Machiavelli’s life and thought—and its relevance today—from the acclaimed author of Terror and Consent (The Times, London).
Constitutional scholar Philip Bobbitt turns his expert attention to the life and work of Niccolo Machiavelli, the sixteenth century political philosopher whose classic text The Prince remains one of the most important and controversial works of political theory ever written.
In The Garments of Court and Palace, Bobitt argues that the perception of Machiavelli’s Prince as a ruthless, immoral tyrant stems from mistranslations, political agendas, and readers who overlooked the philosopher’s earlier work, Discourses on Livy. He explains that Machiavelli was instead advocating for rulers to distinguish between their personal ethos and state governance.
Rather than a “mirror book” advising rulers, The Prince prophesied the end of the feudal era and the birth of the neoclassical state. Using both Renaissance examples and cases drawn from the current era, Bobbitt shows Machiavelli’s work is both profoundly moral and inherently constitutional, a turning point in our understanding of the relation between war, law, and the state.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this work of historical, philosophical, and political examination, Bobbitt (Terror and Consent) plugs Niccolo Machiavelli's controversial masterpiece, The Prince, into its proper context, one that Bobbitt asserts has gone overlooked by most scholars: constitutionalism. He spices up even his layout of the most popular misconceptions regarding Machiavelli with the impartible thrill of tumbling these dusty not to mention contradictory assumptions. An historical overview not only contextualizes major events in Machiavelli's life within Florence's shifting feudal environment but also highlights how influential a political leader he remained until his fall. Correcting misapprehensions, Bobbitt establishes Machiavelli as a political oracle of sorts who perceived the soft boil of a new governmental order at a time when most couldn't see beyond the boundaries of feudalism. In debunking larger myths, he upsets smaller inaccuracies as well, unraveling misunderstandings regarding both the true translation of Machiavelli's "virt " and the political forecaster's role as "apostle of modernity". While Bobbitt frequently segues from the feudal to the modern era to properly illuminate a concepts, latter sections of his book see him focus intensely on the present, and on how Machiavellian means of viewing an agitated state order may prove especially helpful now.
