What’s it about and why should people read it today? Erica Benner
To see it, though, you have to read between the lines and notice all the twists and turns and nuances. It’s deserved in the sense that when you read him quickly, especially in translation, it looks like he’s teaching you to be evil, to do whatever it takes to get and keep power, even if that means doing what people think is wrong. You can read our full conversation below.Įven by people who’ve never read him, Machiavelli’s known as the great teacher of amorality. “When you look at societies like America and Britain and various other liberal democracies,” she told me, “you see the kinds of cracks that Machiavelli warned about - and it ought to trouble us.” I spoke to her recently about Machiavelli’s legacy and what he might teach us about Trump and the decline of liberal democracies around the world. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts.Įrica Benner, a professor of political philosophy at Yale, writes about all of this in her new book Be Like the Fox: Machiavell i in His World. Machiavelli also had plenty to say about things that matter today. He was, in other words, giving both sides the handbook. He taught rulers how to govern more ruthlessly, yes - but at the same time, he also showed the ruled how they were being led.
But there’s more to Machiavelli than that.
Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, is widely viewed as an instruction manual for tyrants, and it kind of is. He was warning citizens of the 16th-century Republic of Florence not to be duped by cunning leaders. The infamous Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli wrote those words in 1526, near the end of his life. “I’d like to teach them the way to hell, so they can steer clear of it.”
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