Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation

320 Pages·2018·1.078 MB·English

by  Christopher Holman

MACHIAVELLI AND THE POLITICS
OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION
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CHRISTOPHER HOLMAN
Machiavelli and the Politics
of Democratic Innovation
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2018
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0393-2
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with
vegetable-based inks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Holman, Christopher, 1979–, author
Machiavelli and the politics of democratic innovation / Christopher J. Holman.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0393-2 (cloth)
1. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527 – Criticism and interpretation.
2. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527 – Political and social views.
3. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527. Principe. 4. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527.
Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. I. Title.

JC143.M4H65 2018 320.1 C2018-902598-0
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly
Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the fi nancial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Funded by the Financé par le
Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 3
Part One: Methodology
1 Machiavelli and the Constellative Mode
of Historical Appropriation 15
Part Two: Philosophical Anthropology
2 The Contingency of Being: On Worldly and Human
Indetermination 43
3 Politics and the Human Essence: T he Prince as a Model
of Human Subjectivity 75
Part Three: Political Ontology
4 Ambition and the People: The Popular Form of
the Desire for Creation 131
5 Social Equality and the Contingent Being of the Great 185
6 Institutionalizing Ambitious Expression: The Republic
as the Self-Overcoming Regime 217
Works Cited 275
Index 301
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to the anonymous reviewers of earlier versions of this man-
uscript for their detailed critical commentary, which improved the fi nal
product immensely. I am grateful to the entire staff at the University of
Toronto Press involved in the production of this book for their contri-
butions, in particular Daniel Quinlan for providing his usual editorial
expertise throughout the entire publication process. James Leahy, fur-
thermore, provided comprehensive and detailed copy editing, greatly
improving the readability of the book.
Material from this book has been presented at various meetings of
the Western Political Science Association, the Canadian Political Sci-
ence Association, and the International Herbert Marcuse Society, as
well as the 2015 conference “Radical Democracy and Utopia” at the
University of Paris Diderot, and the 2014 workshop “Moral Revolu-
tions: Institutional and Ideational Dimensions” at Nanyang Techno-
logical University. The questions from many of the participants at these
meetings were helpful in clarifying certain issues for me, and orienting
the direction of the project.
Finally, my thanks to all of the usual friends, colleagues, and teach-
ers from York University, Stony Brook University, NTU, and elsewhere
with whom I have discussed Machiavelli and democratic theory over
the years.
Abbreviated versions of chapters 1 and 2 appeared earlier as “Machi-
avelli’s Constellative Use of History,” Theory and Event 19, no. 2 (2016),
and “Machiavelli’s Philosophical Anthropology,” European Legacy 21,
no. 8 (2016): 769–90.
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MACHIAVELLI AND THE POLITICS
OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION