Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy

by Edited by Paul A. Rahe

• ISBN13: 9780521851879
• ISBN10: 0521851874
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The significance of Machiavelli's political thinking for the development of modern republicanism is a matter of great controversy. In this volume, a distinguished team of political theorists and historians reassess the evidence, examining the character of Machiavelli's own republicanism and charting his influence on Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, David Hume, the Baron de Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. This work argues that while Machiavelli himself was not liberal, he did set the stage for the emergence of liberal republicanism in England. By the exponents of commercial society he provided the foundations for a moderation of commonwealth ideology and exercised considerable, if circumscribed, influence on the statesmen who founded the American Republic. Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy will be of great interest to political theorists, early modern historians, and students of the American political tradition.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Abbreviations and Brief Titles	xiii
Introduction: Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy	xix
Paul A. Rahe
Prologue: Machiavelli's Rapacious Republicanism	xxxi
Markus Fischer
PART I: THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTHMEN	1	(86)
1 Machiavelli in the English Revolution	9	(27)
Paul A. Rahe
2 The Philosophy of Liberty: Locke's Machiavellian Teaching	36	(22)
Margaret Michelle Barnes Smith
3 Muted and Manifest English Machiavellism: The Reconciliation of Machiavellian Republicanism with Liberalism in Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government and Trenchard's and Gordon's Cato's Letters	58	(36)
Vickie B. Sullivan
PART II: THE MODERATE ENLIGHTENMENT	87	(80)
4 Getting Our Bearings: Machiavelli and Hume	94	(27)
John W. Danford
5 The Machiavellian Spirit of Montesquieu's Liberal Republic	121	(22)
Paul Carrese
6 Benjamin Franklin's "Machiavellian" Civic Virtue	143	(27)
Steven Forde
PART III: AMERICAN FOUNDING	167	(112)
7 The American Prince? George Washington's Anti-Machiavellian Moment	170	(19)
Matthew Spalding
8 John Adams's Machiavellian Moment	189	(19)
C. Bradley Thompson
9 Thomas Jefferson's Machiavellian Political Science	208	(21)
Paul A. Rahe
10 James Madison's Princes and Peoples	229	(25)
Gary Rosen
11 Was Alexander Hamilton a Machiavellian Statesman?	254	(25)
Karl-Friedrich Walling
Index	279