Machiavelli: A Life Beyond Ideology

(Hardback)

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Niccol di Bernardo Machiavelli is not only one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance, an outstanding author and statesman, but indisputably one of its most influential political theorists, whose fundamental contributions to ideas of political power - as well as to the history of modern drama - remain astonishingly pertinent. His adventurous life led him to notable heights as a diplomat and reformer of the Florentine military, with his replacement of mercenaries by a citizen-militia. His fall, exile and eventual rehabilitation followed as briskly as his rise.

Unlike many innovative thinkers about politics, he developed his radical theories of treachery and social transformation, here explored in terms of their originality, in an atmosphere of violence. Based on his experience of government, his insights led to a shift from understanding statehood, war and society as forms of finitude and stasis to those of process.

All this unfolds in Paul Oppenheimer's compelling recreation of Machiavelli's life as he actually lived it.

Reviews

There is a good analysis of [Machiavelli's] writings... this is a very scholarly volume... Oppenheimer has painted a vivid portrait of the instability of medieval Florence, which had its parallels in the upheavals of England under the reigns of Henry VIII and his children. The eight pages of black and white plates, mostly of contemporary images and documents, are well chosen. http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.phptitle=Machiavelli:_A_Life_Beyond_Ideology_by_Paul_Oppenheimer -- The Bookbag
The first scholarly biography of the Italian Renaissance statesman and political theorist for 30 years, Oppenheimer's book compellingly recreates the life of a man who remains relevant to current political thinking. -- The Big Issue in the North
What Oppenheimer has done, almost miraculously, is to create a biography that is in the strictest and most literary sense "Machiavellian" very much in the spirit and style of its subject. -- The Tablet
Oppenheimer is at his best discussing Machiavelli's reforms, and his drive to modernise a government cankered by archaic traditions, inefficiency and baffling levels of cronyism... It makes for a telling biography, one rooted in all the drama and noisy colour or Renaissance Florence. -- The Good Book Guide, Issue 259
Author's essay on his book appears in The Coffin Factory A profile of the magazine will appear in the Style section of this Sunday's New York Times. http://thecoffinfactory.com/machiavelli-just-now-by-paul-oppenheimer/
Reviewed in Iranian publication Garavi Gujarat, Vo. 44, No. 2163.
Reviewed in the Literary Review.

Author Bio

Paul Oppenheimer is a professor of Comparative Literature at The City College and The Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. He is the author of Rubens: A Portrait, Evil and the Demonic: A New Theory of Monstrous Behaviour and The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness and the Invention of the Sonnet.