The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition


The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition by J. G. A. Pocock

J.G.A. Pocock explores how Machiavelli's revival of the republic caused a revival of Republican thought in Europe and led to the forming of a republic in revolutionary North America.




The Machiavellian Moment is a classic study of the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness of the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. J.G.A. Pocock suggests that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, and which he calls the "Machiavellian moment."


After examining this problem in the thought of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, Pocock turns to the revival of republican thought in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. He argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance. He relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in the thought of the eighteenth century.




More on Amazon » | More on Wikipedia »


$42.00 (new) | $25.30 (used)


Lists Appeared In
The 100 Best History Books of All Time