Machiavelli in the Making is both a novel interpretation of the Florentine's work and a critical document for understanding influential French scholar and public intellectual Claude Lefort's later writings on democracy and totalitarianism. Lefort extricates Machiavelli's thought from the dominant interpretations of him as the founder of "objective" political science, which, having liberated itself from the religious and moralizing tendencies of medieval political reflection, attempts to arrive at a realistic discourse on the operations of raw power. Lefort ultimately finds that...
Machiavelli in the Making is both a novel interpretation of the Florentine's work and a critical document for understanding influential Fren...
Writing involves risks--the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader's prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must "clear a passage within the agitated world of passions," an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In "Writing: The Political Test, "France's leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which...
Writing involves risks--the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which ...
