No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Machiavelli and the Contestable Surface: Zuckert and Strauss
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 April 2018
Abstract
Both Zuckert and Strauss take the “surface” of Machiavelli's work as the necessary starting point for their interpretations. Zuckert differs from Strauss, however, with respect to what she takes the surface to be. She focuses more attentively on the literary character of the work, as written or literary, and so is led to a different series of observations and emphases in her interpretation of Machiavelli.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- The Review of Politics , Volume 80 , Special Issue 2: Honoring Catherine H. Zuckert , Spring 2018 , pp. 283 - 288
- Copyright
- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2018
References
1 Parenthetical references are indicated as follows: TM = Strauss, Leo, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar; HPP = Strauss, Leo, “Niccolo Machiavelli,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MP = Zuckert, Catherine, Machiavelli's Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Benardete, Seth, The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 409Google Scholar.
3 As Strauss states at numerous points, then, throughout this study of Machiavelli: “Let us return once more to the beginning” (TM 54). Or “To gain some clarity, let us return once more to the surface, to the beginning of the beginning” (TM 17). “But let us return once more to the surface” (TM 27). See TM 24. The surface relates to reverence or “more than ordinary care”: “He certainly expects his reader to read Livy with more than ordinary care or, to return to the surface, with profound reverence” (TM 122).
4 For a pellucid dissipation of this obscurity, see Lynch, Christopher, “The Prudence of Philosophic Politics: Leo Strauss's ‘Introduction’ to Thoughts on Machiavelli,” in Principle and Prudence in Western Political Thought, ed. Lynch, Christopher and Marks, Jonathan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), 319–38Google Scholar.
5 Thus, “In The Prince Machiavelli announces the change he is advocating in the moral standards used to evaluate leaders and their governments more clearly than the basis of those opinions in popular opinion and sentiments” (MP 107).
6 Once again, this procedure is not strictly speaking absent from Strauss's interpretation: “At any rate, in studying the general teaching of the Prince we must never lose sight of the particular situation in which Lorenzo finds himself. We must understand the general in light of the particular” (TM 62–63).