Upcoming Events

This seminar will offer participants the chance to reconnect with one of the ancient world’s most famous poems, Virgil’s classic epic on the adventures of Aeneas. The seminar’s participants are asked to read (or to refamiliarize themselves with) the epic in its entirety. But the seminar itself will focus largely (though not exclusively) on [...]

Professor Steven B. Smith, Alfred Cowles Professor of Government and Philosophy. Machiavelli’s Prince is the most famous political book ever written and yet it remains one of the most contested. Was he the evil “Machiavel” of Elizabethan literature, a teacher of the dark arts of political duplicity and deception, or was he prophet of political liberation and maybe even democracy as more recent interpreters have argued? Machiavelli is the writer who puts executive power at the center of his political thinking. In this seminar we will consider Machiavelli’s role in creating the idea of the modern executive and how this has entered American political debate.

Professor Steven B. Smith, Alfred Cowles Professor of Government and Philosophy. Machiavelli’s Prince is the most famous political book ever written and yet it remains one of the most contested. Was he the evil “Machiavel” of Elizabethan literature, a teacher of the dark arts of political duplicity and deception, or was he prophet of political liberation and maybe even democracy as more recent interpreters have argued? Machiavelli is the writer who puts executive power at the center of his political thinking. In this seminar we will consider Machiavelli’s role in creating the idea of the modern executive and how this has entered American political debate.