Machiavelli and the orders of violence
- PDF / 89,859 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 8 Downloads / 209 Views
Machiavelli and the orders of violence Yves Winter Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018, xi+230pp., ISBN 978-1-108-44544-3 Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00311-5
Yves Winter makes a valuable contribution both to Machiavelli studies and to political theories of violence in this enjoyably readable, informative, and interesting book. It is clearly written and lively, so will be helpful for students, as well as offering an original interpretation to scholars and theorists. By ‘orders’ of violence Winter, following Machiavelli, understands formations and rules, institutions in the informal as well as the formal sense. The chapters are ordered thematically. Spectacle (chapter 1), force (2), cruelty (3), beginnings (4), institutions (5) and tumults (6) are all distinct formations of violence, central, in Winter’s interpretation, to Machiavelli’s theory of political power and state stability, and governed by social rules which are discernible by close readings of Machiavelli’s texts. These ‘orders’ and ‘modes’ of violence must be understood as internal and constitutive, not incidental, to Machiavelli’s princely and republican politics. Winter infers from this to a thesis about the concept of politics in political theory more generally. As the concluding short chapter succinctly shows and emphasises, political theory of all kinds has tended either to marginalise and pathologise, or to sanitise and disguise, the violent processes and interactions that are an abiding element in the processes of shaping constitutions and the competition for the power to govern. Constitutional political theory centres on authority, law, and justice, which are presented as if they were independent of the machines that pacify populations and competitors and that punish transgressors. Of course, critical political theorists have long sought to disavow such dematerialisation and disguise, and to unmask the violent techniques and energies at the heart of political power. In Winter’s analysis, Machiavelli is a key source for such radical theorists. But, simultaneously, he emphasises the ways in which Machiavelli’s accounts of statefounding and defence, constitution of political power, and political freedom, part company with late twentieth and twenty-first century unmaskings of the violence that underlies ostensibly non-violent categories like ‘the people’, and that seek to justify some violent actions and processes while condemning others. Ó 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Review
A central theme of Winter’s analysis is the disaggregation of Machiavelli’s concepts of violence. Winter emphasises Machiavelli’s Roman heritage here in the distinction between force (forza) and violence (violenza), where the latter has connotations of violation and injustice. Machiavelli’s originality, though, is in his relative emphasis not on violence but on the more shocking phenomenon of cruelty (crudelta`). Cruelty as a political practice trades on its
Data Loading...
