De Grazia, Sebastian

Princeton. 1989. Princeton University Press. 1st American Edition. Plato Society' Stamp in Front,Otherwise Very Good in Slightly Discolored Dustjacket. 0691055386. Winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. 497 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration - After Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), 'Dante's Inferno XXII'. keywords: Biography Machiavelli Renaisance Italy History. FROM THE PUBLISHER - ‘Finally a book free of the interminable religious and idealistic bickerings over Machiavelli, and critically up-to-date in scholarship. An exhilarating work, restoring Machiavelli to us as his contemporaries probably knew him. The harvest of quotations alone supplies the reader with the best provisions for a journey into Machiavelli's texts.' -Sergio Bertelii, Editor of Machiavelli: Opera Omnia . . In this intellectual biography Sebastian de Grazia presents a new Machiavelli-in a way that gives an almost uncanny sense of the great Florentine thinker's presence. After telling the story of Machiavelli's childhood and the period of personal crisis that followed his imprisonment and torture, the book turns to The Prince. Thence- forth the facts of biography-Machiavelli's home, journeys, fears and joys, works, friends, and loves-never cease to weave in and out of the narrative as his ideas gather power and come together to form a unified vision of humankind and the world. Convinced that a good political leader or ‘prince new' would have to engage in acts of cruelty and bad faith, Machiavelli faces a predicament: how to justify this evil to prospective leaders themselves and to people at large. He cannot dispense with their fear of God's judgment, for he holds it to be essential to political community. MACHIAVELLI IN HELL offers a profound and skillful exploration of how he penetrated this difficulty. To do so, he had to work out a new statecraft, invent a new moral reasoning, and redimension heaven and hell. Drawing on all of Machiavelli's writings, from carnival songs to major political works, de Grazia bases the book on Machiavelli's own words. He uses his own translations of Machiavelli, including many passages never before translated into English. ‘This is the best work I have read on Machiavelli. It is unique in that it considers him explicitly as a moralist and moral philosopher, and it presents through this viewpoint a new and exciting reading of his work. The book achieves remarkable results of clarity and depth and, above all, offers a complete view of the figure of Machiavelli. The author has brilliantly interwoven philosophical-political analysis with biographical details.' - Rosario Villari, University of Rome . . ‘MACHIAVELLI IN HELL is the best-integrated and most thorough, searching treatment of Machiavelli I have encountered. De Grazia brings Machiavelli's experiences, personality, and milieu together with his political and literary writings to produce a convincing historical being with a consistent and unified vision of man and the world. De Grazia probes deeply into Machiavelli's language, its usages and resonances, and its relation to classical, Christian and Florentine tradition and finds the meanings appropriate to a consistent reading of the text.' - Donald Weinstein, University of Arizona. inventory #12968 ISBN: 0691055386.