30 June 2023: A new textbook—Rethinking Political Thinkers—was just published by Oxford University Press, and I wrote the chapter on Machiavelli. The book is edited by by Manjeet Ramgotra and Simon Choat. It seeks to provide readers with a broader perspective on the history of political thought; and it situates political theorists in the contexts of several axes of power and domination, with special attention to gender, race, class, and imperialism.
27 September 2022: I have a forthcoming article in the next issue of Polity: “A Government of Creditors: Machiavelli on Genoa, the Bank of San Giorgio, and the Financial Oligarchy.”
In this piece, I address a problem in Machiavelli’s political theory, namely the relation between credit, finance, and political power. There are few places in Machiavelli’s work where he writes explicitly about these issues, but one of them is chapter 29 of book 8 of the Florentine Histories. There, Machiavelli heaps praise on a curious institution: the Bank of Saint George (Casa di San Giorgio). A creditor association and also the oldest chartered bank in the world, San Giorgio owned Genoa’s public debt. In return, the creditor association exercised a striking degree of fiscal, judicial, political, and even military power.
The political power of creditors is often regarded as a distinctive feature of the contemporary neoliberal era and a source of much of its discontent. But the history of Genoa shows that the relation between credit and political power has a much longer trajectory, and it is one on which Machiavelli commented.
So if Machiavelli was a committed republican–why did he offer such a glowing portrayal on what is an undeniably oligarchic institution that ran the city of Genoa in the fifteenth century? This is the question my article asks, and to address it, I combine a textual analysis with a deep-dive into early modern fiscal policy and taxation.
May 31, 2020: Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence won the 2020 C.B. Macpherson Prize of the Canadian Political Science Association
September 1, 2019: I am on sabbatical in Berlin, affiliated with Rahel Jaeggi’s Lehrstuhl für praktische Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie at Humboldt University and with the Center for the Humanities and Social Change, the home of Critical Theory in Berlin.
August 1, 2019: My article, “Machiavelli and the Rape of Lucretia” is out in the most recent issue of History of Political Thought. Here is the abstract:
“The rape and suicide of Lucretia is one of the most prominent motifs in early Roman historiography. A prelude to the revolution that overthrew the Tarquins and transformed Rome into a republic, the episode was narrated and examined by Roman historians, medieval philosophersand Renaissance humanists. Unlike his Roman and Renaissance sources, Machiavelli downplays the rape and suicide, denying the causal role in the revolution that his predecessors had routinely attributed to it. This dismissal of Lucretia’s rape and suicide is surprising both in view of the importance Machiavelli accords to public spectacles of violence in founding political institutions and because the case of Lucretia appears to corroborate his persistent warning to princes to abstain from sexually assaulting their subject women. This article examines the reasons behind Machiavelli’s sceptical attitude towards Lucretia and argues that the refusal to extol Lucretia as a republican hero stems from his rejection of a central ethical premise and rhetorical trope of republicanism: the idea that sexual virtue is a synecdoche for political virtue.”
August 1, 2019: At this year’s annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence will be awarded the Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award.
May 24, 2019: The first reviews of Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence are out. Elizabeth Frazer reviewed the book for Contemporary Political Theory and Michelle Clarke and I engaged in a Critical Dialogue in the most recent issue of Perspectives on Politics. Here’s Clarke’s review of my book; my reply; my review of her book; and her reply. I am enormously grateful to both reviewers for all their work.
September 18, 2018: My book, Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence, is out! It is available in hardback, paperback, and as an ebook from Cambridge University Press.
Our co-edited volume on governmentality and security, Gouvernementalität und Sicherheit (Transcript Verlag, 2008) is now available in open-access.
June 29, 2016: My article The Siege of Gaza: Spatial Violence, Humanitarian Strategies, and the Biopolitics of Punishment [behind paywall] is now available from Constellations.