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Fortune is a woman: Gender and politics in the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli
"Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under, you've got to knock her around some."â Niccolò Machiavelli
Hanna Pitkin's provocative and enduring study of Machiavelli was the first to systematically place gender at the center of its exploration of his political thought. In this edition, Pitkin adds a new afterword, in which she discusses the book's critical reception and situates the book's arguments in the context of recent interpretations of Machiavelli's thought.
"A close and often brilliant exegesis of Machiavelli's writings."â The American Political Science Review
Hanna Pitkin's provocative and enduring study of Machiavelli was the first to systematically place gender at the center of its exploration of his political thought. In this edition, Pitkin adds a new afterword, in which she discusses the book's critical reception and situates the book's arguments in the context of recent interpretations of Machiavelli's thought.
"A close and often brilliant exegesis of Machiavelli's writings."â The American Political Science Review
363 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 18, 2017
The argument Hanna Fenichel Pitkin raises in her critique of Machiavelli is the concern over the way Machiavelli constructs the masculine and the feminine, the personal and the political in his works. The major preoccupation of Machiavelli in ‘The Prince’ is on the concept of individual autonomy. His work was revolutionary (considering the times it was written) in the sense that it merged the concept of the political with the personal and rescued politics from the realm of the metaphysical and established it in the activities of daily life.
Machiavelli who himself never experienced either direct political power nor belonged to the class in power was but a middle ranking official. Pitkin writes, “Personally as well as politically, practically as well as symbolically, Machiavelli has been unmanned”. The masculinity that is lacking in Machiavelli and that which he longs to achieve is the individual autonomy and integrity that one is unable to achieve because of the political power one lacks as a result of the existing social conditions/relations.
Antonio Gramsci reads Machiavelli as a revolutionary political thinker whose allegiance rested with the working class. Gramsci argues that ‘The Prince’ which seems to be written for those who were earlier in the unknown about the political realities, is written more or less as a party manifesto. For Gramsci, ‘The Prince’ is not an individual entity but an organism of a party with a “collective will”. In other words the modern prince is the communist party. In the process of achieving a collective will (disrupted and challenged for centuries by different power regimes) the prince tries to reform and create a new moral and intellectual reality. The logical, rational, calculating ‘masculinity’ of the Prince is addressed against the fervent passion (the feminine) of change the Prince and his people wishes to achieve. Machiavelli’s manhood is then of a different sort. As Pitkin writes, “The point is never just getting others to do what you want, but changing them, introducing new patterns of action and of relationship”.
Machiavelli who himself never experienced either direct political power nor belonged to the class in power was but a middle ranking official. Pitkin writes, “Personally as well as politically, practically as well as symbolically, Machiavelli has been unmanned”. The masculinity that is lacking in Machiavelli and that which he longs to achieve is the individual autonomy and integrity that one is unable to achieve because of the political power one lacks as a result of the existing social conditions/relations.
Antonio Gramsci reads Machiavelli as a revolutionary political thinker whose allegiance rested with the working class. Gramsci argues that ‘The Prince’ which seems to be written for those who were earlier in the unknown about the political realities, is written more or less as a party manifesto. For Gramsci, ‘The Prince’ is not an individual entity but an organism of a party with a “collective will”. In other words the modern prince is the communist party. In the process of achieving a collective will (disrupted and challenged for centuries by different power regimes) the prince tries to reform and create a new moral and intellectual reality. The logical, rational, calculating ‘masculinity’ of the Prince is addressed against the fervent passion (the feminine) of change the Prince and his people wishes to achieve. Machiavelli’s manhood is then of a different sort. As Pitkin writes, “The point is never just getting others to do what you want, but changing them, introducing new patterns of action and of relationship”.
November 17, 2015
LOL ohhhh Niccolo, how you enrage and enlighten me all at once, with your fascist and sexist and liberal ad contradictory ways.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews