Reading Politics with Machiavelli, Schmidt Jr Ronald J

This book is meant to suggest one way of thinking past and out of the current moment, and it does so by looking to a perhaps unlikely figure: Niccolo Machiavelli. The book presents Machiavelli as an anachronistic thinker -- a thinker who, deprived of his political community and public identity
during his exile from Florence, originated a new approach to democratic theory and practice. In particular he immersed himself in the writings of ancient thinkers and looked to them as models for understanding contemporary problems of corruption, conspiracy, and torture. This books main
contribution is a methodological one: it argues that the power in Machiavellis work derived from this sort of anachronistic reading, which went against the grain of Renaissance thought. In turn it shows that if we imitate Machiavellis interpretive method in reading The Prince and Discourses of
Livy, we can find in them solutions to the neoliberal problems Brown warns about.