When he gave his first political work the title The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Hobbes signalled an agenda to revise and incorporate continental Roman and Natural Law traditions for use in Great Britain, and from first to last he remained faithful to this agenda, which it took his entire corpus to complete. The success of his project is registered in the impact Hobbes had upon the continental legal system in turn, specific aspects of his theory, as for instance (...) the right to punish, entering the European civil code through Pufendorf, and remaining to this day. This is a topic of considerable importance at a time at which the UK is considering scrapping the European Union, with all the attendant the legal ramifications. But strangely, despite some acknowledgement of Hobbes’s contribution to European civil law, and specifically the German civil code, the larger legal context for his thought has not thus far been systematically addressed. -/- Key words: Hobbes, civil law, common law, jurisprudence, ‘artificial reason’, natural law, sovereignty,. (shrink)

Machiavelli is the first modern political thinker who pays great attention to the magistracy of dictatorship. “Dictatorial authority,” as he puts it, is fundamental to the survival and prosperity of republics: It is the magistracy, the “ordinary mode,” to which they turn to deal with “extraordinary accidents,” political and military emergencies. Machiavelli's gaze is cast both on the Ancient and the Modern world: Although he concentrates on the Roman magistracy, he also pays attention to magistracies of the modern world that (...) were in some way similar, such as the Council of the Ten in the Republic of Venice. In my paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the essential points of Machiavelli's discussion on dictatorship; in the concluding remarks, I will briefly tackle the more general question of the relationship between politics and law in his work as a whole. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article examines the place of Machiavelli’sPrincein the history of ethics and the history of leadership philosophy. Close scrutiny indicates that Machiavelli advances an ethical system for leadership that involves uprooting corruption and establishing rule of law. He draws on history and current affairs in order to obtain a realistic understanding of human behavior that forms a basis for a consequentialist ethics. While he claims a good leader might do bad things, this is in situations where necessity constrains a prince (...) to choosing the “least bad” course of action. Furthermore, Machiavelli advocates winning the goodwill of followers through leadership as a source of power. Machiavelli’s leadership ethics has a sophistication not fully enjoyed by his reputation in management scholarship. He would not score as especially “Machiavellian” on the Mach IV. Many of his ideas contain seeds for theories that are now considered important for leadership today. (shrink)

Is Machiavelli an Epicurean in his political and religious thought? Recent scholarship has identified him as the foremost representative of Epicureanism in Renaissance Florence. In particular, his incomplete epic poem, The Ass, is read as an expression of his adherence to Lucretian naturalism. This article offers a new reading of the poem and shows that its teaching reveals that Machiavelli is closer to a Platonic variant of classical naturalism linked with the idea of a natural virtue modelled on the lives (...) of animals which has been lost through human civilization and progress and to which it is necessary to return periodically. The article focuses on the poem’s claim that civil religion is a necessary component for good laws that maintain a free republic and argues that Machiavelli offers a poetic reflection on the role of Numa as the founder of Roman religion on the model of a neo-Pythagorean philosophical religion that was instrumental in the rise of constitutional government. More than Lucretius’s critique of religion, Machiavelli’s poem can be read as an extended reflection on Plutarch’s texts – above all, his Life of Numa. (shrink)

This essay examines the two means by which Machiavelli thought republics could address the political problem of predatory socio-economic elites: Healthy republics, he proposes explicitly, should consistently check the “insolence of the nobles” by establishing constitutional offices like the Roman tribunes of the plebeians; corrupt republics, he suggests more subtly, should completely eliminate overweening oligarchs via the violent actions of a tyrannical individual. Roman-styled tribunes, wielding veto, legislative and accusatory authority, contain the oppressive behavior of socio-economic elites during normal republican (...) circumstances. By contrast, having overthrown a republic grown corrupt through oligarchic encroachment on the commonweal, Machiavelli suggests that Greek-styled tyrants lay the foundation for a more robust—that is, more egalitarian and martial—republic down the road by eliminating elites entirely and by instituting economic redistribution and military reforms. (shrink)