HIS 357Machiavelli-Power/Ldrshp/Gendr

Catalog

POWER, LEADERSHIP AND GENDER IN MACHIAVELLI AND HIS TIMES--This course will explore the relationship between power, leadership, and gender in the thought of the most famous and controversial political theorist in the Western tradition, Niccolò Machiavelli. Although Machiavelli is best known for the ideas that he expressed in The Prince (1513), for the rest of his life Machiavelli engaged in a constant process of rethinking and revising these ideas. We will examine how in the Discourses on Livy, the Art of War, the plays Mandragola and Clizia, his poetry and his personal correspondence with acquaintances and friends, Machiavelli reformulates his notions on the methods and limits of political power; of the forms of government and their relative merits; of social structures and the ways they condition individual action; and of the nature of political thought itself, especially how it is affected by assumptions about gender, family, and the realm of the private and erotic. Gender will be employed as the central category of analysis for our close readings of Machiavelli's works. Cross-listed with WS-357.