The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made
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About this ebook
Constitutional scholar Philip Bobbitt turns his expert attention to the life and work of Niccolo Machiavelli, the sixteenth century political philosopher whose classic text The Prince remains one of the most important and controversial works of political theory ever written.
In The Garments of Court and Palace, Bobitt argues that the perception of Machiavelli’s Prince as a ruthless, immoral tyrant stems from mistranslations, political agendas, and readers who overlooked the philosopher’s earlier work, Discourses on Livy. He explains that Machiavelli was instead advocating for rulers to distinguish between their personal ethos and state governance.
Rather than a “mirror book” advising rulers, The Prince prophesied the end of the feudal era and the birth of the neoclassical state. Using both Renaissance examples and cases drawn from the current era, Bobbitt shows Machiavelli’s work is both profoundly moral and inherently constitutional, a turning point in our understanding of the relation between war, law, and the state.
Philip Bobbitt
Philip Bobbitt, is the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence at Columbia University and Senior Fellow at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. He has served as a senior official at the White House, the State Department and the National Security Council, in both Republican and Democratic administrations. He is a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy for Arts and Sciences and has written seminal works in constitutional theory, diplomatic history and social choice.The Shield of Achilles, published in 2002, was internationally acclaimed and was named a Book of the Year by the Economist, the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian.The Prince is his latest book.
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Reviews for The Garments of Court and Palace
8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Garments of Court and Palace poses an interesting challenge for me. It is essentially a review of Machiavelli’s The Prince. A 288 page review. How much more can one say? How does a reviewer review a review? Worse (or better yet), Bobbitt does in his review what readers of my reviews come to expect of me: a completely different take, with aspects and interpretations no other reviewer has caught, and which sometimes the author has missed, being mired in the trees of the forest.The discovery here would never have occurred to me. It is that The Prince is actually a study in the evolution of constitutional government, and not a recipe for oppression and subjugation of a people. Only someone steeped in constitutional law and philosophy would interpret it that way, but Bobbitt makes an absolutely commanding case for it. In fact, by massaging Machiavelli into this thesis, Bobbitt solves a number of contradictions and conundrums that reviews have used to criticize Machiavelli and diminish his accomplishment with his book, which by the way, he never called The Prince.In places, it is positively Talmudic in its incorporation of outside voices and critics. Commentators through the ages are shredded or vetted. He backs his premise thoroughly and completely, enlisting Machiavelli’s words despite centuries of them being interpreted in a completely different direction. It is fascinating.Millions of us (had to) read The Prince in high school. Our teachers drummed into us exactly what it was about, and all our appreciation of it was framed in that context. But it’s wrong. And that makes this book compelling, valuable, and important.I’m delighted to have come across it.