by Claude Lefort
translated by Michael B. Smith
Northwestern University Press, 2011
eISBN: 978-0-8101-6618-9 | Paper: 978-0-8101-2438-7 | Cloth: 978-0-8101-2437-0
Library of Congress Classification JC143.M4L413 2011
Dewey Decimal Classification 320.01

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ABOUT THIS BOOK

Machiavelli in the Making is both a novel interpretation of the Florentine’s work and a critical document for understanding influential French scholar and public intellectual Claude Lefort’s later writings on democracy and totalitarianism. Lefort extricates Machiavelli’s thought from the dominant interpretations of him as the founder of “objective” political science, which, having liberated itself from the religious and moralizing tendencies of medieval political reflection, attempts to arrive at a realistic discourse on the operations of raw power. Lefort ultimately finds that Machiavelli’s discourse opens the “place of the political” which had previously been occupied by theology and morality.