Publishing the Prince [electronic resource] : history, reading, & the birth of political criticism / Jacob Soll.

ISBN:

9780472025282

Title:

Author:

Soll, Jacob, 1968-

Personal Author:

Soll, Jacob, 1968-

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 202 pages).

Series:

Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Contents:

Political theory as textual criticism -- How to teach kings to read history : humanist culture and the disenchantment of absolutist power -- Political power in the archives : from reason of state to critical history -- In the workshop of politics : Amelot de La Houssaye and the methods of unmasking Venice -- How to read a subversive : decoding reason of state of the self -- The Machiavellian reformation : critical technologies of reading and the culture of personal prudence -- An enlightened prince reads Machiavelli, and a philosophe publishes The prince.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Title Subject:

Principe (Machiavelli, Niccolò) (OCoLC)fst01356790

Subject Term:

Political science -- History.

Political science -- Philosophy.

Geographic Term:

Europe -- Intellectual life -- 18th century.

Europe -- Intellectual life -- 17th century.

France -- Intellectual life -- 18th century.

France -- Intellectual life -- 17th century.

Europe -- History -- 18th century.

Europe -- History -- 17th century.

Europe -- Vie intellectuelle -- 18e siècle.

Europe -- Vie intellectuelle -- 17e siècle.

Europe -- Histoire -- 18e siècle.

Europe -- Histoire -- 17e siècle.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2005

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
320.1 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread through later editions.

Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters.

Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski

"Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation."
---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead

"Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power."
---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment

"Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history."
---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley

"Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice."
---Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review

Author Notes

Jacob Soll is Professor of History and Accounting at the University of Southern California and the author of The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System. He is a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and a 2009 winner of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He is also co-editor of the series Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World, together with Ann Blair and Anthony Grafton.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

The intellectual, social, and political forces that contributed to the transition from 16th-century absolutism (monarchies) to the 18th-century Enlightenment (republics) have long been a source of scholarly debate. Intellectual historians focus on the role of ideas in that transformation, whereas social and political historians identify social, political, economic, and cultural events. Machiavelli's The Prince is usually portrayed by intellectual historians as a defense of absolutism. This book argues that the publication of the translation and commentary by Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaye (1634-1706) of The Prince actually contributed to the Enlightenment by introducing historical criticism into political discourse, which brought the "secret sphere of the state" into the "public sphere of criticism." This is certainly an important, well-written, and profusely documented piece of scholarship that will elevate the role played by translators and commentators in intellectual history. Its principal critics will be historians who argue that Soll places too much emphasis on elitist intellectual history at the expense of the more basic social and economic forces present in everyday life, which always play a foundational role in large-scale revolutions like the Enlightenment. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Interested undergraduates, graduate students, and specialists in early modern European history and political science; of interest to those in communications and library science. R. F. White College of Mount St. Joseph