This item has FREE SHIPPING to any address in NZ

NOTE: Item will ship from our Australian warehouse. A handling time of 2-4 business days applies for all orders. Delivery will then take 3-7 working days.

A Great and Wretched City: Promise and Failure in Machiavelli's Florentine Political Thought

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780674725461 Author(s): Mark Jurdjevic Format: Hardcover Year: 2014 Publisher: Harvard University Press Dimensions: 163 x 245 x 28 (w x l x h) Pages: 295 Series: I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History Series Number: 13

BUYER OFFERS: We are a retail store with set pricing and unfortunately we can't fulfil any requests to sell items for less than the listed price.

Description: Like many inhabitants of booming metropolises, Machiavelli alternated between love and hate for his native city. He often wrote scathing remarks about Florentine political myopia, corruption, and servitude, but also wrote about Florence with pride, patriotism, and confident hope of better times. Despite the alternating tones of sarcasm and despair he used to describe Florentine affairs, Machiavelli provided a stubbornly persistent sense that his city had all the materials and potential necessary for a wholesale, triumphant, and epochal political renewal. As he memorably put it, Florence was 'truly a great and wretched city.'Mark Jurdjevic focuses on the Florentine dimension of Machiavelli's political thought, revealing new aspects of his republican convictions. Through The Prince, Discourses, correspondence, and, most substantially, Florentine Histories, Jurdjevic examines Machiavelli's political career and relationships to the republic and the Medici. He shows that significant and as yet unrecognized aspects of Machiavelli's political thought were distinctly Florentine in inspiration, content, and purpose. From a new perspective and armed with new arguments, A Great and Wretched City reengages the venerable debate about Machiavelli's relationship to Renaissance republicanism. Dispelling