Search for your favourite author or book

Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli's Lifelong Quest for Freedom

ISBN 
9780141974859
Format 
Paperback
Recommended Price 
R275.00
Published 
April 2018
About the book: 
Niccolò Machiavelli lived in a fiercely competitive world, one where brute wealth, brazen liars and ruthless self-promoters seemed to carry off all the prizes and a new breed of leaders - super-rich dynasties like the Medici or military strongmen like Cesare Borgia - promised radical alternatives to the status quo. In the republic of Florence, Machiavelli and his contemporaries faced a choice: should they capitulate to these new princes, or fight to save the city's democratic freedoms?
 
In this book, Erica Benner follows Machiavelli's dramatic quest for political and human freedom through his own eyes. Far from the cynical henchman people think he was, Machiavelli emerges as his era's staunchest champion of liberty, a profound ethical thinker who refused to compromise his ideals to fit corrupt times. But he did sometimes have to mask his true convictions, becoming a great artist of fox-like dissimulation: a master of disguise in dangerous times.

Others also viewed

Can the Euro be saved? Should it be?Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz dismantles the...
'An absorbing book, beautifully told and with the writer fully in command of a huge body of...
‘An indispensable guide.’ Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn   ‘Tech...
The Royal Horticultural Society's definitive guide to propagating, nurturing, and designing...