John P. McCormick - "The People’s Princes" - Daragh Grant, Julia Brown, Max Benjamin Smith

John P. McCormick will discuss The People's Princes: Machiavelli, Leadership, and Liberty. He will be joined in conversation by Daragh Grant, Julia Brown, and Max Benjamin Smith. A Q&A and signing will follow the conversation.

RSVP Here — please note that your RSVP is requested but not required. 

At the Co-op

About the book: For more than a decade, John P. McCormick has been at the forefront of a new wave of scholarship that reveals the anti-elitist and democratic commitments at the center of Niccolo Machiavelli’s political thought. In The People’s Princes, McCormick turns his attention to Machiavelli’s conception of virtuous leadership and Machiavelli’s views on the appropriate relationships among individual leaders, common citizens, and elites.

While most people think of Machiavelli as a cynical advisor of tyrants—a man who counseled leaders to aggrandize themselves, by any means necessary, at the expense of their subjects and citizens—The People’s Princes fundamentally challenges this understanding. Drawing from Machiavelli’s major political works a normative standard for leadership that emphasizes the mutually reinforcing relationship of civic leadership and popular government, McCormick delineates Machiavelli’s method of “political exemplarity” by analyzing in detail the Florentine’s case studies of leaders and their interactions with populaces throughout ancient and modern history.

McCormick argues that Machiavelli suggests that civic leaders should enhance their reputations by providing for their own eventual obsolescence; specifically, they should establish institutional means through which common citizens rule themselves more directly and substantively. The People’s Princes invites readers to consider Machiavelli anew, and also reflect on insights that remain relevant in the twenty-first century amidst growing concerns that political leaders are not accountable or responsive to popular majorities.

About the author: John P. McCormick is the Karl J. Weintraub Professor in political science and the college at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Reading Machiavelli, Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, and Machiavellian Democracy, among other books.

About the interlocutors: Daragh Grant is an Associate Senior Instructional Professor in the College and Co-Chair of the Classics of Social and Political Thought Core sequence at the University of Chicago. His intellectual interests include the history of colonialism and empire, the history of slavery, and the development of understandings of sovereignty and subjecthood from the sixteenth century to the present.

Julia Brown is Collegiate Assistant Professor of the Classics of Social and Political Thought sequence at the University of Chicago.

Max Benjamin Smith is an Assistant Instructional Professor of Political Science in MAPSS. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame and has a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago.