An Imagined Debate with Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli was a diplomat, political thinker, historian and playwright in the Florentine Republic. Best known for The Prince, he helped shape modern political thought.

Earlier political philosophy often began with how a society ought to be governed. Machiavelli made a different question urgent: how does politics work in practice?

His name has become shorthand for the pursuit of power by any means. The republican side of his work is also worth reading. It takes seriously the place of ordinary people and their liberty in political life, an argument that influenced later republican thought.

Jeong Ui-seok’s Debate Class with Machiavelli

We cannot sit down with a thinker who was born in the fifteenth century. Jeong builds an imagined dialogue by bringing his questions to Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.

The chapters take the shape of an exchange between the two, which explains the title.

There is a familiar idea that reading a book is a conversation with its author. Jeong reads the Discourses as a conversation with Machiavelli. Reading Jeong, I find myself having another conversation in turn.

Power, Position and Competition

The book asks what power does to the choices people have. It looks at people with power and people without it, then asks how someone in either position might act today.

Jeong reads the Discourses with one eye on where we stand. Strategies available to people with an established stake in a system are different from those open to people outside it.

Much of the book turns on what changes when you move from one of those positions to the other.

Examples from Rome and from the Present

Jeong quotes the Discourses often and also brings in contemporary events, including the subprime mortgage crisis and Brexit.

The examples are a way to think about how much room people have to act where they are. Jeong shows how to compare past cases with the present and work toward a response suited to the circumstances.

Room for a Life of One’s Own

The book also insists that each life has value of its own and that other people should have room to live it without coercion or interference.

The imagined conversation is the book’s most distinctive feature. It gives Jeong a way to bring older arguments to bear on modern events and to ask what choices are available to the people caught up in them.

Book Information

Debate Class with Machiavelli

Author

Jeong Ui-seok

Publication date

20 April 2017

ISBN13

9788987390055

View book at Kyobo Book Centre

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