Machiavelli: The Prince

Description

This new edition of the acclaimed translation of Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince - revised for the first time after thirty years - includes a rewritten and extended introduction by Quentin Skinner. Niccolo Machiavelli is arguably the most famous and controversial figure in the history of political thought. The Prince remains his best-known work, and throws down a challenge that subsequent writers on statecraft and political morality have found impossible to ignore. Quentin Skinner's introduction offers a lucid analysis of Machiavelli's text both as a response to the world of Florentine politics and as a critical engagement with the classical and Renaissance genre of advice-books for princes. This new edition also features an improved timeline of key events in Machiavelli's life, helping the reader place the work in the context of its time, in addition to an enlarged and fully updated bibliography.

Quentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University between 1974 and 1979 and Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a foreign member of many other national academies, including the Academia Europea, the American Academy and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. His scholarship, which is available in more than two dozen languages, has won him many awards, including the Wolfson History Prize, the Bielefeld Wissenschaftspreis and a Balzan Prize. He has been the recipient of honorary degrees from numerous leading universities, including Athens, Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. His two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1979), was listed by The Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the hundred most influential books published since World War II. His other books include Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1997), Machiavelli (2000), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), Forensic Shakespeare (2014), From Humanism to Hobbes (Cambridge, 2018) and a three-volume collection of essays, Visions of Politics (Cambridge, 2002). Russell Price, who died in 2011, was Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Lancaster.