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James Baldwin might be imagined as reaching his greatest level of popularity within this current decade. With the growth of social media activist movements like Black Lives Matter, which captures and catalyzes off a Baldwinian rage, and the publishing of works directly evoking Baldwin, his voice appears more pronounced between the years of 2013 and 2015. Scholars in Baldwin studies, along with strangers who were turned into witnesses of his literary oeuvre, have contributed to this renewed interest in Baldwin, or at least have been able to sharpen the significance of the phenomenon. Publications and performances highlight Baldwin’s work and how it prefigured developments in critical race and queer theories, while also demonstrating Baldwin’s critique as both prophetic and “disturbingly” contemporary. Emerging largely from Baldwin’s timelessness in social and political discourse, and from the need to conjure a figure to demystify the absurd American landscape, these interventions in Baldwin studies follow distinct trends. This essay examines the 2013–15 trends from four vantages: an examination of a return, with revision, to popular work by Baldwin; identifying Baldwin’s work as a contributor to theoretical and critical methodology; Baldwin and intertextuality or intervocality; and a new frontier in Baldwin studies.
, highlighting the exclusionary ways in which history is written and remembered and retelling similar stories from different perspectives to address issues as diverse as abolitionism and segregation, the relationship between science and faith, and predestination and grace, sex work and gender politics, and the state of political thought in the contemporary United States. Robinson is similarly unconventional in her approach to a writing career. In a 2016 lecture published as “Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself” (2018), Robinson makes the
formulation does not completely negate the need for secular political action, sometimes even by women. As Constance Jordan writes about the political and spiritual status of early modern women: ‘In the language of Renaissance political thought, she is a persona mixta : her natural and political self balanced by her spiritual self’ ( 1990 : 23). Though early modern patriarchy often
8 Machiavelli's political philosophy in The Prince MAUREEN RAMSAY Trying to place Machiavelli's The Prince in the history of political thought involves confronting a bewildering array of conflicting interpretations of his political views. 1 This can be all the more perplexing when what is initially striking about The Prince is its brevity, clarity and, though intense and dynamic, its ad hoc nature, its lack of philosophical rigour. Although there are those who imply the opposite, by claiming that Machiavelli was the founder of political science, it is now
’s identities as a ‘scientist’ and a ‘statesman’.11 It is certainly clear from several of his works that Bacon found a degree of incommensurability between ethical (specifically Christian) and civic values,12 and that many of the conditions praised in his natural philosophy are condemned Price_04_Ch4 62 14/10/02, 9:33 am Ethics and politics 63 elsewhere in his writings. Markku Peltonen stresses that the repeated identification of Bacon’s philosophical with his political thought relies upon a ‘rhetorical similarity’ which can obscure the distinction Bacon makes between
Essex’s ambitions to ‘become an other Henry the 4 th ’. 4 Essex’s circle has also been strongly associated with the English manifestation of broader intellectual trends: the political thought associated with Roman history, especially Tacitus, which electrified European literati in the later sixteenth century, and the directed reading of history with a serious political purpose
away. Notes 1 For the relationship between Hobbes and Hyde, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’s Elements of Law, Natural and Politic’, Historical Journal, 32.2 (1989), 303–17. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. by Paul Seaward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 6–10; the latest and most sophisticated account of the attack on Hobbes in 1666–68 is Jon Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear: the Anglican attack on Hobbes in the later 1660s’, History of Political Thought, 34.3 (2013), 421–58. 3 Richard Ollard, Clarendon and his Friends (London
temporal kings.124 However, her political thinking –and her claim of a licence to preach –was inherited from the very large number of women writers who had gone before her and for whom the civil wars, but, more significantly, the Republic, represented an authorising moment in English history. Therefore, when Patricia Crawford once argued that the impact of the civil wars and Interregnum ‘was remarkable’, she was absolutely correct. However, this chapter offers an addition to her analysis, finding that the most far-reaching consequences for gender and political thought
Much of the writing about The Prince is often at a certain distance from the text, not engaging with it in a critical or textual way. One of the features of the chapters in this book is the extent to which they focus on the complex texture of Machiavelli's writing and on the complex reading processes this in turn calls forth. Indeed, the book argues that it is not simply, as modern theorists have it, that the reader creates the meaning of the text but that certain texts in our culture - texts like The Prince - create and demand a more complicated response from readers as well as different kinds of reading. In other words, they demand a plural approach. The book brings together both a variety of critical viewpoints and a variety of disciplines but also a series of arguments which would allow the reader to engage in a debate that was at once broadly based and intensely focused. That debate has to include proper recognition of the particular circumstances of Machiavelli's writing, an awareness of the modern critical approaches now being explored in relation to The Prince, and a sense of the connection between Machiavelli and the twentieth century. What is clear, however, is that The Prince remains an important text in the attempt to understand cultural history and one that reminds us how difficult but rewarding that task is.