The Garments of Court and Palace (eBook)

The Prince, a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli, is widely regarded as the most important exploration of politics - and in particular the politics of power - ever written. In Garments of Court and Palace, Philip Bobbitt, a preeminent and original interpreter of modern statecraft, presents a vivid portrait of Machiavelli's Italy and demonstrates how The Prince articulates a new idea of government that emerged during the Renaissance. Bobbitt argues that when The Prince is read alongside the Discourses, modern readers can see clearly how Machiavelli prophesied the end of the feudal era and the birth of a recognizably modern polity. As this book shows, publication of The Prince in 1532 represents nothing less than a revolutionary moment in our understanding of the place of the law and war in the creation and maintenance of the modern state.

Philip Bobbitt, is the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence at Columbia University and Senior Fellow at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. He has served as a senior official at the White House, the State Department and the National Security Council, in both Republican and Democratic administrations. He is a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy for Arts and Sciences and has written seminal works in constitutional theory, diplomatic history and social choice.The Shield of Achilles, published in 2002, was internationally acclaimed and was named a Book of the Year by the Economist, the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. The Prince is his latest book.