Mark Jurdjevic is Associate Professor of History at Glendon College, York University.
Mark Jurdjevic's A Great and Wretched City is a
wonderful contribution to Machiavelli studies. It gives
Machiavelli's 'Florentine writings' their proper due, and
appropriately tempers the ill-considered and much too prevalent
overemphasis on Machiavelli's admiration for Rome. The book is
astoundingly erudite, penetrating analytically, and generally
written with a confident elegance that makes it an unusually
accessible piece of high-end scholarship. -- John P. McCormick,
University of Chicago
Jurdjevic convincingly argues that two of Machiavelli's late
works, The Florentine Histories and Discourse on
Florentine Affairs, constitute the culmination of a change in
Machiavelli's political thinking beginning with the Discourses
on Livy. Pessimistic about the potential for individual action,
Machiavelli concludes that collective structures and institutions,
purposely designed to limit the impact of individual political
activity, can create and preserve republican government. -- Ronald
G. Witt, Duke University
Wonderfully researched and deeply persuasive, this book offers us
an entirely new vision of the Florentine chancellor as a man
dedicated in his later years to radically reshaping his broken
world. Jurdjevic not only reinterprets the man himself, but
challenges our very understanding of the relationship between
Renaissance individuals and the society around them. -- Michael
Martoccio * H-Net Reviews *
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