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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Dynamic Politics : Necessity, Founding, And (Re)Founding In Machiavelli's Discourses On Livy, Vincent John Commisso
Dynamic Politics : Necessity, Founding, And (Re)Founding In Machiavelli's Discourses On Livy, Vincent John Commisso
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation is an attempt to recast the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy in a far more radical light than it has been previously understood. Rather than trying to overcome fortune, I argue that Machiavelli was encouraging political actors to embrace it by embracing the force which fortune generates: necessity. Along with this orientation towards fortune and necessity, Machiavelli also was engaging in an additional subversive project: the systematic undermining of the conventional republican wisdom of his predecessors and his contemporaries. On a practical level, the necessity central to Machiavelli’s thought is that of “founding,” …
Breaking The Iron Law : Robert Michels, The Rise Of The Mass Party, And The Debate Over Democracy And Oligarchy, Peter Albert Lavenia, Jr.
Breaking The Iron Law : Robert Michels, The Rise Of The Mass Party, And The Debate Over Democracy And Oligarchy, Peter Albert Lavenia, Jr.
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This is a reexamination of Robert Michels' work Political Parties: A Sociological Study Of The Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy and its place in the debate over the rise and role of the mass political party in democracy and democratic thought. It examines Michels' involvement with the German Social Democratic Party and the syndicalist faction around Georges Sorel's Le Mouvement Socialist, as well as his friendship with Max Weber, and his experiences with socialist electoral politics that led him to write Political Parties and explore the nature of political parties and the tension between democracy and oligarchy within them. Time …