Warren Breckman

Class of Fall 2013

Professor of History

University of Pennsylvania

The Machiavellian Moment in Modern Thought and Politics

In his Academy project, “The Machiavellian Moment in Modern Thought,” Breckman investigated how a thinker indelibly associated with the amoral manipulation of politics has inspired numerous modern philosophical projects aimed at deepening and fostering democratic practice. This question, Breckman argues, takes us into concerns central to the history and theory of radical democracy. His project examines the reception of Machiavelli at three levels: first, in European political thought from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century, via thinkers such as Arendt, Strauss, and Schmitt; second, in interpretations of Machiavelli as a theorist of republican virtue to stabilize a state in crisis, as suggested by J.G.A. Pocock’s “Machiavellian moment.” The third level—and core of the project—is an investigation of how twentieth-century left-wing theorists have mobilized Machiavelli to articulate different versions of radical democracy. In the ongoing debates over the relationship between citizens and government, Breckman explores how theorists mine Machiavelli’s ideas for how best to negotiate contemporary challenges to democracy and to imagine a more robust democratic practice.

Warren Breckman is a professor of modern European intellectual and cultural history at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as executive co-editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, a member of the founding editorial circle of Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, and a member of the editorial group of Lapham’s Quarterly. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley (PhD, 1993) and the University of Winnipeg (BA, 1986), he has been a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and visiting scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, with additional fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. His publications include Karl Marx, The Young Hegelians, and The Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge, 1999), European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St Martin’s, 2007), Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2013), and numerous articles on nationalism, modernism and urban culture, the history of political thought, and contemporary theory.