How to Run a Country

How to Run a CountryPhilip Freeman’s second book has been billed as a “sequel to How to Win an Election” reviewed here in an earlier post. Like the first book, this is a short (132 pages in a small format) book with a mix of English and Latin content derived from the writing of Marcus Cicero. I personally don’t feel it lives up to the first in either layout or content. But it has its strengths.

The first book juxtaposed the Latin and English texts on alternating pages, making it reasonable for anyone who might want to attempt to translate the former themselves or just for curiosity’s sake. However, the second book lumps the Latin at the end of the book, making readers all too aware that only slightly more than than half the little work is in English. And anyone wanting to attempt translation and compare their translation to Freeman’s,  has to jump back and forth to do so.

Where the first book was one cohesive piece of writing (a single letter by Quintus Cicero, to his older brother, Marcus), this one is a mix of bits and pieces from the elder Cicero’s letters, speeches and texts.

The actual amount of Cicero is itself minimal. Freeman selects snippets – sometimes as little as a single paragraph – from Cicero’s volumes of writing. He cobbles his translations together under a dozen themed categories – natural law, leadership, persuasion, war, tyranny and so on – and introduces each category with a brief note on either Cicero’s life or Roman history and politics.

Most annoying is that the translations lack citations to identify the source – you need to hunt through the Latin original to find out what original document Freeman is drawing from. For someone like me, who wants to see the entire work (or learn if it is in one of my existing translations), it means paging around to get all the information.

There is a lot to learn from reading the classical authors, but care has to be taken not to turn them into some sort of Nostradamus, making every quotable line into a prediction. Hindsight does that to us. We want to have the past mirror the present to justify our acts, our decisions and our perspectives (this is why tacking words like “ancient” and “traditional” onto quack medical products gives them an air of legitimacy).

While some of their words are timeless, the writing of people like Cicero was mostly about contemporary times, events and politics, and has a specific context. It’s far too easy to lift quotes from that context and drop them into current events as if the original context and the new were the same. Cicero’s Rome and the modern world have things in common, but many more differences.

Continue reading “How to Run a Country”

Welcome to The Municipal Machiavelli: The Prince Rewritten

MachiavelliThis is an online version of a book I wrote in 2012. My goal was to modernize Machiavelli’s famous work, The Prince, and return its attention to its original audience: municipal politicians. It has not been published in a paper version, yet, but I am still looking for a suitable publisher. I am also working on an e-book  and iPad version should I not find a book publisher.

I chose to publish it in this WordPress format now because, after recent events at the local level in my own municipality, I felt it was of great and growing relevance to the daily political business of municipal governance. I do admit to some tongue-in-cheekiness in my comments in these pages, however.

2013 is the 500th anniversary since the writing of The Prince (it wasn’t published until 1532, after Machiavelli’s death). I felt it only fitting to update Machiavelli and bring back the audience he first wrote for. Municipal politicians are often overlooked when scholars dissect Machiavelli, and that’s a big oversight given who Machiavelli originally wrote for. I hope I can in some small way contribute to restoring him to his audience.

This site is somewhat of a work in progress. I am always tweaking with layout and design, so I apologize in advance if you find it changing rather too often.

I have laid this site out using the chapters and sections of the book, including all of the prefatory material, addenda and bibliography. My chapters parallel Machiavelli’s own in The Prince, although the chapter titles are somewhat different. It has approx. 65,000 words. I am still looking for some historical material through online booksellers, and may add content to the bibliography or additional quotations to the core material, in future. I have an outline for a chapter on Machiavelli and Rhetoric, too.

I use many quotes taken from a wide range of sources to buttress both my own interpretations and Machiavelli’s own arguments – Han Fei Tzu, Sun Tzu, Napoleon, Robert Greene, Cicero and others. Quotations lifted from Machiavelli’s book have often been modified to make them clearer or to phrase them in more modern language. In doing so, I used many different translations of his works to find the most appropriate wording, as noted in the bibliography. More than 450 of the main quotes from the book are displayed in the sidebar quotation widget

I take full responsibility for any misquotes, any mistakes, typos, misinterpretations, and bad ideas.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I am working on a version for e-book, iTunes and PDF. Please contact me if you would like a copy.

This work is copyright 2012 under international law by Ian Chadwick. Please do not reproduce any part of it it without prior permission, except as per fair use clauses and for reviews. Thank you for your consideration. I welcome your comments via email: ichadwick (at) rogers.com.

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