The popular perception of Machiavelli is that he is the sign of evil, and scholars have blamed him for abandoning the classical virtues and letting loose the evils particular to modernity: hyperindividualism, ruthless competition, the use of propaganda and violence to govern. Jane Jaquette’s reading of Machiavelli is both feminist and revisionist. She presents Machiavelli in a different way and asks if we can understand him as a virtue theorist (as well as a theorist of virtú) by looking at his writing through the lens of phronesis. She concludes that doing so opens a new way to think about Machiavelli’s intentions and suggests a greater appreciation of his method. She will also show why some important questions remain, not only concerning the consequences of Machiavelli’s political views, but also about the limits of phronesis as a prescription for our contemporary ills.
Machiavelli and Hobbes on Power and Political Authority
Jane Jaquette, Politics Department, Occidental College
Piano Lounge, Graham House, Green College, UBC
October 24 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
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Mark Vessey has been invited to the University of Bristol to give the Blackwell-Bristol Lectures 2013 at the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition.
Dame Anne Salmond will give three talks on how different cultures define and communicate ways of being.
May 07, 2013The Global Civic Policy Society presents a Public Salon on Wednesday, June 5 from 7:30-9pm at the Vancouver Playhouse. A diverse range of speakers from very different walks of life will each spend 7 minutes speaking about something they are passionate about.- May 01, 2013Applicant Paul Yachnin (McGill University) and fifteen co-applicants including Green College Principal Mark Vessey received funding to begin their multi-disciplinary project entitled "Forms of conversion: religion, culture, and cognitive ecologies in early modern Europe and its worlds."
- April 26, 2013Green College resident Brittany Welsh describes how the daunting task of mounting four shows of Shakespeare's The Tempest helped and inspired her and her colleagues in ways she hadn't envisioned when she started down the Bard's path five months earlier.
January 04, 2013Seven Green College students volunteered at Lord Strathcona Elementary School in East Vancouver as part of UBC’s Community Learning Initiative TREK program, matching groups UBC students with elementary schools in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, and helping with reading and writing lessons and tutoring students on a one-on-one basis.
