yves winter

Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence

“Winter’s path-breaking study probes how violence actually works in politics. With Machiavelli as our guide, Winter shows us, strikingly, how little this political work has to do with the direct threat of physical coercion” – Karuna Mantena, Columbia University

“This book not only makes an essential contribution to the Machiavelli scholarship, but also offers a decisive intervention into contemporary theories of political violence” – Jason Frank, Cornell University

“One of the most perspicacious contemporary investigations into the nature of political violence; an outstanding contribution to the recent wave of republican, populist and democratic readings of Machiavelli” – John McCormick, University of Chicago

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Recent News and Publications

  • debating violence on the desert island

    September 10, 2013: My article Debating Violence on a Desert Island: Engels, Dühring and Robinson Crusoe [behind paywall] has been published by Contemporary Political Theory. While it is not yet out in print, it is available online as part of CPT’s Advance Online Publication. The article is about Friedrich Engels’s theory of violence and the use…

  • second nature

    August 13, 2013: Just out from Fordham University Press: Second Nature: Rethinking the Natural through Politics, a new volume edited by Crina Archer, Laura Ephraim, and Lida Maxwell. I have an essay in the book titled “Necessity and Fortune: Machiavelli’s Politics of Nature”.

  • new job at mcgill

    December 4, 2012: Exciting news! As of the August 2013, I will be joining the McGill Department of Political Science as an Assistant Professor. I’ll be affiliated with two great research groups, the Research Group on Constitutional Studies and the inter-university Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique (GRIPP). I look forward to becoming a permanent member of this…

  • machiavelli and the ciompi

    December 1, 2012: The new issue of Political Theory is out. It includes a special section on “Machiavelli’s Politics” with two articles, one by John McCormick and one by Yours truly: Plebeian Politics: Machiavelli and the Ciompi Uprising. The Ciompi Uprising of 1378 was a revolt of Florentine textile workers, and it marked a turning point in Florentine…

  • symposium on structural violence

    May 23, 2012:  The new issue of New Political Science contains our symposium on Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence. Contributors include Andrew Dilts (Loyola Marymount University), Yves Winter (University of Minnesota), Thomas Biebricher (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt), Eric Johnson (University of Florida), Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo (University of Minnesota), and Joan Cocks (Mount Holyoke College). My contribution is…

  • political concepts: a critical lexicon

     March 1, 2012: The first issue of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon has just been published. It’s a new online journal that endeavors to create a lexicon of concepts relevant for contemporary political thought. I have an article in it on conquest.