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

  • violence on the desert island… now in print

    October 15, 2014: My article Debating Violence on a Desert Island: Engels, Dühring and Robinson Crusoe [behind paywall] is now officially out in Contemporary Political Theory.  Here is the abstract: Ever since the publication in 1719 of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the novel’s eponymous protagonist has had a pervasive presence in the modern social and cultural imaginary, giving…

  • machiavelli’s the prince 500 years later

    April 30, 2014: The most recent issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly marks the five hundredth anniversary of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Contributors include John McCormick (issue editor), Mark Jurdjevic, Jacob Soll, Erica Benner, Catherine Zuckert, Jo Ann Cavallo, Nathan Tarcov, Miguel Vatter, Jan-Werner Müller. My article is on The Prince and His Art of War: Machiavelli’s Military Populism.

  • 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…