Three Modern Sensibilities: Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and More
Three Modern Sensibilities: Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and More

Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to map modern sensibilities and their emergence in early modernity. In doing so, the focus is on the great writers and thinkers of Renaissance and Baroque Europe: François Villon, Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and William Shakespeare, whose thoughts and works best reveal modern cultural categories and moral concepts we live by. Since literature often exposes politics both as an art of government and as a mechanics of power better than any sort of political theory or political science based analysis, we always benefit immensely from an interpretive framework within which we can interpret modern predicaments not as something uniquely novel, but, instead, as something that emerged along with the great works of philosophy and literature. Hence, this is another focus on European little stories and grand narratives as constituent parts of modern politics.

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