The People’s Princes: Machiavelli, Leadership, and Liberty

Join us for a discussion of John McCormick’s pathbreaking new book, The People’s Princes: Machiavelli, Leadership, and Liberty (Chicago 2025). For more than a decade, John P. McCormick has been at the forefront of a new wave of scholarship that reveals the anti-elitist and democratic commitments at the center of Niccolo Machiavelli’s political thought. In The People’s Princes, McCormick turns his attention to Machiavelli’s conception of virtuous leadership and Machiavelli’s views on the appropriate relationships among individual leaders, common citizens, and elites. With comments from Lawrence Hamilton (Cambridge) and Camila Vergara (Essex).

The event is taking place in Bush House Lecture Theatre 3 (North East wing, room 0.01). Please report to the reception in Bush House North East wing.

SPEAKERS

John P. McCormick is Karl J. Weintraub Professor in Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Reading Machiavelli, Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, and Machiavellian Democracy, among other books.

Lawrence Hamilton holds the SA UK Bilateral Research Chair in Political Theory, Witwatersrand and Cambridge, where he teaches and researches on various topics in political theory, the history of political and economic thought and South African politics.

Camila Vergara is Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex. She is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile writing on the relation between inequality and the law, and the possible institutional solutions to systemic corruption. She is the author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (Princeton University Press 2020).