Yves Winter
Machiavelli’s History of Florentine Punishment and the Logic of Political Violence

In the Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio, Machiavelli infamously advances a preference for severe punishment of political crimes, typically by recourse to capital punishment. This endorsement of capital punishment is conventionally interpreted in one of two ways. Most commentators accept as trivial that lethal violence is the ultimate penal instrument of any political institution, thus attributing to Machiavelli a proto-Weberian view whereby lethal violence is an inescapable feature of the political and an indispensable instrument of the state. A minority of commentators, by contrast, impute to Machiavelli either a perverse fascination with violence or a cosmology or metaphysics of violence that assigns mystically creative, regenerative, and redemptive powers to violence. In this talk, I develop a third position, which builds on a more complex and rhetorical account of political violence. 

Yves Winter is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University where he teaches history of political thought and contemporary social and political theory. His research interests include Machiavelli, the history of Marxism, and critical theory (Frankfurt School, post-war French thought, post-Marxism, and contemporary debates on gender, colonialism, and race). He is the author of Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence (Cambridge, 2018) as well as articles on violence, sovereignty, and political order. Currently, he is working on a book on the idea of the social/political imaginary and on a research project on the afterlives of colonialism.