Erica Benner
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  • Be Like the Fox
  • Nationalism
  • Machiavelli
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Erica Benner, Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in his World (WW Norton)
Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms (Verso, Radical Thinkers Series)
Erica Benner, Machiavelli's Prince: A New Reading (Oxford University Press)
Erica Benner, Machiavelli's Ethics (Princeton University Press)
Erica Benner, Esser Volpe: Vita di Machiavelli (Giunti)
Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms (Oxford University Press)
Erica Benner, Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli's Lifelong Quest for Freedom (Penguin Allen Lane)
Erica Benner, Als een vos: Machiavelli (Athenaeum)
New: Erica Benner's TRUE DEMOCRACY will be published with Penguin Allen Lane 
Recent online pieces on women writing, democratic crisis, ancient Athens, progress, political knowledge and ignorance, and more ​https://engelsbergideas.com/author/erica-benner/
Erica Benner writer, bio website photo



Welcome to my website. I'm a writer and scholar who works on moral and political thought. Here's my Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erica_Benner

My first book was on nationalism and national identity. Nationalism fascinated me from an early age, no doubt because I was born and grew up in Japan as a gaijin (foreigner), and wanted to understand why some people cared more than I did about national differences. I still don't care much about them, but have come to appreciate why other people do. In the past few years (2020-22) I've been writing and lecturing a lot about nationalism again - especially how it feeds wars and shakes up democracies.

I've worked a lot on Machiavelli. My latest book, Be Like the Fox, is a biography of the good man. Unlike most scholars today - but like many readers nearer to his own time - I see Machiavelli as a lifelong republican who fought hard against tyranny and corruption in republics. This made him a troublemaker in the eyes of princes and popes. So he became an artist of cunning dissimulation who doesn't always 'say what I mean, or mean what I say' (as he wrote to a friend).

I'm now writing a new book that rethinks what we want from democracy in our times, drawing on a long view of history, philosophy, and my experiences in different countries. TRUE DEMOCRACY will come out with Penguin Press.



Erica Benner, Japanese temple
Erica Benner, Florence
Erica Benner, Siena
'When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace.

Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions. And they, out of their human kindness, answer me.'

Erica Benner in Agrigento Sicily
And for hours at a time I feel no boredom,
I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.
I absorb myself into them completely.


Machiavelli, Letter to Vettori 10 December 1513
                                                               

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  • About
  • Be Like the Fox
  • Nationalism
  • Machiavelli
  • Academic
  • Media
  • Contact