Erica Benner's Be Like the Fox is shortlisted for the 2018 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography See more

Welcome to my website. I'm a writer and scholar who works on moral and political thought. 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 an obvious gaijin (foreigner), and wanted to understand why some people cared so much more than I did about national differences. I still don't care much about them, but have come to appreciate why other people do.

For the last decade or so 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 some readers nearer to his own time - I see Machiavelli as a lifelong republican who fought hard against tyranny and corruption. Since this made him a troublemaker in the eyes of princes and popes, 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).

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'In this tightly composed narrative of Machiavelli’s life and works,
Erica Benner argues that The Prince is a work of secret subversion, using irony and beguilement to advance a
staunchly republican message. . .A gripping portrait of a brilliant political thinker, who understood the dangers of authoritarianism and looked for ways to curb them even though independent speech had become impossible.'
— The New Yorker on Be Like the Fox

I got my D.Phil in political theory from Oxford University in 1993, taught for many years at Oxford and the London School of Economics, then became a long-term Fellow in Ethics and Political Philosophy at Yale (website). Berlin has been my home base since 2001.

'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.'
Machiavelli

 These words come from Machiavelli's famous Letter to Francesco Vettori, written in December 1513 - the same letter where he tells his friend that he's 'written a little book on principalities,' aka The Prince. Machiavelli loved ancient writers like Xenophon, Livy, and Plutarch. In trying to understand him over the years, I've been reading and re-reading some of the best books of all time - my favourites are Thucydides' Histories and anything by Plato - and letting the immortal ancients teach me about the interesting times we're living in now. I hope a new book or two will grow out of these conversations.
         

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.