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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.
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'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.' |
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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
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