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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.
Over the last decade or so I 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. 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).
During the first lockdown in Berlin I started writing a new book that looks at democracy's pros and cons from different sides, drawing on my life in different countries. Like Machiavelli's Prince, it has 26 chapters and is both serious and (sometimes) funny. TRUE DEMOCRACY will come out with Penguin Press.
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.
Over the last decade or so I 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. 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).
During the first lockdown in Berlin I started writing a new book that looks at democracy's pros and cons from different sides, drawing on my life in different countries. Like Machiavelli's Prince, it has 26 chapters and is both serious and (sometimes) funny. 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