11:15A-12:30P   TR   WH 006

Students enrolling for social science distribution credit should enroll in
H228.  If you need TOPICs credit, enroll in H204.  For more information on
the course, please contact the instructor, Julia Bondanella
(bondane@indiana.edu).

	Only books that have achieved the status of a "classic" have a
staying power over the centuries.  Italian novelist Italo Calvino defined
a classic as "a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
Generations of readers have found something of interest in such writers as
Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rousseau, Marx and Freud.
Machiavelli's political writings, especially his Prince, have generated
centuries of controversy and debate.  "Machiavelli and Management"
introduces students to a perennial problem in social, political and
intellectual history that concerns the migration of ideas-the creation of
sets of theoretical ideas in a specific historical and social context that
are transformed, used, reused, and even abused over time.   In recent
years, Machiavelli's works have given rise to a "cottage industry" of
books, which attempt to apply his theories to questions of management.
His Prince is commonly taught in introductory political theory, but his
ideas concerning the nature of political inquiry, the purpose and form of
government, and the ways of wielding of political power have had a much
broader influence.  Every modern dictionary contains a definition of the
adjective "Machiavellian".  If you were to type his name into Amazon.com,
you would get some sense of the range of his impact.
	This seminar will examine how a set of ideas about political
leadership rooted in a specific time and place are reformulated,
reinterpreted and then employed in completely different contexts, some of
which Machiavelli himself could never have imagined.  After a brief
exploration of different concepts of leadership, our discussions will
focus on Machiavelli's concept of political leadership,  particularly his
advice to new princes to use such qualities as cruelty, deceit, fear to
achieve social and political stability in a world where human beings
cannot be trusted.  Our investigations will then move to the question of
how this set of political and social theories concerned with the nature of
successful leadership has come to be applied to twentieth-century theories
of political, social, business or corporate management and feminism.
	Readings will include not only selections from Machiavelli's
works, but brief excerpts from other political theorists, including
critiques of his views, and modern transformations of Machiavellian
principles in books devoted to contemporary business management, politics,
and feminist theory.  Some of the books to be read will include
Machiavelli's The Prince, Discourses on Livy, and The Mandrake Root;
Shakespeare's Richard III (1593); and Antonio Gramsci's The Modern Prince
(c. 1930).  We will also read several of the following:   Michael Ledeen's
Machiavelli on Modern Leadership (1999);  Antony Jay's Management and
Machiavelli (1968); Alistair McAlpine's The New Machiavelli (2000);
Harriet Rubin's The Princessa (1997);  Stanley Bing's What Would
Machiavelli Do?  The Ends Justify the Meanness (2000); and V.'s The Mafia
Manager (1991).
	Students will be graded on class discussion and several (4-5)
short essays.