Machiavelli: The Novel
For all you readers, teachers, and students of Machiavelli:
There’s a wonderful graphic artist up in Boston named Don MacDonald who wrote a graphic novel Machiavelli. The aim of the novel, beyond its aesthetic and literary qualities, is to bring the scholarly knowledge about Machiavelli that we in the academy have been accumulating over the years—about his republicanism, his humanism, his literary excellence—to the public. That Machiavelli was not, as a famous book would have it, a teacher of evil, that he was not especially Machiavellian, and that his teaching was not especially Machiavellian, at least as we’ve come to understand that term.
Anyway, Don is now launching a Kickstarter campaign in order to raise money for the conversion of the novel from an online text, which is what it is now, into a printed text, an e-book, and a website. I don’t often make pitches for you to contribute money, but this is a worthy cause. One that’s especially dear to me, as a teacher and reader of Machiavelli.