Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism [Hardcover]

Dr. Jacob Soll (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 21, 2005

As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread through later editions.

Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters.

Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski

"Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation."
---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead

"Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power."
---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment

"Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history."
---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley

"Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice."
---Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

An in-depth look at how Renaissance reading practices set the basis for Enlightenment political criticism

About the Author

Jacob Soll is Professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System. He is a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and a 2009 winner of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.  He is also co-editor of the series Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World, together with Ann Blair and Anthony Grafton. 

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press (April 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0472114735
• ISBN-13: 978-0472114733
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,964,763 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Professor of History at Rutgers University, Jacob Soll received a Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1995, and a Ph.D. from Magdalene College, Cambridge, UK in 1998. He has taught at Princeton University, and Rutgers University, where he is a Full Professor. He has been a Luso-American Fellow at the National Library in Portugal and a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has received the Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas; an NEH Fellowship; the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society; and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in French, German, Italian, and Japanese. To understand the history of political knowledge, liberty, and power, Dr. Soll has built an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together political, intellectual, and economic and social history, the history of books, libraries, education and information.

His first book, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Michigan, 2005), received the 2005 Jacques Barzun Prize. It shows how elite learned culture fused with critical and more popular "Machiavellism" to create a form of subversive, republican politics. His second book, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System (forthcoming from Michigan, May 2009), tells the story of how Louis XIV's minister Colbert perceived that the gathering of information on a massive scale would enable him to create an essential instrument of political power and control. Colbert sought to master the pan-European public sphere of learning and the Republic of Letters, linking it to a vast administrative archive by creating a competing secret state information system. In the end, however, the secrecy of this information bank led to its demise, weakening the very state system Colbert had worked to build.

Professor Soll is currently working on projects in financial and political history and the history of knowledge and information.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smart and surprising, June 9, 2005

By 

verificationist (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Hardcover)

Soll is a scholar of political culture and information culture, which is a critical relationship these days, both at home and abroad. Soll specializes in the early modern period, and the surprise of this sophisticated, elegantly written book is that French humanist political culture came into being as an instrument of monarchical absolutism and evolved over time into radical, Enlightened political criticism. (Perhaps there is hope for top-down democratization, after all.) "Publishing the Prince" is erudite, but compulsively readable -- a rare partnership in the academic book market -- and an eye-opener into the origins of grand political arrangements many of us take for granted.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing and Suprisingly Relevant, August 26, 2011

By 

Melissa McHugh (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World) (Paperback)

In today's world, political criticism is everywhere. We're saturated by it on television, in blogs, in newspapers, but we also take it for granted as one of our freedoms of expression guaranteed to us in our Constitution. The goal of Publishing the Prince is to trace the history of political criticism--where did it come from, who are its forefathers?

Dr. Soll utilized the career of an important editor and translator in late fifteenth century France to tell the story-- Abraham-Nicohlas Amelot de La Houssaye created the first French translations of Machiavelli's the Prince and a Jesuit work which he called L'Homme de Cour (The Man of the Court). Amelot did more than translate them, but inserted his own commentary and introductions. He was the first editor and controlled how they appeared to their new audiences. He also translated other important humanist works, spreading his own ideas by hiding behind accepted authors. He escaped the censorship this way.

This is not a work meant for the general public -- the author clearly expects the reader to be acquainted with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the history of the French and humanism. If you aren't familiar with any of this, it's difficult to place the book in its correct historical context and its importance will be lost. After reading this book, I count myself even more grateful to have had the opportunity to study under Dr. Soll at Rutgers University.

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