Abstract

In this chapter, Yves Winter reads Machiavelli as offering an ambivalent portrait of the modern relationship with nature. Winter's Machiavelli does not adhere to natural law, nor oppose nature with human artifice, but rather foregrounds practices of originating plural natures, instituting and entrenching them, letting them atrophy, and supplanting them. Yet such practices are invariably ambivalent--perhaps positive for human freedom and durability while also enacting brutality toward the natural world. Winter's analysis of Machiavelli thus sheds light on the interconnections between attempts at durability in contemporary political life and our continued domination and stripping of the natural world (spurred, for example, by our need for more and more oil) and pushes us to ask whether or how such durability might be imagined without continued plundering of natural resources that will ultimately be self-destructive and defeating.

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