(Un)masking the Realities of Power: Justus Lipsius and the Dynamics of Political Writing in Early Modern Europe

If Justus Lipsius’s Politica of 1589 and its importance to the history of political thought needs no introduction, Lipsius’s Monita et exempla politica (1605), conceived as a sequel to the Politica, has been overlooked time and again despite the fact that it is a unique key to understand the precise character of Lipsius’s political thought. For, is his widely read political dialogue a Neostoic discourse or is it Tacitean, Machiavellian, or even anti-Machiavellian in nature? Did the work play such a pivotal role in the genesis of the modern, centrally governed nation state, as some scholars tend to believe? This book collects essays by scholars from different disciplines and backgrounds. All of them endeavour to solve this apparent deadlock in scholarly research on Lipsius’s political thought. All of them offer new and fascinating insights in the genesis and developments of the nature and impact of political discourses in Early Modern Europe.