The Demos at War: lessons on democratic warfare from Thucydides and Machiavelli

Erica Benner

Erica Benner is a political philosopher who has held academic posts at St Antony's College Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Yale. Awarded a DPhil at Oxford in 1993, she is the author of the books Really Existing Nationalisms (Oxford University Press, 1995), Machiavelli's Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2009), Machiavelli's Prince: A New Reading (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli's Lifelong Quest for Freedom (Penguin Allen Lane and W.W. Norton, 2017). Be Like the Fox was described by Terry Eagleton as 'lively, compulsively readable biography', chosen by Julian Baggini as one of his picks for The Guardian's best books of 2017 list, and shortlisted for the 2018 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. Benner’s work has been translated into many languages, including Simple and Complex Chinese, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Spanish, Tamil, and Turkish. She is currently writing a new book about the struggles of democracy in ancient Athens, and working on a new translation of Machiavelli’s Prince for W.W. Norton. She lives in Berlin.