Department of Politics at Princeton University

Maurizio Viroli is Professor of Political Theory, emeritus within the Department of Politics and associated faculty within the Department of History at Princeton University.

He is Director of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, where he is full professor of Political Communication. He also serves as Senior Research Fellow at the Collegio Carlo Alberto of Moncalieri, and has founded and is now the Director of a Master’s program in Civic Education established at Asti by Ethica Association of Asti with the support of Professor Robert P. George and the James Madison Program of Princeton University. Finally, he is the scientific coordinator of the Academies of Civic Education of the Compagnia San Paolo Foundation, and since 2005 he participates in the projects of Civic Education organized by the Department of Education of the Marche region, Italy.

His main fields of research are political theory and the history of political thought, classical republicanism and neo-republicanism, with a special expertise on Niccolò Machiavelli and Jean Jacques Rousseau, republican iconography, the relationship between religion and politics, patriotism, constitutionalism, classical rhetoric, political communication, citizenship, and civic education.

He holds a Laurea degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna and a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute of Firenze. His dissertation, on Rousseau’s political thought, was published with the title Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Well-Ordered Society, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

He is the author of L'Etica Laica di Erminio Juvalta, Franco Angeli, 1988; From Politics to Reason of State. The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics (1250-1600), Cambridge University Press, 1992; For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism, Clarendon Press, 1995; Machiavelli, Oxford University Press, 1998. Among his most recent works: Piccole Patrie, Grande Mondo, Donzelli, 1995 (with Martha C. Nussbaum and Gian Enrico Rusconi); Il sorriso di Niccolò. Storia di Machiavelli, Laterza, 1998, translated into English as Niccolò’s Smile, Farrar & Straus; Repubblicanesimo, Laterza, 1999; Dialogo intorno alla Repubblica, Laterza, 2001 (with Norberto Bobbio); Il Dio di Machiavelli e il problema morale del'Italia, Laterza, 2006 (eng. trans. Machiavelli’s God, Princeton University Press, 2010) ; How to read Machiavelli, Granda, 2008; L’Italia dei doveri, Rizzoli, 2008; Come se Dio ci fosse. Religione e Libertà nella storia d’Italia, Einaudi, 2009 (under translation by Princeton University Press); La Libertà dei Servi, Laterza, 2010 (under translation by Princeton University Press). Forthcoming is a high-school textbook of civic education (with Laterza).

His works have been translated into English and various other languages.

PhD, European University Institute