Wednesday’s Maxim – Thursday Edition

14 July 2005, 1642 EDT

I wasn’t in my office on Wednesday, and thus didn’t post a maxim.

Given Dan Drezner’s recent post on prospect theory and terrorism, I thought it would be interesting to post Guicciardini’s views, in effect, on the rational-choice controversy in International Relations:

What I said earlier about princes also applies to people with whom you must deal: always keep an eye not so much on what reason dictates they ought to do, as on what you believe they will do, in view of their nature and their habits (Series C, 151)

Filed as: Guicciardini and maxims

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.