Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Machiavelli cycle

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Delete. Keilana_(recall) 06:00, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Machiavelli cycle

Machiavelli cycle (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Innapropriate for an encyclopedia and a neologism. This pages seems to be nothing other than a placeholder for a quotation. No social scientist who uses this phrase has been identified, making it a neologism. RJC ^Talk 23:19, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

• Delete Neologism. Show me some academic papers about this first, otherwise it's just one thing among any number of things that Machiavelli wrote. --NickPenguin_(contribs) 01:37, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
• ISBN 079236533X devotes pages 53–58 to Machiavelli's cycle of constitutions, comparing it to the cycle of constitutions proposed by Polybius in he 6th book of his Histories. It also tells you its non-English name: anacyclosis — which you'll probably have more success looking up.

  I'm amused to see an idea published in the 16th century being thought to be a neologism, by the way. Uncle G (talk) 01:46, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

  • This source does not contain the phrase "Machiavelli cycle," and so doesn't establish that it is not a neologism. I don't question that Machiavelli discusses how regimes cycle, or that it is reminiscent of Polybius's anacyclosis: rather, is this a notable phrase that is used in scholarly literature, and one that deserves its own article? I think the answer to both is no. RJC ^Talk 21:11, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
    • I suggest that you stop being fixated on the phrase and look instead at the subject. This is not a phrasebook that we are writing here. It's an encyclopaedia, whose articles are about subjects. Google's search engine may mindlessly look for two words stuck next to one another in a bunch of text. But we are human beings, who understand what the words actually mean, and know that one can phrase things using different sequences of words. This is why, after all, we have to have such things as Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names) and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision). As you yourself have just written, Machiavelli discusses how regimes cycle. And people have discussed Machiavelli's discussion. So therefore so too should Wikipedia. That no-one has fleshed out an article on it yet is not a reason for deletion, per both our Wikipedia:Deletion policy and our Wikipedia:Editing policy. Uncle G (talk) 03:47, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

It is possible that someone has referred to this (and other sections) of Machiavelli's work and spoken of a "cycle". But I would appreciate there being some sources to explain this, because without them, any attempt to illuminate the meaning in this passage would be unsourced OR speculation, and without any explanation of this passage, it is a candidate for Wikisource and not Wikipedia. --NickPenguin_(contribs) 04:13, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment An idea published long ago could still be a neologism if given a name that wasn't used at the time; it's unclear to me if that's the case here. Also, we have anacyclosis; since this article is mostly a quotation, perhaps it could be merged there? Rigadoun (talk) 06:57, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
  • "anacyclosis" isn't actually an English word. It's a transliteration of a Greek word: ανακυκλοσις. It comes from the word κύκλος. When you read κύκλος you'll see what that word means in English. So by a strict reading of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English), anacyclosis isn't the best title when there's an actual English title to be had. It's also not the best title when one has read ISBN 3161466756 and realizes that to the Greeks didn't just apply this idea to politics. The full title of the specific political concept, in Aristotelian thought, per ISBN 0415191548 page 11, is in fact ανακυκλοσις πολιτειον.

    RJC implies that xe has read the source. So perhaps xe'd like to tell you what the last three words of the English section title on page 53, as well as the English description on page 48, are. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 03:47, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

The source in question is available through google books, if anyone is interested. The question as I see it is whether this concept is important enough for an encyclopedia article, however it is named. Machiavelli also speaks of airy intelligences in Discourses I 56, but it is not important enough a topic to merit its own article. Vatter's book says that Machiavelli disagreed with Polybius: that's not material for an encyclopedia article. RJC ^Talk 06:17, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

• Delete This article is totally unencyclopedic. Masterpiece2000 (talk) 05:14, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.