The Tom Woods Show, episode 142.

Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion.

Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show.

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people, you get 50 smackers. Check it out at tomwoods.com slash ebates. Hi everybody. Tom Woods here.

We are joined today by Joanne Cavallo, who chairs the Department

of Italian at Columbia University. And I want to talk to her about a number of things. Number one,

how it is that a Columbia University professor comes to be a libertarian in the Rothbardian tradition.

Also, I want to talk about her scholarly work, and in particular, I want to pick her brain a bit about Machiavelli, who he was and what he

really taught and what, if any, value can we find in him. So she is widely published, very well

respected. That is, until she made the mistake

of coming on this show. Joanne, welcome. Thanks, Tom. It's great to be here. So you teach Italian at

Columbia University. What does that mean? Does that mean you teach the language or you also teach

history, literature, because you write about all these sorts of things? Right. In fact, I don't teach language at all. I teach literature, mostly the Renaissance,

the romance epic, Machiavelli, a range of Italian authors. But I also teach in the global

core, a course called Nobility and Civility East and West. And we compare

the concepts of nobility and civility through ancient medieval and the early modern world.

So we have East Asian, Indian, Islamic, and Western traditions. And that's co-taught. So that's

a fun course that I've been teaching for the past 10 years.

So is there a separate department of Italian? Yes, there is. We're the smallest department at

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