Concept

Niccolò Machiavelli

Overview

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was a Florentine diplomat, author, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Italian Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince (Il Principe), written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science.

For many years he served as a senior official in the Florentine Republic with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He worked as secretary to the second chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power. He would be expelled from his duties as a diplomat when the Medici retook power in Florence in 1512, and soon thereafter would be mistakenly suspected of treason, and sent into exile. A year later, he would take up the life of a political writer.

After his death Machiavelli's name came to evoke unscrupulous acts of the sort he recommended in his most famous work, The Prince. In the treatise, Machiavelli stated that rulers will have to take on unsavory policies in the furtherance of their political society, in contradiction to classical political thought. He advised rulers to engage in evil when political necessity requires it, for example, stating that successful founders and reformers of governments should be excused for killing their political enemies. Machiavelli's Prince has been surrounded by controversy since it was published, with many commentators viewing The Prince as a manual that aims to teach would-be tyrants how they should seize authority and establish an absolute regime. Even into recent times, scholars such as Leo Strauss have restated the traditional opinion that Machiavelli was a "teacher of evil".

Even though Machiavelli has become most famous for his work on principalities, scholars also give attention to the exhortations in his other works of political philosophy. The Discourses on Livy (composed c. 1517) has been said to have paved the way for modern republicanism. His works were a major influence on Enlightenment authors who revived interest in classical republicanism, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James Harrington. Machiavelli's philosophical contributions have influenced generations of philosophers, academics and politicians, with many of them debating the nature of his ideas.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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So far, we have considered the prince as a moral and collective person, unified by the force of the laws, and the depositary in the State of the executive power. We have now to consider this power when it is gathered together into the hands of a natural person, a real man, who alone has the right to dispose of it in accordance with the laws. Such a person is called a monarch or king. In contrast with other forms of…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The social contract & discourses
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He wrote his will with his own hand on the 19th of December, 1625. He directs that he shall be interred in St. Michael’s Church, near St. Albans: “There was my mother buried, and it is the parish church of my mansion-house at Gorhambury.... For my name and memory, I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages.” This supreme act of filial piety towards his gifted mother is…
Francis Bacon, Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients
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And what use he had of learning doth appear, or rather shine, in all his speeches and answers, being full of science and use of science, and that in all variety.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
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