• Born: 3 May 1469
• Birthplace: Florence, Italy
• Died: 22 June 1527
• Best Known As: Author of The Prince

Name at birth: Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

Machiavelli has been called the brilliant creator of modern political science by some, and a cynical beast by others; he is considered the originator of the idea of a political pragmatism that says "the end justifies the means." Either way, his 1513 book The Prince is a landmark work in the history of political power. A high-level statesman in Florence (1498-1512), he travelled on diplomatic missions throughout Europe before he was exiled by the Medicis. Imprisoned for a time, he later retired to his private estate and concentrated on studying and writing. A rumination on the acquisition and uses of power, The Prince remains a mainstay of college bookstores everywhere.

Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469-1527). Florentine political thinker, writer, and historian, and also military thinker. Although he is popularly known as a scheming political spin doctor of satanic cynicism and subtlety, an examination of Machiavelli's work in the context of the brutal politics of the Italian city states and emerging nation states of the time suggests he was merely an accomplished practitioner and advocate of realpolitik. His best-known works are The Prince (1513-16), and The Discourses (1513-19). His Art of War (1519-20) seems to have arisen from the Discourses, and from 1520 Machiavelli became preoccupied with the Florentine History. The Prince, by far the most famous, was written to gain the attention of the Medici, rulers of Florence, after Machiavelli had been dismissed from the civil service jobs—one of them that of secretary to the committee responsible for military and diplomatic affairs—he held from 1498 to 1512. It includes three short sections on military organization, dismissing mercenaries and composite armies as ‘useless’ and advocating a citizens' militia. ‘The first way to lose your state’, he tells the Prince, ‘is to neglect the art of war; the first way to win a state is to be skilled in the art of war.’

His Discourses on Livy (see Roman military historians), which inevitably included Roman military organization, led to the Art of War. A great admirer of the Romans, Machiavelli asked what had changed since Roman times which might make their exemplary military organization obsolete. There was only one real candidate: gunpowder, and the most charitable view of Machiavelli's Art of War is that it was the first-ever attempt to wrestle with the results of a technological military revolution. The book takes the form of a civilized dialogue between a group of prosperous citizens and a renowned professional soldier, Fabrizio Colonna, in the garden of Cosimo Rucellai. The superiority of citizen armies over mercenaries is asserted, and Machiavelli dismisses artillery on the battlefield as an ineffectual nuisance, which can only fire one salvo, usually inaccurately, before it is overwhelmed. Therefore, Machiavelli concludes, artillery does not prevent modern armies following the well-tried methods and close formations of ancient times. He favours swordsmen, who move nimbly among pikemen and cut them to pieces. In all this, history proved him wrong. The French had won Marignano in 1515 with firearms, and the Spanish had developed the tercio, with pikes and firearms only. None of Machiavelli's recommendations bore any relation to the subsequent evolution of weapons and tactics. He deserves recognition, however, for defining the concept of virtū, a kind of active citizenship which embodied the willingness to subordinate personal safety and interest to the good of the state. Engels thought Machiavelli was the ‘first military writer of the new epoch’. He was partly right, for if Machiavelli's regard for classical antiquity made him backward-looking, his notion of virtū has formed an important component of morale to the present day.

Bibliography

• Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Chief Works and Others, trans A. Gilbert (Duke, NC, 1965).
• Anglo, Sidney, Machiavelli (London, 1969).
• Oman, Sir Charles, The Art of War in the 16th Century (London, 1937)

— Christopher Bellamy

The Italian author and statesman Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) is best known for "The Prince", in which he enunciated his political philosophy.

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence of an aristocratic, though by no means wealthy, family. Little is known of the first half of his life, prior to his first appointment to public office. His writings prove him to have been a very assiduous sifter of the classics, especially the historical works of Livy and Tacitus; in all probability he knew the Greek classics only in translation.

In 1498 Machiavelli was named chancellor and secretary of the second (and less important) chancellery of the Florentine Republic. His duties consisted chiefly of executing the policy decisions of others, carrying on diplomatic correspondence, digesting and composing reports, and compiling minutes; he also undertook some 23 missions to foreign states. His embassies included four to the French king and two to the court of Rome. His most memorable mission is described in a report of 1503 entitled "Description of the Manner Employed by Duke Valentino [Cesare Borgia] in Slaying Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, Signor Pagolo and the Duke of Gravina, Orsini" with surgical precision he details Borgia's series of political murders, implicitly as a lesson in the art of politics for Florence's indecisive and timorous gonfalonier, Pier Soderini.

In 1502 Machiavelli married Marietta Corsini, who bore him four sons and two daughters. To his grandson Giovanni Ricci we owe the preservation of many of his letters and minor works.

In 1510 Machiavelli, inspired by his reading of Roman history, was instrumental in organizing a citizen militia of the Florentine Republic. In August 1512 a Spanish army entered Tuscany and sacked Prato. The Florentines in terror deposed Soderini, whom Machiavelli characterized as "good, but weak," and allowed the Medici to return to power. On November 7 Machiavelli was dismissed; soon afterward he was arrested, imprisoned, and subjected to torture as a suspected conspirator against the Medici. Though innocent, he remained suspect for years to come; unable to secure an appointment from the reinstated Medici, he turned to writing.

In all likelihood Machiavelli interrupted the writing of his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius to write the brief treatise on which his fame rests, II Principe (1513; The Prince). Other works followed: The Art of War and The Life of Castruccio Castracani (1520); three extant plays, Mandragola (1518; The Mandrake), Clizia, and Andria; the Istorie fiorentine (1526; History of Florence); a short story, Belfagor; and several minor works in verse and prose.

In 1526 Machiavelli was commissioned by Pope Clement VII to inspect the fortifications of Florence. Later that year and the following year his friend and critic Francesco Guicciardini, Papal Commissary of War in Lombardy, employed him in two minor diplomatic missions. He died in Florence in June 1527, receiving the last rites of the Church that he had bitterly criticized.

The Prince

Machiavelli shared with Renaissance humanists a passion for classical antiquity. To their wish for a literary and spiritual revival of ancient values, guided by such authors as Plato, Cicero, and St. Augustine, he added a fierce desire for a political and moral renewal on the model of the Roman Republic as depicted by Livy and Tacitus. Though a republican at heart, he saw as the crying need of his day a strong political and military leader who could forge a unitary state in northern Italy to eliminate French and Spanish hegemony from Italian soil. At the moment that he wrote The Prince he envisioned such a possibility while the restored Medici ruled both Florence and the papacy. He had taken to heart Cesare Borgia's energetic creation of a new state in Romagna in the few brief years while Borgia's father, Alexander VI, occupied the papal throne. The final chapter of The Princeis a ringing plea to his Medici patrons to set Italy free from the "barbarians." It concludes with a quotation from Petrarch's patriotic poem Italia mia: "Virtue will take arms against fury, and the battle will be brief; for the ancient valor in Italian hearts is not yet dead." This exhortation fell on deaf ears in 1513 but was to play a role 3 centuries later in the Risorgimento.

The preceding 25 chapters of The Prince are written in a terse, analytical, and frequently aphoristic style. Preceding political writers, from Plato and Aristotle in ancient times and through the Middle Ages and the 15th-century humanists, had all concurred in treating politics as a branch of morals. Machiavelli's chief innovation was to break with this long tradition and to confer autonomy upon politics. In chapter 15 of The Prince he writes: "My intent being to write a useful work for those who understand, it seemed to me more appropriate to pursue the actual truth of the matter than the imagination of it. Many have imagined republics and principalities which were never seen or known really to exist; because how one lives is so far removed from how one ought to live that he who abandons what one does for what one ought to do, learns rather his own ruin than his preservation." Like Galileo in astronomy at the end of the 16th century, Machiavelli in politics chooses to describe the world as it is, rather than as people are taught that it should be. Although his longest work, the Discourses on Livy, takes the familiar humanistic form of a commentary on a classical text, his approach to political theory marks a sharp break with tradition.

Fundamental to Machiavelli's conception of history and politics is the binomial of fortuna and virtù. Abandoning the Christian view of history as providential, Machiavelli views events in purely human terms. Often it is fortune that gives - or terminates - the political leader's opportunity for decisive action. Borgia, though a virtuoso politician, succumbed to an "extreme malignity of fortune" when he fell ill just as his father died. Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus alike received their occasions from fortune. Sacred history implicitly is reduced to the same plane as secular history. In some passages it seems that fortune itself hinges upon human habits and institutions: "I believe that the fortune which the Romans had would be enjoyed by all princes who proceeded as the Romans did and who were of the same virtue as they." Like others in the Renaissance, Machiavelli believed in man's capacity for determining his own destiny in opposition to the medieval concept of an omnipotent divine will or the crushing fate of the ancient Greeks. Virtù in politics - unlike Christian virtue - is an effective combination of force and shrewdness, the lion and the fox, with a touch of greatness.

The kernel of The Prince is found in chapters 17, "On Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether It Is Better To Be Loved or Feared," and 18, "How Princes Should Keep Their Word." As Machiavelli frequently says also in other works, the innate badness of men requires that the prince instill fear rather than love in his subjects and break his pledge, when necessary, with other princes, who in any case will be no more honest than he. Moralistic critics of Machiavelli have sometimes forgotten that he is attempting to describe rather than to invent the rules of political success. For him the state is an organism, greater than the sum of its citizens and individual interests, subject to laws of growth and decay; its health consists in unity, but even in the best of circumstances its longevity is limited.

The founding of a state is the work of one man; its continuance, however, is better trusted to many than to one (Discourses, I, 9 and 58). If this maxim is kept in mind, much of the alleged discrepancy between the monarchical Prince and the republican Discourses vanishes. The two books differ little in their teachings; the Discourses is more leisurely and somewhat fragmentary, The Prince more "scientific," absolute, revolutionary, and exciting. Both works are excessively exemplary; unlike Guicciardini, Machiavelli thought it possible to find in his Roman ideal a practical guide to contemporary Italian politics. Particularly in The Prince, he combines recent examples with ancient ones to illustrate his axioms.

Other Works

Certain passages in the Discourses (I, 11 and 12; II, 2) set forth Machiavelli's quarrel with the Church: by the bad example of the court of Rome, Italy has lost its devotion and religion; the Italian states are weak and divided because the Church, too feeble politically to dominate them, has nevertheless prevented any one state from uniting them. He suggests that the Church might have been destroyed by its own corruption had not St. Francis and St. Dominic restored it to its original principles by founding new orders. However, in an unusual if not unique departure from traditional anticlericalism, Machiavelli contrasts favorably the fiercely civil and militaristic pagan religion of ancient Rome with the humble and otherworldly Christian religion.

The Mandragola, the finest comedy of the Italian Renaissance, is not unrelated to Machiavelli's political writings in its comic indictment of contemporary Florentine society. In a well-knit intrigue the simpleton Nicia contributes to his own cuckolding. Nicia's beautiful and virtuous wife, Lucrezia (so named by the author with an eye to Roman history), is corrupted by those who should be her closest protectors: her mother, her husband, and her unscrupulous confessor, Fra Timoteo, all pawns in the skillful hands of the manipulator Ligurio.

Although not equaling Guicciardini as a historian, Machiavelli in his History of Florence nevertheless marks an advance over earlier histories in his attention to underlying causes rather than the mere succession of events as he tells the history of the Florentines from the death of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492.

Machiavelli closely adhered to his maxim that a servant of government must be loyal and self-sacrificing. He nowhere suggests that the political morality of princes is a model for day-to-day dealings between ordinary citizens. His reputation as a sinister and perfidious counselor of fraud is largely undeserved; it began not long after his death. His works were banned in the first printed Index (1559). In Elizabethan England, Machiavelli was represented on the stage and in literature as diabolically evil. The primary source of this misrepresentation was the translation into English by Simon Patericke in 1577 of a work popularly called Contre-Machiavel, by the French Huguenot Gentillet, who distorted Machiavelli and blamed his teachings for the St. Bartholomew Night massacre of 1572. A poem by Gabriel Harvey the following year falsely attributed four principal crimes to Machiavelli: poison, murder, fraud, and violence. Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1588) introduces "Machiavel" as the speaker of an atrocious prologue; Machiavellian villains followed in works by other playwrights.

Many of Machiavelli's authentic values are incorporated into 19th-century liberalism: the supremacy of civil over religious power; the conscription of citizen armies; the preference for republican rather than monarchical government; and the republican Roman ideals of honesty, work, and the people's collective responsibility for values that transcend those of the individual.

Further Reading

Recommended translations of Machiavelli's works are The Prince and the Discourses, translated by Luigi Ricci, E. R. P. Vincent, and Christian E. Detmold (1940); Mandragola, translated by Anne and Henry Paolucci (1957); Literary Works, edited by J. R. Hale (1961); and The Chief Works and Others, edited and translated by Allan Gilbert (3 vols., 1965). Among the many works about Machiavelli are Pasquale Villari, Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli (2 vols., 1877-1883; trans., rev. ed. 1892); Federico Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance (1926; trans. 1958); Mario Praz, Machiavelli and the Elizabethans (1928); Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance (1933); D. Erskine Muir, Machiavelli and His Times (1936); Leonardo Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist (1945); J. H. Whitfield, Machiavelli (1947); Roberto Ridolfi, The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli (1954; trans. 1963); and Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli (1966).

(1469-1527) Florentine political adviser and historian, often regarded as the first modern political theorist. After the fall of Savonarola's administration, Machiavelli became head of the Second Chancery of Florence at the age of 29. As a member of Florentine diplomatic delegations, Machiavelli became acquainted with the chief political actors of his region and time—notably, Cesare Borgia, Maximilian (the Holy Roman Emperor), and Pope Julius II. Following the invasion of Florence and restoration of the Medici family, Machiavelli was sacked and imprisoned for conspiracy. Upon his release in 1513 he sought employment as a political adviser to the new Medici Pope (Giovanni), to whom he dedicated The Prince. Political ambitions frustrated, Machiavelli turned to scholarship in the company of a group of ‘literati’ at the ‘Orti Oricellari’. During this period he wrote (among other works) three Discourses on the first ten books of Livy's history of Rome (completed in 1519). From 1521 until his death, Machiavelli devoted his attention to writing a commissioned history of Florence.

Machiavelli's main contributions to political science are to be found in The Prince and the Discourses. Both works can be seen as expounding the requirements for the maintenance of political stability in two different regimes (principalities in The Prince, republics in the Discourses), addressing similar themes, and offering similar counsel to political leaders. The primary goals of political leaders must be to sustain government, and to acquire glory, honour, and riches for the rulers and their people. The bulk of the discussion in these works is concerned with what is required of those in power in order to secure these goods. Machiavelli's answer rests on the interplay of two key classical concepts—fortune and virtú.

Machiavelli's concept of fortune is very much a Roman rather than a Christian inheritance. Fortune is not a synonym for ‘fate’ or ‘Providence’ in Machiavelli's usage. Rather, it is a ‘force’ with which a state must ‘ally’ itself in order to reap greatness. Machiavelli argues that princes (and in republics the whole citizen body) must be prepared to do whatever is necessary to preserve liberty and earn glory on behalf of the state. This is the quality of virtú. Virtú uses luck and fortune when it can, but princes who possess it can achieve great things even without luck or fortune. In an evil world, Machiavelli warns, the wise prince must recognize that it is not always prudent to act according to conventional maxims of private morality. Nothing other than necessity should dictate a prince's actions. Much of The Prince is devoted to examples (drawn largely from Machiavelli's own diplomatic experience) of the art of political leadership—princes must imitate the cunning of the fox and the brawn of the lion; they must avoid the people's hatred but sustain their awe; they must consistently project an image of nobility and virtue irrespective of their deeds; they must be prepared to be cruel. His name has become associated with the exercise of cunning and expediency.

Whereas The Prince is concerned with the qualities of princes, the Discourses place a greater emphasis on the civic demands on citizens. Machiavelli's central claim in the Discourses is that liberty is a necessary precondition for the accumulation of power and riches. The protection of liberty is therefore the fundamental political task in a republic, and requires first and foremost a citizen body of the highest ‘virtue’. What role should rulers play in a republic? Machiavelli's answer is that they should organize the polity in such a way as to promote the virtue of its citizens, and prevent its corruption (either by the substitution of private for general interests, or by creeping indifference). This requires men of great stature, exhibiting those qualities detailed in The Prince. In addition, a state can only secure its liberty through a perennial quest for dominion over other states (for which a large population, citizen militias, and strong allies are indispensable). Internally, a strong republic is characterized by a wisely designed constitution and basic institutions (ordini) whose chief function is to promote the civic patriotism required to secure liberty. Central to this project is state sponsorship of divine worship in order to inspire individuals to strive for excellence and glory. However, Machiavelli is at his most radical in urging that this utilitarian function is better fulfilled by Roman religion than by Christianity (with its enervating values of piety, humility, and general ‘other-worldliness’). Machiavelli also rejects conventional Christian affirmation of social harmony by emphasizing the instrumental value of preserving the distinction between the ‘orders’ of rich and poor. Fearing the domination of one order by the other, Machiavelli embraced the notion of a ‘mixed constitution’, neither aristocracy nor democracy, but embracing elements of both forms. Similarly, laws should be designed not only to protect the rich (e.g. prohibition on slander) as well as the masses (e.g. limitation of emergency power provisions), but to keep people poor in order to avoid the dangers of factionalism.

Machiavelli remains an impenetrable figure—as Sabine observes: ‘He has been represented as an utter cynic, an impassioned patriot, an ardent nationalist, a political Jesuit, a convinced democrat, and an unscrupulous seeker after the favor of despots.’ His work excites similar controversy. Civic republican commentators (e.g. Skinner, Pocock) see Machiavelli as part of a broader contemporary renaissance of the virtues of classical humanism. Straussians (e.g. Strauss, Mansfield), in contrast, view Machiavelli as a pivotal figure in the history of political philosophy in his elevation of ‘liberty’ above ‘nature’ as the defining object of political inquiry. To these interpreters, Machiavelli is the first modern political philosopher.

— Stewart Wood

For more information on Niccolò Machiavelli, visit Britannica.com.

Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469-1527) Florentine political philosopher, and a major presence in subsequent political philosophy. His works Il Principe (1512/13, first trs. in its entirety as The Prince, 1640, although excerpts circulated much earlier) and the Discorsi (c. 1516, trs. as Discourses) brought a new realism into the study of politics. Machiavelli's shocking contention was that although the Prince or ruler was supposed to be an embodiment of virtue and honour, yet given the way of the world, the successful ruler is only the one who acts effectively without regard to the conventional morality of actions. By seeing political organizations as organic entities subject to their own laws of development, flourishing and disintegrating in ways that owe nothing to an independent moral order, Machiavelli may also be regarded as the first sociologist.

(nēk-kōlô' mäkyävĕl'lē) , 1469–1527, Italian author and statesman, one of the outstanding figures of the Renaissance, b. Florence.

Life

A member of the impoverished branch of a distinguished family, he entered (1498) the political service of the Florentine republic and rose rapidly in importance. As defense secretary he substituted (1506) a citizens' militia for the mercenary system then prevailing in Italy. This reform sprang from his conviction, set forth in his major works, that the employment of mercenaries had largely contributed to the political weakness of Italy. Machiavelli became acquainted with power politics through his important diplomatic missions. He met Cesare Borgia twice and was sent by way of Florence to Louis XII of France (1504, 1510), to Pope Julius II (1506), and to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1507).

The Medicis' return (1512) to Florence caused his dismissal; in 1513 he was briefly imprisoned and was tortured for his alleged complicity in a plot against the Medici. Machiavelli retired to his country estate, where he wrote his chief works. He humiliated himself before the Medici in a vain attempt to recover office. When, in 1527, the republic was briefly reestablished, Machiavelli was distrusted by many of the republicans, and he died thoroughly disappointed and embittered.

Principal Writings

Machiavelli's best-known work, Il principe [the prince] (1532), describes the means by which a prince may gain and maintain his power. His “ideal” prince (seemingly modeled on Cesare Borgia) is an amoral and calculating tyrant who would be able to establish a unified Italian state. The last chapter of the work pleads for the eventual liberation of Italy from foreign rule. Interpretations of The Prince vary: it has been viewed as sincere advice, as a plea for political office, as a detached analysis of Italian politics, as evidence of early Italian nationalism, and as political satire on Medici rule. However, the adjective Machiavellian has come to be a synonym for amoral cunning and for justification by power.

Less widely read but more indicative of Machiavelli's politics is his Discorsi sulla prima deca di Tito Livio [discourses on the first 10 books of Livy] (1531). In it Machiavelli expounded a general theory of politics and government that stressed the importance of an uncorrupted political culture and a vigorous political morality. Vaster in conception than The Prince, the Discourses shows clearly Machiavelli's republican principles, which are also reflected in his Istorie Fiorentine [history of Florence] (1532), a historical and literary masterpiece, entirely modern in concept.

Other works include Dell'arte della guerra [on the art of war] (1521), which viewed military problems in relation to politics, and numerous reports and brief works. He also wrote many poems and plays, notably the lively and ribald comedy Mandragola (1524). His correspondence has been preserved and is of great interest. The chief works of Machiavelli are available in several popular English editions.

Bibliography

See P. Villari, Life and Time of Niccolò Machiavelli (2 vol., tr. 1878); H. Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (1956); S. Anglo, Machiavelli (1970); E. Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (1987); P. S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State (1989); M. Vitoli, Nocolò's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli (2000).

Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527), political theorist. Niccolò Machiavelli was born on 3 May 1469, the son of a lawyer of modest means from an old Florentine family. He received an excellent humanistic education in the classics, but nothing else is known about his early life until he was appointed head of the foreign policy chancery of the Florentine government in June and July 1498. He spent much of the next fourteen years traveling, negotiating agreements, and reporting to his government. This gave him the opportunity to visit Italian and foreign states and to observe rulers, statecraft, and military actions. He also organized and trained a militia that helped Florence reconquer the neighboring city of Pisa in 1509.

In 1512 the republican government that employed Machiavelli fell, and the Medici family came to power. Machiavelli was dismissed, and he moved to his small farm outside of Florence. Out of office, he wrote in the next fifteen years all the works that made him famous.

Machiavelli gradually worked his way into favor with the Medici by undertaking small tasks and commissions. In 1525 he became friends with the Florentine Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), a statesman and the most important historian of the Italian Renaissance. In 1526, as war neared Florence, the Medici rulers of Florence employed Machiavelli to help defend the city. But in the spring of 1527 the Florentines threw out the Medici and reestablished a republican regime. Machiavelli asked for a position in government but was turned down because of his association with the Medici. He died on 21 June 1527.

The Prince

Machiavelli wrote Il principe (The prince) in the second half of 1513, but it was not published until 1532. It is probably the best-known work in political theory of all time. Machiavelli employed the advice-to-princes genre, which usually advised a prince act honorably and to work for the good of his people and state. The Prince is a manual on how a ruler should gain and hold power. It is based on what Machiavelli had witnessed of politics and war plus reading in ancient history. He wanted to understand politics, what succeeded and what failed, what actions and principles produced a successful ruler.

Several themes dominate the work. Machiavelli believed that politics could be understood through observation, study of the past, and the application of reason to uncover rules. He endorsed the use of force against internal and external foreign enemies to achieve desired ends. He emphasized the importance of the ruler's personal ability or virtù, a combination of manipulation, boldness, and stealth that brought success. He insisted that the prince must base his actions not on what people ought to do but what they were likely to do in the pursuit of self-interest and without concern for what was morally right. He viewed the bulk of the inhabitants of the state as fickle, selfish, and easily duped. But Machiavelli also recognized that rulers were not completely masters of their own destinies, but were at the mercy of necessity and fortune. Necessity was the accumulation of adverse circumstances so great that no ruler or state could withstand it. Fortune was luck, chance, even opportunity, the unpredictable in politics. Machiavelli offered numerous examples drawn from contemporary politics and the ancient world in support of his views.

A great part of Machiavelli's appeal and influence came from his brilliant and memorable language. Numerous phrases (here paraphrased) leap from the pages to drive home his points. "It is better to be feared than to be loved." "A good man will come to ruin among so many who are not good." "The prince must learn how not to be good." "Fortune is a woman who yields to the young and the bold." "A man will sooner forget the loss of a father than the loss of his fortune."

The Discourses

The Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the first ten books of Livy) was probably written between 1515 and 1517, although some scholars believe Machiavelli began it in 1513, dropped it to write The Prince, then returned to it. He used the first part of the famous history of the Roman Republic from its foundation in 753 B.C.E. to 194 B.C.E. written by Titus Livy (59 B.C.E.–17 C.E.) as the starting point. Machiavelli offered analyses of the principles and institutions of successful, enduring republics, that is, states in which the people have greater or lesser participation in government.

In the Discourses, Machiavelli paid less attention to individuals but focused on groups, such as the nobles and the people, and especially the political, religious, and military institutions and laws needed for a successful republic. Using even more examples from the ancient world, especially Rome, and current events than he used in The Prince, he argued that a successful republic must have good laws that the people respect. Indeed governments should engender respect by severely punishing transgressors. He endorsed civil religion with the argument that ancient Roman religion strengthened the state by encouraging its inhabitants to fight for the state. By contrast, Christianity, with its ideals of humility and peace, weakened the state. Machiavelli also criticized the papacy for dividing Italy through its politics and wars.

Other Works

Machiavelli also wrote Dell'arte della guerra (1519–1520; The art of war), which discussed military organization and tactics. Machiavelli believed strongly that states should develop citizen militias, which would be much more reliable than the untrustworthy and fickle mercenary soldiers. His Istorie fiorentine (1520–1524; Florentine histories) used episodes from Florentine history to illustrate political principles and to criticize Florentine factionalism. But he carefully avoided either praising or criticizing the Medici. His play La mandragola (c. 1517; The mandrake root) is a thoroughly amoral and hilarious masterpiece. The best comedy to come from Renaissance Italy, it is still performed in the twenty-first century. He also wrote another comedy, Clizia (c. 1525), the short story Belfagor (written between 1515 and 1520), poetry, shorter historical works, numerous personal letters, plus diplomatic reports during his active political career.

Influence

Machiavelli's works had enormous influence from the moment of the printing of most of his works in 1532 through the eighteenth century. Although the Index of Prohibited Books forbade the publication, holding, or reading of all of Machiavelli's works, numerous printings and translations, some of them under fictitious names, appeared in the sixteenth century and the following centuries. And writers responded to Machiavelli because he posed the basic political question, can political success and the moral law be reconciled? The view that they could not was expressed in terms of "reason of state" (an expression Machiavelli did not use), the argument that for the good of the state a ruler or government may commit evil actions, such as killing innocent family members of political rivals, an action Machiavelli endorsed in The Prince.

The French Huguenot Innocent Gentillet (c. 1532–1588) in his Discours contre Machiavel (1576; Discourse against Machiavelli) was the first to condemn Machiavelli for separating politics from morality, although some of his political recommendations were equivocal. The term Machiavellian, meaning the use of immoral means to achieve political power, soon came into use. The English playwrights Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) and William Shakespeare (1564–1616) several times used such expressions as "murderous Machiavel." King Richard III of England (ruled 1483–1485), who lived before Machiavelli wrote, was seen as Machiavellian, because it was believed that he murdered several people in his ruthless ascent to power.

Political theorists tried to come to terms with the issues Machiavelli raised. Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) in his Della ragion di stato (1589; Reason of state), which saw many reprints and translations, argued that rulers could reconcile political ends and Christian morality, especially if the state's actions benefited religion. When in doubt, the ruler should consult his confessor. Some seventeenth-century English Puritan casuists also endorsed the principle that the state's actions in defense of true religion were morally defensible. Frederick II the Great (ruled 1740–1786), king of Prussia, did not completely condemn Machiavelli in his Anti-Machiavel (1767). Machiavelli's republican theories also influenced such English political theorists as James Harrington (1611–1677), Henry Neville (1620–1694), and Algernon Sidney (1623–1683), and perhaps the founders of the American Republic in the late eighteenth century.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Machiavelli, Niccolò. Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence. Translated and edited by James B. Atkinson and David Sices. De Kalb, Ill., 1996. Letters to and from Machiavelli revealing many aspects of his personality.

——. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. Translated by Allan Gilbert. 3 vols. Durham, N.C., 1965; reprint 1989. Good English translation.

——. The Portable Machiavelli. Edited and translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1979, with reprints. Contains complete texts of The Prince, The Mandrake Root, and other works plus substantial selections from The Discourses.

——. Tutte le opere. Edited by Mario Martelli. Florence, Italy, 1971. Best single-volume edition of Machiavelli's works.

Secondary Sources

Bireley, Robert. The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990. Discusses the anti-Machiavellian tradition.

Gilbert, Felix. Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Princeton, 1965. Best discussion of Machiavelli's thought in the context of contemporary politics and political thought.

Ridolfi, Roberto. The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli. Translated from the Italian by Cecil Grayson. Chicago, 1963. The standard biography.

—PAUL F. GRENDLER

Quotes:

"Benefits should be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better."

"It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both."

"Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied."

"The wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes."

"Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil."

"Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain."

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niccolo machiavelli