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Chapter Three analyses the Valori family's friendship with Niccolò Machiavelli. It considers Niccolò Valori's political support of Machiavelli, their common fortunes following the restoration of the Medici and how those connections became reflected in Machiavelli's historical writings. It looks at a discrepancy between passages in Machiavelli's Discorsi and a small work entitled Nature di huomini fiorentini. In the former, Machiavelli interpreted Francesco, owing to his influential combination of ambition and power, as a potential problem for republican politics, an instigator of controversial policies and a lightning‐rod around which tension and conflict was naturally attracted; in the latter, written during a period of heightened Medici power, Machiavelli interpreted Francesco as a republican patriot who subordinated his private interests to uphold the common good of the republic at all times. The chapter argues that Machiavelli was attempting to downplay his ties to the Valori family and the republican associations that alliance implied.

This chapter argues that the people must assert their necessary, salutary role as the guardian of liberty against predatory oligarchs and tyrants. It suggests that once readers appreciate that one of the most frequently quoted passages in the entire Florentine Histories occurs just a mere few paragraphs after Machiavelli has demonstrated this to be a deeply inaccurate assessment of events, they are encouraged to begin rethinking the entire relationship of words and deeds in that book—a reconsideration which reveals that Machiavelli, perhaps more often than not, seems to undermine his own expressly declared evaluative judgments throughout the entire Histories. The chapter also shows how pleasurable, perplexing, and beguiling the careful reading of Machiavelli's political writings can be.

This chapter analyzes Leo Strauss' engagement with the democratic elements of Niccolò Machiavelli's political thought; specifically, Machiavelli's self-avowed departure from the ancients in favoring the political judgment and participation of the many over the few, and in recommending the people, rather than the nobles, as the ultimate foundation for political authority. It identifies several of Strauss' misinterpretations of Machiavelli's democratic, anti-elitist republicanism and explores tensions and discrepancies within Strauss' reconstruction of Machiavelli's political-philosophical project. Furthermore, Strauss exaggerates Machiavelli's criticisms of peoples and underplays his criticisms of the nobilities within republics. Strauss marshals instances of elite-popular interactions in the Discourses that purportedly demonstrate Machiavelli's preference for elite intervention and manipulation over popular participation and judgment.

This chapter focuses on the most influential contemporary approach to the study of classical and early-modern republicanism and Niccolò Machiavelli's supposed place within that tradition—the Cambridge School of intellectual history, most prominently represented by J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. It argues that these world-renowned intellectual historians obscure important aspects of both republican and Machiavellian political thought; specifically, they largely ignore the fact that ancient and modern republicanisms secure the privileged position of elites more than they facilitate political participation by citizens. They also underplay the fact that Machiavelli's political prescriptions more substantively empower common people and more actively facilitate popular contestation of elites than did most authors and regimes that typify republicanism.

This chapter examines Niccolò Machiavelli's ideas about liberty. It considers Machiavelli's Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy (1584), which contains Machiavelli's treatment of republican liberty and is considered to be his greatest contribution to the discussion of the tensions between political power and the liberty of both the individual citizen and the community at large. Alongside the conflict between law and the liberty of the republican citizen, the chapter turns to another key point in Machiavelli's arguments about liberty—the contradictions between liberty and what he calls fortuna (good luck or good fortune). Next, the chapter studies Machiavelli's Discourses in light of the genre of the utopia, as conceived by Sir Thomas More. Finally, the chapter takes a more detailed look into Machiavelli's other famous work, The Prince (1532).

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the crucial themes within Machiavelli's three major political writings: The Prince, the Discourses and the Florentine Histories. It challenges what is considered to be misguided interpretive efforts offered by three illustrious, widely influential appraisals of the Florentine's work. Furthermore, the chapter substantiates Machiavelli's consistent advocacy for a new form of muscular, populist politics conveyed across his three greatest works. It also details how and why major interpretive schools of Machiavelli's political thought have either missed or deliberately obscured the radical extent of the Florentine's decidedly democratic form of republicanism. The chapter tackles suspect engagements with Machiavelli's political thought undertaken by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Strauss, and scholars affiliated with the Cambridge School.

This chapter demonstrates how Machiavelli's narrative of Cesare Borgia's career—to which he devotes more space than any other in The Prince—is presented as a story in which a holy father sends his son to redeem, and to bring peace to, his people. All of a sudden, religious tropes or images jump out and impose themselves on the reader in potentially subversive ways: one begins to discern the presence of the crucifixion, the transfiguration, a circumcision, a bloody sacrifice that atones for political sins, an empty tomb, even St. Paul—all of which signify Machiavelli's beliefs concerning the appropriate covenants that should characterize prince-people relationships.

This chapter indicates how, when one realizes that Machiavelli presents the Gracchi's career in the Discourses in such a way that he may be read as both endorsing and criticizing the ill-fated Roman tribunes' redistributive agenda, the reader is compelled to doggedly pursue what Machiavelli actually means when he repeatedly declares that republics must keep the public rich but the citizens poor. At the end of this interpretive expedition, one discovers a radical answer to perhaps the most controversial question within the Roman-Florentine republican tradition: political liberty requires genuine economic equality. The chapter then asserts that the people of republics ought to relate to each other as free and equal citizens—not only politically equal but socioeconomically as well.

This chapter looks at the relation between the renaissance and the conquest and mapping of the new world in terms of their impact on the theory and practice of territory. Despite how Machiavelli is often read, and translated, he did not have a concept of territory and did not see political power as pre-eminently related to land but instead we need to make sense of his ambiguous notion of lo stato. The second part of the chapter looks at the Reformation, and in particular the political writings of Erasmus, Thomas More and Martin Luther. The establishment of polities with different confessions to Catholicism produced a political as well as religious fracturing within the Holy Roman Empire. Some of these issues are worked through in the writings of Jean Bodin and Giovanni Botero; the former known for his discussions of sovereignty and the latter for the notion of reason of state. But Bodin’s work is complicated by looking at the French and Latin versions of his writings, and Botero’s writings on the city and the world also need to be interrogated. The chapter concludes with a reading of the role of property in and struggles over land in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

This chapter contends that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's analysis and appropriation of the Roman Republic deliberately undermines Machiavelli's efforts to reconstruct and promote institutions that both maximize the participation of poor citizens in popular governments and facilitate their efforts to control or contain economic and political elites. Rousseau's radical revision of Machiavelli's appropriation of the ancient Roman Republic historically served to foreclose the possibility of an alternative, popularly participatory, and anti-elitist strand of modern republicanism that in subsequent centuries would have better served democratic theory and practice. Through the promulgation of sociologically anonymous principles like generality and popular sovereignty, and by confining elite accountability to elections alone, Rousseau's institutional analyses and proposals allow wealthier citizens and magistrates to dominate the politics of popular governments in surreptitious and unassailable ways.

This concluding chapter entertains the idea of Niccolò Machiavelli possibly dismissing Leo Strauss, J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in much the same manner that he disdained “the writers” who comprised the Western tradition of ancient and medieval political thought—all of whom he considered pusillanimous propagandists for the enduring power of wealthy elites. Machiavelli often exposed the powerful forces operating throughout intellectual history that disparaged the political judgment of the people, hence prompting his own defiant, often uproarious, distancing of himself from that tradition. In this sense, the book's efforts to contest the influential interpretations of Machiavelli offered by Rousseau, the Straussian school, and the Cambridge School were intended to serve as a Machiavellian critique of Machiavelli scholarship itself.

This chapter examines the modern republican tradition and how thinkers from Niccolò Machiavelli to the authors of The Federalist conceived of the relationship and inevitable tensions between law and politics. It first provides an overview of the modern republican tradition, the various theoretical strands within it and contemporary modern neo-republicanism. It then proceeds with a discussion of how modern republicans thematise the relationship between law and politics, along with the ideas of contemporary neo-republican thinkers about the modern republican tradition. It also considers the research program initiated by the studies of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, namely, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997) and Liberty before Liberalism (1998), respectively. The chapter concludes by proposing a republican political theory that addresses the reality of pluralism and highlights points of conflict.

Francisco Seijo draws on Niccolò Machiavelli to take issue with contemporary greens who argue that radical decentralization – in the form of eco-anarchism or bioregionalism – is most conducive to ecological sustainability. Machiavelli sees changing fortune as destabilizing the conditions for peaceful coexistence among small polities and providing an impetus for political expansion. Drawing on lessons from Machiavelli’s account of Rome, Seijo argues that the challenges of security and large-scale ecological problems make a loose, federative partnership between a large central government and its constituent smaller polities superior to radical decentralization. However, Seijo rejects Machiavelli’s emphasis on expansion as violating notions of ecological limits and ultimately finds a federative model in Elinor Ostrom’s call for multi-level governance of common pool resources.

This chapter studies the political thought of Justus Lipsius, a moral and political thinker as well as the author of the two-volume philosophical dialogue De constantia (1583) and the six-volume Politica (1589). The chapter explores the scholarship surrounding Lipsius and the historical significance of his works and investigates his connections to Neostoicism. It then embarks on a discussion of the connection between Lipsius's political thought and that of Machiavelli, particularly as revealed in the latter's The Prince (1532). The chapter argues that Machiavelli and Lipsius disagree on the ends of political action: Lipsius's prince aims at serving the common good, understood in terms of the security and welfare of the subject population; Machiavelli's prince acts to secure his own glory.

Strauss identified Machiavelli as the originator of modern political philosophy, and frequently wrote on him. One of his writings was the essay on Machiavelli in the second and later editions of History of Political Philosophy, where Strauss paired that essay with another he had written on Marsilius of Padua. Marsilius and Machiavelli faced similar situations– the theological-political order of late medieval times in Italy. But one reacted in a way that remained within the classical tradition of political philosophy, while the other went beyond and ushered in that new “kind of thought which is philosophic indeed but no longer Greek: modern philosophy.” It is as though Marsilius and Machiavelli came to the same crossroads, Marsilius veering back toward classical political philosophy, and Machiavelli heading off toward that new moral continent Strauss called modernity. These twin essays reveal especially well just how Strauss understood the nature of modernity.

This chapter studies Henry Neville's Plato redivivus (Plato reborn, 1681), a work that continued the discussion of republican rule under the influence of a reading of Machiavelli. It compares and contrasts Neville's work with that of another work referencing Machiavelli's republicanism in the years of the commonwealth governed by Oliver Cromwell in seventeenth-century Britain—James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). Specifically, this chapter seeks to argue that Neville's book is different from Harrington's Oceana in both kind and content, and that it needs to be read carefully for its own sake and not just as an appendix to Harrington's text.

This introductory chapter shows how Niccolò Machiavelli's account of a new Rome points to the tremendous impact that he believes Christianity has had and can have on politics. In order to overcome the politically deleterious consequences of Christianity and the pagan beliefs that engendered it, as well as to forestall the rise of another tyranny of its magnitude, Machiavelli appeals to certain Christian doctrines to support his vision of an earthly discipline that exercises the strength that he views as essential to sustain political life. In so doing, he creates a wholly temporal interpretation of Christianity. Furthermore, the argument that he infuses his presentation of Livy's Rome with a temporal form of Christianity that can fortify political life allows this chapter to account for several otherwise puzzling and controversial features of Machiavelli's work. His many changes in Livy's history can be seen as a conscious—indeed, an acknowledged—attempt to mask his innovations as a recourse to antiquity. His divergences from Livy reveal an innovation that, if successful, will establish a new epoch.

This chapter argues for reading the Prince both rhetorically and historically as the product of multiple desires on the part of its exiled, unemployed author: to obtain employment for him as privy counsellor to the Medici family; to persuade the Medici pope, Leo X, to provide the unifying impetus that Italy needs to fend off French and Spanish invaders, and, finally, to offer more general rules of conduct for the founder of a new state. The key in each case is the reconciliation of two forms of “virtù”—the physical power of autonomous arms and the intellectual foresight (prudence) which dictates when and how to use such arms in order to overcome obstacles presented by “fortuna”. The two categories appear in the famous animal imagery of the fox and the lion (Chapter 15), betraying Machiavelli's literary indebtedness to Dante (and Cicero), as well as dramatizing his (hoped for) relationship to Leo, the pope with an animal's name. The chapter concludes with a reading of the last two chapters of the treatise to suggest Machiavelli's recognition and acknowledgment of the “utopian” character of a politics which claims to adhere strictly to “la verità effettuale delle cose” (the effectual truth of things).

This chapter examines the few references to Machiavelli in The Spirit of the Laws to reveal the extent and depth of Montesquieu’s engagement with the Florentine thinker. Although Montesquieu equivocally acknowledges his predecessor’s eminent status by calling him a great man, it becomes clear that he attributes to Machiavelli a dangerous political prejudice that has taken root, among other places, in France’s royal family. This chapter makes clear, however, that Montesquieu is no conventional anti-Machiavelli. He finds cause for concern not only in the notorious teachings of The Prince, but also in the severe republicanism that Machiavelli promotes in the Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli’s unreserved admiration for early Rome — including its unchecked accusations, collective judgments, and harsh penalties — blatantly conflicts with the principles of criminal judgment that Montesquieu advances in The Spirit of the Laws. Indeed, Montesquieu associates many of the tenets of Machiavelli’s republicanism with despotic rule. Nowhere is this odious connection more apparent than in Machiavelli’s recommendation of fear as a political instrument. This chapter also expounds Montesquieu’s cure for Machiavellianism in his proposal for a middle way that is consonant with both political liberty and true greatness.