Niccolo Machiavelli is probably at one and the same time one of the
most read and one of the most widely misunderstood of any of the political
philosophers of the renaissance in Europe whose ideas are still considered
relevant and in active circulation today, indeed, as Leo Strauss has noted,
there seems to be a prevailing notion that Machiavelli's teaching was a
basically malevolent one that offers little hope for progress in
. . . the old fashioned and simple opinion according to which
Machiavelli was a teacher of evil . . . the only philosopher who has
lent the weight of his name to . . . [a] way of political thinking and
political acting . . . Callicles and Thrasymachus, who set forth the
evil doctrine . . . are Platonic characters . . . the Athenian
ambassadors who state the same doctrine . . . are Thucydidean actors.
Machiavelli proclaims openly and triumphantly a corrupting doctrine .
(Strauss 9-10)
While it is certainly true that Machiavelli was not a man overly concerned
with abstract ethical systems, neither was he evil. Indeed, as his less
read mature work, Discourses on Livy, reveals, he was a staunch and ardent
defender of the idea of the republic as the best solution for the
governance of the people. This work reveal a very different side of
Machiavelli's teaching, although, ultimately, just as in The Prince, we see
here that Machiavelli's interests lie much more deeply in pragmatic
concerns than they do in defining some abstracts system that does not in
any way, shape, or form cohere to the practical concerns of reality that
Indeed, despite their radically different character in some regards,
The Prince, written in 1513, addresses Monarchy and the Discourses on Livy,
written between 1513 and 1521, discusses the idea that "for a republic to
survive it need...