machiavellian essay questions

Machiavelli Essay Questions—The Prince

1.        Machiavelli notes that by destroying the weaker powers King Louis made a dangerous mistake. However, if a state is striving for dominance, aren’t demonstrations of power necessary to appease the people and also warn enemies?  (Julie Kim)

2.        Machiavelli’s war-disease analogy seems to justify preemptive warfare.  Do you agree with his worldview?  (Esther Schoenfeld)

3.        Machiavelli seems to have no concern for justice whatsoever; he is only concerned about maintaining power. In light of our past discussions about justice, however, how do you view the assertion that “there is no surer way of keeping possession than by devastation?” (Allegra Wiprud)

4.        Is practicality always the best policy?  (Maaz Tambra)

5.        Do you agree that “there is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others?” Is war a necessity?  (Daniel Frankel)

6.        What do we expect from new rulers when they are chosen today? How important is change?  (Omika Jikaria)

7.        Machiavelli advocates the use of settlements rather than armed troops to exert a foreign nation’s influence upon another. Is this good advice? In particular, think about Israel’s settlements in the West Bank. Does this pacify the Palestinians or inflame tensions?  (Jacob Sunshine)

8.        Machiavelli says “whoever is responsible for another’s becoming powerful ruins himself.” Do you agree with this? What does it say about the value of allies?  (Sharada Sridhar)

9.        Would Machiavelli approve of U.S. foreign policy?  (Anna Gordan)

10.    Does Machiavelli’s merciless desire to keep enemies down hold in a global society with multinational police institutions like the U.N?  (Phillip Yuen)

1.        Can a criminal today become president? Is it easier or more difficult for those in power to commit crimes?  (Taha Ahsin)

2.        Machiavelli says unarmed prophets fail. Would he also say that the principle of civil disobedience is not an effective way to achieve political change?  (Sandesh Kataria)

3.        What is the ultimate goal of the Machiavellian prince? Is it worthwhile?  (Dominika Burek)

4.        Can cruelty be used “well?” If “those who use [cruelty well] can, with God and with men, somehow enhance their position”—do immoral means justify moral ends?  (Cassie Moy)

5.        Machiavelli states that “without opportunity, the virtue of their spirit would have been extinguished.” This clashes with the American sentiment that with hard work, one can achieve anything. Is Machiavelli’s vision outdated, or is it still true today?  (Masha Gindler)

6.        “Therefore one must urgently arrange matters so that when they no longer believe they can be made to believe by force.” Should efficiency in government be sacrificed for democratic ideals?  (Paul Lee)

7.        Machiavelli says “the less a man has relied on fortune, the stronger he has made his position.” Is this still applicable to our government?  (Tammuz Huberman)

8.        Are Agathocles and Oliverotto models of our perfectly unjust man?  (Allegra Wiprud)

9.        What do you make of the story about Agathocles? Can cruelty ever be used well, as Machiavelli says it may be?  (Sarah Kaplan)

10.    Does using past examples to prove his points make Machiavelli right? Or should we side with Plato and condemn Machiavelli’s use of particulars?  (Matthew Solomon)

11.    How large a role, if any, should morality play in foreign policy?  (Esther Schoenfeld)

12.    “Men do you harm either because they fear you or because they hate you.” Do you agree?  (Kai Sam Ng)

13.    “Whoever believes that with great men new services wipe out old injuries deceives himself.” Does this mean that reconciliation is never possible? What implications does this have for world leaders today?  (Casey Griffin)

14.    Machiavelli does condone unnecessary violence and criminality on the part of princes. How was his reputation for moral decrepitude, and the decidedly negative connotation of “Machiavellian” arrived at?  (Evan Smith)

1.        What is the end goal of Machiavelli obtaining these principalities and land? Can this be translated into today’s modern system of power?   (Taha Ahsin)

2.        How does Machiavelli’s idea of what constitutes a “good law” differ from that of other philosophers we have read? Which leads to a more successful state? (Julia Kaplan)

3.        “When things are quiet, everyone dances attendance, everyone makes promises, and everybody would die for him so long as death is far off.  But in times of adversity, when the state has need of its citizens, there are few to be found.” Does this hold true today? Is this true of America? (Maaz Tambra)

4.        Machiavelli argues that low expectations are the greatest advantage, because “when man receive favors from someone they expected to do them ill, they are under greater obligation to their benefactor.” Do you agree? (Claire Littlefield)

5.        “Princes… rule either directly or through magistrates. In the latter case, their position is weaker and more dangerous…” Does bureaucracy weaken the power of the sovereign? (Kai Sam Ng)

6.        Can Machiavelli’s critique of the use of mercenaries be likened to our own use of military contractors in places like Iraq and Afghanistan? If so, does it mean that out use of these contractors is ultimately detrimental to our goals in these wars? (Anna Gordan)

7.        How does a prince find balance between doing favors for his people and making reasonable laws? (Sandesh Kataria)

8.        In this day and age of centralized governments and large states, do Machiavelli’s arguments about controlling a small city-state still prevail? (Jacob Sunshine)

9.        Given Machiavelli’s opinions on mercenary armies, how would we feel about how t he United States Armed Forces is composed today? Specifically, would he have an opinion on the fact that expedited citizenship is offered to immigrants who perform military service? (Lily Ostrer)

10.    Is the United States a strong state in Machiavelli’s terms? (Tousif Ahsan)

11.    Many of Machiavelli’s theories seem to coincide with why wars were won and lost even after he dies. Does one simply have to follow his ideas to get to the top? (Marley Lindsey)

12.    Do you think that Machiavelli believes in God? If he does, how can he reconcile his philosophy with theology? (Sarah Kaplan)

13.    Is being the Prince truly worth all the emotional and mental trouble? (Sharada Sridhar)

14.    Do you agree with the idea that good laws cannot exist without good armies? Can the two ever be independent of one another? (Omika Jikaria)

1.        Does democracy doom politicians to generosity? Are government entitlements an example of destructive generosity?   (Claire Littlefield)

2.        Machiavelli says that “Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist;  the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done moves towards self destruction rather than self preservation.” Is idealism a fault? What does this mean for the writings of Plato, Augustine and Aquinas?  (Sarah Kaplan)

3.        Machiavelli claims that men are “ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers” who “shun danger and are greedy for profit” and “who sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.” Do you agree with this characterization of mankind?  (Sarah Kaplan)

4.        Can a person gain power while acting virtuously?  (Casey Griffin)

5.        Can a state be injured by constantly remaining on guard, even against the benefits which allies can bring? Are other opportunities lost due to a lack of trust?  (Julie Kim)

6.        Is the very start of Chapter XV a concealed criticism of Plato?  (Anna Gordan)

7.        What would Machiavelli think of Cincinnatus, the Roman who gave up his power in times of peace instead of preparing for the next war?  (Max Blitzer)

8.        How would Plato respond to Machiavelli’s criticism that a virtuous life “moves toward self-destruction?” What do you think?  (Esther Schoenfeld)

9.        Is diplomacy only reserved for those who can afford the alternative?  (Tousif Ahsan)

10.    Is there something morally wrong with lending a country’s troops to another country?  (Matthew Solomon)

11.    Machiavelli has previously stated that a prince must be willing and able to eliminate former allies, and here states that allies are ultimately harmful in war. Can true alliances or friendships exist without jealousy or rivalry?  (Allegra Wiprud)

12.    Is there any room for morality in Machiavelli’s city?  (Masha Gindler)

13.    Does being skilled in the art of war allow one to govern properly as a ruler?  (Michael Huang)

1.        Would you rather be feared or loved? (Marley Lindsey)

2.        Is the prince’s main goal to keep order in the state (much like Plato’s conception of the perfect city) or does he aspire to give all individuals the best life? How do power and order clash with individualism? (Jacob Sunshine)

3.        “A prince… cannot observe all those things which give men a reputation for virtue, because in order to maintain his state he is often forced to act in defiance of good faith.” Do you agree? (Matthew Solomon)

4.        Is there room for true compassion in politics or can nothing be free from calculation? (Allegra Wiprud)

5.        “Fear is quite compatible with the absence of hatred.” Do you agree? (Casey Griffin)

6.        How do Aristotle and Machiavelli’s political animals compare and which is bound to be more successful? (Daniel Frankel)

7.        Must a prince overcome adversity in order to be great? If this is the case, does greatness depend more on the individual or circumstance? (Sarah Kaplan)

8.        Do Machiavellian conclusions lead to relativism? (Kai Sam Ng)

9.        Machiavelli mentions that one of the despised traits in a ruler is effeminacy. Though societal attitudes towards women have changed greatly, there are still many similarities to Machiavelli’s day. Does the aversion to effeminacy explain why there are very few female heads of state? Or do any other requirements in a ruler that Machiavelli mentions require an explanation? (Lily Ostrer)

10.    Because of Hannibal’s cruelty, “the historians… on the one hand admire what [he] achieved, and on the other hand condemn what made those achievements possible.” How do we evaluate our leaders? Do the ends justify the means? (Claire Littlefield)

11.    Is there aesthetic value to being a great leader? Should aesthetics be considered on the same level as virtue? (Esther Schoenfeld)

12.    Does true love or friendship exist? Or is love what Machiavelli defines it to be: “a bond of gratitude which men, wretched creatures they are, break when it is there advantage to do so?” (Tammuz Huberman)

13.    “Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.” Are all people not who they appear to be? (Angela Han)

1.        Would you rather live under the Prince or the Republic? (Maaz Tambra)

2.        “If everyone can speak the truth then you lose respect.” Is this true? (Casey Griffin)

3.        Even though Machiavelli endorses ruthlessness towards others to gain power, he still has some reservations, whether on the grounds of aesthetics or virtú . Why does he have these reservations? (Kai Sam Ng)

4.        If a lot of the things Machiavelli writes are self-evident, why is the term “Machiavellian” pejorative? (Kai Sam Ng)

5.        Throughout The Prince, Machiavelli advocates warfare, violence, cruelty and deceit. Does his impassioned plea for a unified Italy make you see him in a more sympathetic light? (Esther Schoenfeld)

6.        Do you agree that “it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half of the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves?” (Julia Kaplan)

7.        “…this is a common failing of mankind, never to anticipate a storm when the sea is calm.” Do you agree? (Anna Gordan)

8.        Have the requirements for governing society changed since Machiavelli’s time? What would need to be updated for such a manual for the prince in the modern day? (Lily Ostrer)

9.        Is caution a vice? (Sarah Kaplan)

10.    Is it not more practical to watch two warring countries fight while staying neutral, waiting for an opportunity, rather than choosing a side? (Michael Huang)

11.    What do you think of Machiavelli’s reason for the Prince to exist? Is stability that important, especially if the ruler sacrifices people’s rights? Do the ends justify the means? (Matthew Solomon)

12.    Has Machiavelli convinced you of his virtue? Do you still see being Machiavellian with a somewhat negative connotation? (Marley Lindsey)

13.    “…men are won over by the present far more than by the past.” Do you agree? (Angela Han)

• Richard III

William Shakespeare

• Literature Notes
• Essay Questions
• Play Summary
• About Richard III
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Character Analysis
• Richard, Duke of Gloucester, afterward Richard III
• Henry, Earl of Richmond, afterward Henry VII
• George, Duke of Clarence
• Henry, Duke of Buckingham
• Queen Margaret of Anjou
• William, Lord Hastings
• Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby
• Queen Elizabeth
• The Duchess of York
• William Shakespeare Biography
• Critical Essay
• Date, Style and Theme in Richard III
• Cite this Literature Note

Study Help Essay Questions

1.  What characteristics peculiar to the Machiavellian villain-hero are revealed in Gloucester's first soliloquy, Act I, Scene 1?

2.  Richard is early referred to as a "hedgehog" and later repeatedly as the "boar." What is the significance of this appellation?

3.  In the introduction, reference is made to Senecan elements in this play. What is one example each as regards (a) style, (b) character, (c) theme, and (d) tragic elements?

4.  In what way are the two wooing scenes (I. ii and IV. iv) similar to each other? How do they differ?

5.  What dramatic purpose is served by such minor characters as the three London citizens and the scrivener?

6.  Keeping in mind the major theme of this play, how can you account for the fact that the villain-hero flourishes for such a relatively long time?

7.  Why is Queen Margaret's appearance in this play unexpected? How do you account for it?

8.  What is the first indication that Richard's fortunes, which have been in the ascendant, have reached a turning point? What do you consider to be the climax of the play?

9.  George Bernard Shaw insisted that Richard was a splendid comedian. What can be said in support or in refutation of this opinion?

10.  According to a long-lived theory, tragedy evokes the tragic emotions of pity as well as fear. What scenes are especially notable for arousing our sense of pity?

11.  "In Buckingham we have an admirable foil to Richard." How may one defend this statement?

12.  What is meant by dramatic irony? Illustrate your definition by three examples from this play, each differing with regard to the person or persons concerned.

13.  Especially since this play is based upon chronicle history, considerable knowledge of antecedent action is needed. Shakespeare does not choose to use a prologue to provide such information. Exactly how, and by whom, is it provided?

14.  Since the major theme of this play is God's vengeance visited upon those guilty of heinous crimes, how can one explain the deaths of the queen's kinsmen, Hastings, and the little princes?

15.  When the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth berate King Richard in Act IV, scene iv, he exclaims: "Let not the Heavens hear these telltale women / Rail on the Lord's anointed." Is this another example of Richard's hypocrisy? Or can he properly call himself the Lord's anointed?

16.  Both Richard and Richmond use the name St. George as a battle cry. Why is this appropriate in both instances? Why is it nevertheless ironic that Richard should use the name of St. George?

17.  What justification does Richmond have for identifying himself as "God's Captain?"

18.  Aside from his "timorous dreams" reported by Anne, what evidence do you find that Richard has begun his descent on Fortune's Wheel?

19.  Why is it appropriate that Buckingham should not survive to aid Richmond?

20.  In what ways do Lord Stanley (Derby) and Lord Hastings provide an interesting contrast?

21.  How does Shakespeare succeed in centralizing the conflict in this play and thus achieve a superior chronicle history play which is also a tragedy?

22.  Shakespeare develops the major theme of  Richard III  with unstinted use of the supernatural. What are four examples? Which do you find to be most effective?

23.  With reference to the proposal of marriage of her daughter, how may the Queen-Mother Elizabeth's apparent changeableness and double-dealing be explained?

24.  More than one reference is made to Jane Shote in this play, although she does not make her appearance. Who was she? In absentia, what does she contribute to the action?

25.  On his way to his death, Lord Rivers exclaims against Pomfret, calling it a "bloody prison." Is this to be explained only by reference to his own impending fate? Exactly why is Pomfret truly a "bloody prison"?

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Niccolò Machiavelli

Why Machiavelli? That question might naturally and legitimately occur to anyone encountering an entry about him in an encyclopedia of philosophy. Certainly, Machiavelli contributed to a large number of important discourses in Western thought—political theory most notably, but also history and historiography, Italian literature, the principles of warfare, and diplomacy. But Machiavelli never seems to have considered himself a philosopher—indeed, he often overtly rejected philosophical inquiry as beside the point—nor do his credentials suggest that he fits comfortably into standard models of academic philosophy. His writings are maddeningly and notoriously unsystematic, inconsistent and sometimes self-contradictory. He tends to appeal to experience and example in the place of rigorous logical analysis. Yet there are good reasons to include Machiavelli among the greatest of political philosophers, some of which are internal to his writings. In spite of the temptation to emphasize his political pragmatism, a lively scholarly debate rages about the presence of a coherent and original philosophy, addressed to topics of concern to philosophers, at the core of his thought (Benner 2009; Zuckert 2017, 2018; Baluch 2018; Bogiaris 2021).

Moreover, succeeding thinkers who more obviously qualify as philosophers of the first rank did (and still do) feel compelled to engage with his ideas, either to dispute them or to incorporate his insights into their own teachings. Even if Machiavelli grazed at the fringes of philosophy, the impact of his extensive musings has been widespread and lasting. The terms “Machiavellian” or “Machiavellism” find regular purchase among philosophers concerned with a range of ethical, political, and psychological phenomena, regardless of whether or not Machiavelli himself invented “Machiavellism” (a term apparently coined by Pierre Bayle in the seventeenth century) or was in fact a “Machiavellian” in the sense commonly ascribed to him. Machiavelli’s critique of utopian philosophical schemes (such as those of Plato) challenges an entire tradition of political philosophy in a manner that commands attention and demands consideration and response. Finally, a new generation of so-called “neo-Roman” political theorists (such as Philip Pettit [1997], Quentin Skinner [1998] and Maurizio Viroli [1999 [2002]]) finds inspiration in Machiavelli’s version of republicanism. Thus, Machiavelli deserves a place at the table in any comprehensive survey of political philosophy.

1. Biography

2. the prince : analyzing power, 3. power, virtù , and fortune, 4. morality, religion, and politics, 5. the state and the prince: language and concepts, 6. the discourses on livy : liberty and conflict, 7. popular liberty and popular speech, 8. the character of republican leaders, 9. machiavelli’s place in western thought, primary sources in italian, primary sources in english translation, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Relatively little is known for certain about Machiavelli’s early life in comparison with many important figures of the Italian Renaissance (the following section draws on Capponi 2010; Vivanti 2013; Celenza 2015; Lee 2020) He was born 3 May 1469 in Florence and at a young age became a pupil of a renowned Latin teacher, Paolo da Ronciglione. It is speculated that he attended the University of Florence, and even a cursory glance at his corpus reveals that he received an excellent humanist education. It is only with his entrance into public view, with his appointment in 1498 as the Second Chancellor of the Republic of Florence, however, that we begin to acquire a full and accurate picture of his life. For the next fourteen years, Machiavelli engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity on behalf of Florence, traveling to the major centers of Italy as well as to the royal court of France and to the imperial curia of Maximilian.

Florence had been under a republican government since 1494, when the leading Medici family and its supporters had been driven from power. After four years under Savonarola’s leadership (and eventual downfall), the Florentine Republic sought more stable government and reformed its institutions accordingly. During this time, Machiavelli entered public service and thrived under the patronage of the city’s gonfaloniere (or chief administrator) for life, Piero Soderini, who was elected to that position in 1502. In his official capacities, Machiavelli travelled considerably, producing a large body of dispatches (known as the Legations ) reporting on events across Europe. He also composed personal correspondence, poetic works, and short political analyses (Nederman 2023). In 1512, however, with the assistance of Spanish and papal troops, the Medici defeated the republic’s civic militia (which Machiavelli had organized) and dissolved its government. Machiavelli was a direct victim of the regime change: he was immediately dismissed from office and, when he was (wrongly) suspected of conspiring against the Medici, was imprisoned and tortured for several weeks in early 1513. His retirement thereafter to his family farm outside of Florence afforded the occasion and the impetus for him to turn to intellectual pursuits.

The first of his writings in a more reflective vein was also ultimately the one most commonly associated with his name, The Prince . Penned at the end of 1513 (and perhaps early 1514), but only published posthumously in 1532, The Prince was composed in haste by an author who, among other things, sought to regain his status in Florentine political affairs. (Many of his colleagues in the previous republican government were quickly rehabilitated and returned to service under the Medici.) Originally written for presentation to Giuliano de’Medici (who may well have appreciated it), the dedication was changed, upon Giuliano’s death, to Lorenzo de’Medici (the Younger), who almost certainly did not read it when it came into his hands in 1516.

Meanwhile, Machiavelli’s retirement from politics led him to other literary activities. He wrote verse, plays, and short prose, authored a study of The Art of War (published in 1521), and produced biographical and historical sketches. Most importantly, he composed his other major contribution to political thought, the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy , an exposition of the principles of republican rule masquerading as a commentary on the work of the famous historian of the Roman Republic. Unlike The Prince , the Discourses was written over a long period of time (commencing perhaps in 1514 or 1515 and completed in 1518 or 1519, although again only published posthumously in 1531). The book may have been shaped by informal discussions attended by Machiavelli among some of the leading Florentine intellectual and political figures under the sponsorship of Cosimo Rucellai.

Near the end of his life, and probably as a result of the aid of well-connected friends whom he never stopped badgering for intervention, Machiavelli began to return to the favor of the Medici family. In 1520, he was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’Medici to compose a history of Florence (the so-called Florentine Histories ), an assignment completed in 1525 and presented to the Cardinal, who had since ascended to the papal throne as Clement VII, in Rome. Other small tasks were forthcoming from the Medici government, but before the opportunity arose for him to return fully to public life, he died on 21 June 1527.

Traditionally, political philosophers of the past posited a special relationship between moral goodness and legitimate authority. Many authors (especially those who composed mirror-of-princes books or royal advice books during the Middle Ages and Renaissance) believed that the use of political power was only rightful if it was exercised by a ruler whose personal moral character was strictly virtuous. Thus rulers were counseled that if they wanted to succeed—that is, if they desired a long and peaceful reign and aimed to pass their office down to their heirs—they must be sure to behave in accordance with conventional ethical standards, that is, the virtues and piety. In a sense, it was thought that rulers did well when they did good; they earned the right to be obeyed and respected on account of their moral and religious rectitude (see Briggs and Nederman 2022).

Machiavelli criticized at length precisely this moralistic view of authority in his best-known treatise, The Prince . For Machiavelli, there is no moral basis on which to judge the difference between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. Rather, authority and power are essentially coequal: whoever has power has the right to command; but goodness does not ensure power and the ruler has no more authority on account of being good. Thus, in direct opposition to morally derived theories of politics, Machiavelli says that the only real concern in politics is the acquisition and maintenance of power (although he talks less about power per se than about “maintaining the state”). In this sense, Machiavelli presents a trenchant criticism of the concept of authority by arguing that the notion of legitimate rights of rulership adds nothing to the actual possession of power. The Prince purports to reflect the self-conscious political realism of an author who is fully aware—on the basis of direct experience in the service of the Florentine government—that goodness and right are not sufficient to win and maintain political supremacy. Machiavelli thus seeks to learn and teach the rules of political power. For him, it necessary for any successful ruler to know how to use power effectively. Only by means of its proper application, Machiavelli believes, can individuals be brought to obey and will the ruler be able to maintain the state in safety and security.

Machiavelli’s political theory, then, excludes issues of moral authority and legitimacy from consideration in the discussion of political decision-making and political judgment. Nowhere does this come out more clearly than in his treatment of the relationship between law and force. Machiavelli acknowledges that good laws and good arms constitute the dual foundations of a well-ordered political system. But he immediately adds that since coercion creates legality, he will concentrate his attention on force. He says, “Since there cannot be good laws without good arms, I will not consider laws but speak of arms” ( Prince CW 47). In other words, valid law rests entirely upon the threat of coercive force; authority is impossible for Machiavelli as a right apart from the power to enforce it. Machiavelli is led to conclude that fear is always preferable to affection in subjects, just as violence and deception are superior to legality in effectively controlling them. He observes that

one can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit…. Love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes. ( Prince CW 62; translation revised)

As a result, Machiavelli cannot really be said to have a theory of obligation separate from the imposition of power; people obey only because they fear the consequences of not doing so, whether the loss of life or of privileges. And of course, power alone cannot bind one, inasmuch as obligation is voluntary and assumes that one can meaningfully do otherwise. Someone can choose not to obey only if he possesses the power to resist the ruler or is prepared to risk the consequences of the state’s superiority of coercive force.

Machiavelli’s argument in The Prince is thus designed to demonstrate that politics can only properly be defined in terms of the effective employment of coercive power, what Yes Winter (2018) has termed “the orders of violence.” Authority as a right to command has no independent status. He substantiates this assertion by reference to the observable realities—historical and contemporary—of political affairs and public life as well as by arguments revealing the self-interested tendencies of all human conduct. For Machiavelli it is meaningless and futile to speak of any claim to the authority to command detached from the possession of superior political power. The ruler who lives by his supposed rights alone will surely wither and die by those same rights, because in the rough-and-tumble of political conflict those who prefer power to authority are more likely to succeed. Without exception the authority of states and their laws will never be acknowledged when they are not supported by a show of power which renders obedience inescapable.

Machiavelli presents to his readers a vision of political rule allegedly purged of extraneous moralizing influences and fully aware of the foundations of politics in the effective exercise of power. The methods for achieving obedience are varied and depend heavily upon the foresight that the prince exercises. Hence, the successful ruler needs special training. The term that best captures Machiavelli’s vision of skill that must be learned in order to engage successfully in power politics is virtù . While the Italian word would normally be translated into English as “virtue”, and would ordinarily convey the conventional connotation of moral goodness, Machiavelli obviously means something very different when he refers to the virtù of the prince. In particular, Machiavelli employs the concept of virtù to refer to the range of personal qualities that the prince will find it necessary to acquire in order to “maintain his state” and to “achieve great things”, the two standard markers of power for him. This makes it brutally clear there can be no equivalence between the conventional virtues and Machiavellian virtù . Machiavelli’s sense of what it is to be a person of virtù can thus be summarized by his recommendation that the prince above all else must possess a “flexible disposition”. That ruler is best suited for office, on Machiavelli’s account, who is capable of varying her/his conduct from good to evil and back again “as fortune and circumstances dictate” ( Prince CW 66; see Nederman and Bogiaris 2018).

Not coincidentally, Machiavelli also uses the term virtù in his book The Art of War in order to describe the strategic prowess of the general who adapts to different battlefield conditions as the situation dictates. Machiavelli sees politics to be a sort of a battlefield on a different scale. Hence, the prince just like the general needs to be in possession of virtù , that is, to know which strategies and techniques are appropriate to what particular circumstances (Wood 1967). Thus, virtù winds up being closely connected to Machiavelli’s notion of the power. The ruler of virtù is bound to be competent in the application of power; to possess virtù is indeed to have mastered all the rules connected with the effective application of power. Virtù is to power politics what conventional virtue is to those thinkers who suppose that moral goodness is sufficient to be a legitimate ruler: it is the touchstone of political efficacy.

What is the conceptual link between virtù and the effective exercise of power for Machiavelli? The answer lies with another central Machiavellian concept, Fortuna (usually translated as “fortune”). Fortuna is the enemy of political order, the ultimate threat to the safety and security of the state. Machiavelli’s use of the concept has been widely debated without a very satisfactory resolution. Suffice it to say that, as with virtù , Fortuna is employed by him in a distinctive way. Where conventional representations treated Fortuna as a mostly benign, if fickle, goddess, who is the source of human goods as well as evils, Machiavelli’s fortune is a malevolent and uncompromising fount of human misery, affliction, and disaster. While human Fortuna may be responsible for such success as human beings achieve, no man can act effectively when directly opposed by the Goddess ( Discourses CW 407–408).

Machiavelli’s most famous discussion of Fortuna occurs in Chapter 25 of The Prince , in which he proposes two analogies for understanding the human situation in the face of events. Initially, he asserts that fortune resembles

one of our destructive rivers which, when it is angry, turns the plains into lakes, throws down the trees and buildings, takes earth from one spot, puts it in another; everyone flees before the flood; everyone yields to its fury and nowhere can repel it.

Yet the furor of a raging river does not mean that its depredations are beyond human control: before the rains come, it is possible to take precautions to divert the worst consequences of the natural elements. “The same things happen about Fortuna ”, Machiavelli observes,

She shows her power where virtù and wisdom do not prepare to resist her and directs her fury where she knows that no dykes or embankments are ready to hold her. ( Prince CW 90)

Fortune may be resisted by human beings, but only in those circumstances where “ virtù and wisdom” have already prepared for her inevitable arrival.

Machiavelli reinforces the association of Fortuna with the blind strength of nature by explaining that political success depends upon appreciation of the operational principles of Fortuna . His own experience has taught him that

it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because Fortuna is a woman and it is necessary, in order to keep her under, to beat and maul her.

In other words, Fortuna demands a violent response of those who would control her. “She more often lets herself be overcome by men using such methods than by those who proceed coldly”, Machiavelli continues, “therefore always, like a woman, she is the friend of young men, because they are less cautious, more spirited, and with more boldness master her” ( Prince CW 92). The wanton behavior of Fortuna demands an aggressive, even violent response, lest she take advantage of those men who are too retiring or “effeminate” to dominate her.

Machiavelli’s remarks point toward several salient conclusions about Fortuna and her place in his intellectual universe. Throughout his corpus, Fortuna is depicted as a primal source of violence (especially as directed against humanity) and as antithetical to reason. Thus, Machiavelli realizes that only preparation to pose an extreme response to the vicissitudes of Fortuna will ensure victory against her. This is what virtù provides: the ability to respond to fortune at any time and in any way that is necessary.

These basic building blocks of Machiavelli’s thought have induced considerable controversy among his readers going back to the sixteenth century, when he was denounced as an apostle of the Devil, but also was read and applied sympathetically by authors (and politicians) enunciating the doctrine of “reason of state” (Meinecke 1924 [1957]). The main source of dispute concerned Machiavelli’s attitude toward conventional moral and religious standards of human conduct, mainly in connection with The Prince . For many, his teaching endorses immoralism or, at least, amoralism. The most extreme versions of this reading find Machiavelli to be a “teacher of evil”, in the famous words of Leo Strauss (1958: 9–10), on the grounds that he counsels leaders to avoid the common values of justice, mercy, temperance, wisdom, and love of their people in preference to the use of cruelty, violence, fear, and deception. A more moderate school of thought, associated with Benedetto Croce (1925), views Machiavelli as simply a “realist” or a “pragmatist” advocating the suspension of commonplace ethics in matters of politics. Moral values have no place in the sorts of decisions that political leaders must make, and it is a category error of the gravest sort to think otherwise. Perhaps the mildest version of the amoral hypothesis has been proposed by Quentin Skinner (1978), who claims that the ruler’s commission of acts deemed vicious by convention is a “last best” option. Concentrating on the claim in The Prince that a head of state ought to do good if he can but must be prepared to commit evil if he must ( Prince CW 58), Skinner argues that Machiavelli prefers conformity to moral virtue ceteris paribus .

Disinterest in ethical concerns also permeates the claim, popular in the early- and mid-twentieth century, that Machiavelli simply adopts the stance of a scientist—a kind of “Galileo of politics”—in distinguishing between the “facts” of political life and the “values” of moral judgment (Olschki 1945; Cassirer 1946; Prezzolini 1954 [1967]). He is thereby set into the context of the scientific revolution more generally. The point of Machiavellian “science” is not to distinguish between “just” and “unjust” forms of government, but to explain how politicians deploy power for their own gain. Thus, Machiavelli rises to the mantle of the founder of “modern” political science, in contrast with Aristotle’s classical norm-laden vision of a political science of virtue. More recently, the Machiavelli-as-scientist interpretation has largely gone out of favor (Viroli 1998 1–3), although some have recently found merit in a revised version of the thesis (e.g., Dyer and Nederman 2016).

Other of Machiavelli’s readers have found no taint of immorality or amoralism in his thought whatsoever. Jean-Jacques Rousseau long ago held that the real lesson of The Prince is to teach the people the truth about how princes behave and thus to expose, rather than celebrate, the immorality at the core of one-man rule (quoted in Connell 2005, 178). Various versions of this thesis have been disseminated more recently. Some scholars, such as Garrett Mattingly (1958), have pronounced Machiavelli the supreme satirist, pointing out the foibles of princes and their advisors. The fact that Machiavelli later wrote biting popular stage comedies is cited as evidence in support of his strong satirical bent. Thus, we should take nothing Machiavelli says about moral conduct at face value, but instead should understand his remarks as sharply humorous commentary on public affairs. Alternatively, Mary Deitz (1986) asserts that Machiavelli’s agenda was driven by a desire to “trap” the prince by offering carefully crafted advice (such as arming the people) designed to undo the ruler if taken seriously and followed.

A similar range of opinions exists in connection with Machiavelli’s attitude toward religion in general, and Christianity in particular. Machiavelli was no friend of the institutionalized Christian Church as he knew it. The Discourses makes clear that conventional Christianity saps from human beings the vigor required for active civil life (CW 228–229, 330–331). And The Prince speaks with equal parts disdain and admiration about the contemporary condition of the Church and its Pope (CW 29, 44–46, 65, 91–92). Many scholars have taken such evidence to indicate that Machiavelli was himself profoundly anti-Christian, preferring the pagan civil religions of ancient societies such as Rome, which he regarded to be more suitable for a city endowed with virtù . Anthony Parel (1992) argues that Machiavelli’s cosmos, governed by the movements of the stars and the balance of the humors, takes on an essentially pagan and pre-Christian cast. For others, Machiavelli may best be described as a man of conventional, if unenthusiastic, piety, prepared to bow to the externalities of worship but not deeply devoted in either soul or mind to the tenets of Christian faith. A few dissenting voices, most notably Sebastian de Grazia (1989) and Maurizio Viroli (2006 [2010]), have attempted to rescue Machiavelli’s reputation from those who view him as hostile or indifferent to Christianity. Grazia demonstrates how central biblical themes run throughout Machiavelli’s writings, finding there a coherent conception of a divinely centered and ordered cosmos in which other forces (“the heavens”, “fortune”, and the like) are subsumed under a divine will and plan. Cary Nederman extends and systematizes Grazia’s insights by showing how such central Christian theological doctrines as grace, free will and prayer form important elements of Machiavelli’s conceptual framework (2009: 28–49; Nederman and Lahoud 2023). Viroli considers, by contrast, the historical attitudes toward the Christian religion as manifested in the Florentine republic of Machiavelli’s day.

Machiavelli has also been credited (most recently by Skinner 1978) with formulating for the first time the “modern concept of the state”, understood in the broadly Weberian sense of an impersonal form of rule possessing a monopoly of coercive authority within a fixed territorial boundaries. Certainly, the term lo stato appears widely in Machiavelli’s writings, especially in The Prince , in connection with the acquisition and application of power in a coercive sense, which renders its meaning distinct from the Latin term status (condition or station) from which it is derived. Moreover, scholars cite Machiavelli’s influence in shaping the early modern debates surrounding “reason of state”—the doctrine that the good of the state itself takes precedence over all other considerations, whether morality or the good of citizens—as evidence that he was received by his near-contemporaries as a theorist of the state (Meineke 1924 [1957]). Machiavelli’s name and doctrines were widely invoked to justify the priority of the interests of the state in the age of absolutism.

Yet, as Harvey Mansfield (1996) has shown, a careful reading of Machiavelli’s use of lo stato in The Prince and elsewhere does not support this interpretation. Machiavelli’s “state” remains a personal patrimony, a possession more in line with the medieval conception of dominium as the foundation of rule. ( Dominium is a Latin term that may be translated with equal force as “private property” and as “political dominion”.) Thus, the “state” is literally owned by whichever prince happens to have control of it. Moreover, the character of governance is determined by the personal qualities and traits of the ruler—hence, Machiavelli’s emphasis on virtù as indispensable for the prince’s success. These aspects of the deployment of lo stato in The Prince mitigate against the “modernity” of his idea. Machiavelli is at best a transitional figure in the process by which the language of the state emerged in early modern Europe, as Mansfield concludes.

Another factor that must be kept in mind when evaluating the general applicability of Machiavelli’s theory in The Prince stems from the very situation in which his prince of virtù operates. Such a ruler comes to power not by dynastic inheritance or on the back of popular support, but purely as a result of his own initiative, skill, talent, and/or strength (all words that are English equivalents for virtù , dependent upon where it occurs in the text). Thus, the Machiavellian prince can count on no pre-existing structures of legitimation, as discussed above. In order to “maintain his state”, then, he can only rely upon his own fount of personal characteristics to direct the use of power and establish his claim on rulership. This is a precarious position, since Machiavelli insists that the throes of fortune and the conspiracies of other men render the prince constantly vulnerable to the loss of his state. The idea of a stable constitutional regime that reflects the tenor of modern political thought (and practice) is nowhere to be seen in Machiavelli’s conception of princely government.

Indeed, one might wonder whether Machiavelli, for all of his alleged realism, actually believed that a prince of complete virtù could in fact exist. He sometimes seems to imagine that a successful prince would have to develop a psychology entirely different from that known hitherto to mankind, inasmuch as this “new” prince is

prepared to vary his conduct as the winds of fortune and changing circumstances constrain him and … not deviate from right conduct if possible, but be capable of entering upon the path of wrongdoing when this becomes necessary. (MP 62)

This flexibility yields the core of the “practical” advice that Machiavelli offers to the ruler seeking to maintain his state: exclude no course of action out of hand, but be ready always to perform whatever acts are required by political circumstance.

Yet Machiavelli himself apparently harbored severe doubts about whether human beings were psychologically capable of generating such flexible dispositions within themselves. In spite of the great number of his historical examples, Machiavelli can point in The Prince to no single ruler who evinced the sort of variable virtù that he deems necessary for the complete control of fortune. Rather, his case studies of successful rulers repeatedly point to the situation of a prince whose characteristics suited his times but whose consistency of conduct (as in the case of Pope Julius II) “would have brought about his downfall” if circumstances had changed ( Prince CW 92). Even the Emperor Severus, whose techniques Machiavelli lauds, succeeded because he employed “the courses of action that are necessary for establishing himself in power”; he is not, however, to be imitated universally ( Prince CW 73). Machiavelli’s evaluation of the chances for creating a new, psychologically flexible type of character is extremely guarded, and tends to be worded in conditional form and in the subjective mood: “If it were possible to change one’s nature to suit the times and circumstances, one would always be successful” ( Prince CW 91, translation revised). Such observations must make us wonder whether Machiavelli’s advice that princes acquire dispositions which vary according to circumstance was so “practical” (even in his own mind) as he had asserted.

While The Prince is doubtless the most widely read of his works, the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy perhaps most honestly expresses Machiavelli’s personal political beliefs and commitments, in particular, his republican sympathies. The Discourses certainly draw upon the same reservoir of language and concepts that flowed into The Prince , but the former treatise leads us to draw conclusions quite different from—many scholars have said contradictory to—the latter. In particular, across the two works, Machiavelli consistently and clearly distinguishes between a minimal and a full conception of “political” or “civil” order, and thus constructs a hierarchy of ends within his general account of communal life. A minimal constitutional order is one in which subjects live securely ( vivere sicuro ), ruled by a strong government which holds in check the aspirations of both nobility ( grandi ) and people ( Popolo ), but is in turn balanced by other legal and institutional mechanisms. In a fully constitutional regime, however, the goal of the political order is the freedom of the community ( vivere libero ), created by the active participation of, and contention between, the nobility and the people (Pedullà 2011 [2018]). As Quentin Skinner (2002, 189–212) has argued, liberty forms a value that anchors Machiavelli’s political theory and guides his evaluations of the worthiness of different types of regimes. Only in a republic, for which Machiavelli expresses a distinct preference, may this goal be attained.

Machiavelli adopted this position on both pragmatic and principled grounds. During his career as a secretary and diplomat in the Florentine republic, he came to acquire vast experience of the inner workings of French government, which became his model for the “secure” (but not free) polity. Although Machiavelli makes relatively little comment about the French monarchy in The Prince , he devotes a great deal of attention to France in the Discourses .

Why would Machiavelli effusively praise (let alone even analyze) a hereditary monarchy in a work supposedly designed to promote the superiority of republics? The answer stems from Machiavelli’s aim to contrast the best-case scenario of a monarchic regime with the institutions and organization of a republic. Even the most excellent monarchy, in Machiavelli’s view, lacks certain salient qualities that are endemic to properly constituted republican government and that make the latter constitution more desirable than the former.

Machiavelli asserts that the greatest virtue of the French kingdom and its king is the dedication to law. “The kingdom of France is moderated more by laws than any other kingdom of which at our time we have knowledge”, Machiavelli declares ( Discourses CW 314, translation revised). The explanation for this situation Machiavelli refers to the function of the Parlement. “The kingdom of France”, he states,

lives under laws and orders more than any other kingdom. These laws and orders are maintained by Parlements, notably that of Paris: by it they are renewed any time it acts against a prince of the kingdom or in its sentences condemns the king. And up to now it has maintained itself by having been a persistent executor against that nobility. ( Discourses CW 422, translation revised)

These passages of the Discourses suggest that Machiavelli has great admiration for the institutional arrangements that obtain in France (Nederman 2023: 52–55). Specifically, the French king and the nobles, whose power is such that they would be able to oppress the populace, are checked by the laws of the realm which are enforced by the independent authority of the Parlement. Thus, opportunities for unbridled tyrannical conduct are largely eliminated, rendering the monarchy temperate and “civil”.

Yet such a regime, no matter how well ordered and law-abiding, remains incompatible with vivere libero . Discussing the ability of a monarch to meet the people’s wish for liberty, Machiavelli comments that

as far as the … popular desire of recovering their liberty, the prince, not being able to satisfy them, must examine what the reasons are that make them desire being free. ( Discourses CW 237).

He concludes that a few individuals want freedom simply in order to command others; these, he believes, are of sufficiently small number that they can either be eradicated or bought off with honors. By contrast, the vast majority of people confuse liberty with security, imagining that the former is identical to the latter: “But all the others, who are infinite, desire liberty in order to live securely ( vivere sicuro )” ( Discourses CW 237). Although the king cannot give such liberty to the masses, he can provide the security that they crave:

As for the rest, for whom it is enough to live securely ( vivere sicuro ), they are easily satisfied by making orders and laws that, along with the power of the king, comprehend everyone’s security. And once a prince does this, and the people see that he never breaks such laws, they will shortly begin to live securely ( vivere sicuro ) and contentedly ( Discourses CW 237).

Machiavelli then applies this general principle directly to the case of France, remarking that

the people live securely ( vivere sicuro ) for no other reason than that its kings are bound to infinite laws in which the security of all their people is comprehended. ( Discourses CW 237)

The law-abiding character of the French regime ensures security, but that security, while desirable, ought never to be confused with liberty. This is the limit of monarchic rule: even the best kingdom can do no better than to guarantee to its people tranquil and orderly government.

Machiavelli holds that one of the consequences of such vivere sicuro is the disarmament of the people. He comments that regardless of “how great his kingdom is”, the king of France “lives as a tributary” to foreign mercenaries.

This all comes from having disarmed his people and having preferred … to enjoy the immediate profit of being able to plunder the people and of avoiding an imaginary rather than a real danger, instead of doing things that would assure them and make their states perpetually happy. This disorder, if it produces some quiet times, is in time the cause of straitened circumstances, damage and irreparable ruin ( Discourses CW 410).

A state that makes security a priority cannot afford to arm its populace, for fear that the masses will employ their weapons against the nobility (or perhaps the crown). Yet at the same time, such a regime is weakened irredeemably, since it must depend upon foreigners to fight on its behalf. In this sense, any government that takes vivere sicuro as its goal generates a passive and impotent populace as an inescapable result. By definition, such a society can never be free in Machiavelli’s sense of vivere libero , and hence is only minimally, rather than completely, political or civil.

Confirmation of this interpretation of the limits of monarchy for Machiavelli may be found in his further discussion of the disarmament of the people, and its effects, in The Art of War . Addressing the question of whether a citizen army is to be preferred to a mercenary one, he insists that the liberty of a state is contingent upon the military preparedness of its subjects. Acknowledging that “the king [of France] has disarmed his people in order to be able to command them more easily”, Machiavelli still concludes “that such a policy is … a defect in that kingdom, for failure to attend to this matter is the one thing that makes her weak” ( Art CW 584, 586–587). In his view, whatever benefits may accrue to a state by denying a military role to the people are of less importance than the absence of liberty that necessarily accompanies such disarmament. The problem is not merely that the ruler of a disarmed nation is in thrall to the military prowess of foreigners. More crucially, Machiavelli believes, a weapons-bearing citizen militia remains the ultimate assurance that neither the government nor some usurper will tyrannize the populace: “So Rome was free four hundred years and was armed; Sparta, eight hundred; many other cities have been unarmed and free less than forty years” ( Art CW 585). Machiavelli is confident that citizens will always fight for their liberty—against internal as well as external oppressors. Indeed, this is precisely why successive French monarchs have left their people disarmed: they sought to maintain public security and order, which for them meant the elimination of any opportunities for their subjects to wield arms. The French regime, because it seeks security above all else (for the people as well as for their rulers), cannot permit what Machiavelli takes to be a primary means of promoting liberty.

The case of disarmament is an illustration of a larger difference between minimally constitutional systems such as France and fully political communities such as the Roman Republic, namely, the status of the classes within the society. In France, the people are entirely passive and the nobility is largely dependent upon the king, according to Machiavelli’s own observations. By contrast, in a fully developed republic such as Rome’s, where the actualization of liberty is paramount, both the people and the nobility take an active (and sometimes clashing) role in self-government (McCormick 2011; Holman 2018). The liberty of the whole, for Machiavelli, depends upon the liberty of its component parts. In his famous discussion of this subject in the Discourses , he remarks,

To me those who condemn the tumults between the Nobles and the Plebs seem to be caviling at the very thing that was the primary cause of Rome’s retention of liberty…. And they do not realize that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the people and that of the great men, and that all legislation favoring liberty is brought about by their dissension ( Discourses CW 202–203).

Machiavelli knows that he is adopting an unusual perspective here, since customarily the blame for the collapse of the Roman Republic has been assigned to warring factions that eventually ripped it apart. But Machiavelli holds that precisely the same conflicts generated a “creative tension” that was the source of Roman liberty. For “those very tumults that so many inconsiderately condemn” directly generated the good laws of Rome and the virtuous conduct of its citizens ( Discourses CW 202). Hence,

Enmities between the people and the Senate should, therefore, be looked upon as an inconvenience which it is necessary to put up with in order to arrive at the greatness of Rome. ( Discourses CW 211)

Machiavelli thinks that other republican models (such as those adopted by Sparta or Venice) will produce weaker and less successful political systems, ones that are either stagnant or prone to decay when circumstances change.

Machiavelli evinces particular confidence in the capacity of the people to contribute to the promotion of communal liberty. In the Discourses , he ascribes to the masses a quite extensive competence to judge and act for the public good in various settings, explicitly contrasting the “prudence and stability” of ordinary citizens with the unsound discretion of the prince. Simply stated, “A people is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgment than a prince” ( Discourses CW 316). This is not an arbitrary expression of personal preference on Machiavelli’s part. He maintains that the people are more concerned about, and more willing to defend, liberty than either princes or nobles ( Discourses CW 204–205). Where the latter confuse their liberty with their ability to dominate and control the popolo , the masses are more concerned with protecting themselves against oppression and consider themselves “free” when they are not abused by the more powerful or threatened with such abuse ( Discourses CW 203). In turn, when they fear the onset of such oppression, ordinary citizens are more inclined to object and to defend the common liberty. Such an active role for the people, while necessary for the maintenance of vital public liberty, is fundamentally antithetical to the hierarchical structure of subordination-and-rule on which monarchic vivere sicuro rests. The preconditions of vivere libero simply do not favor the security that is the aim of constitutional monarchy.

One of the main reasons that security and liberty remain, in the end, incompatible for Machiavelli—and that the latter is to be preferred—may surely be traced to the “rhetorical” character of his republicanism. Machiavelli clearly views speech as the method most appropriate to the resolution of conflict in the republican public sphere; throughout the Discourses , debate is elevated as the best means for the people to determine the wisest course of action and the most qualified leaders. The tradition of classical rhetoric, with which he was evidently familiar, directly associated public speaking with contention: the proper application of speech in the realms of forensic and deliberative genres of rhetoric is an adversarial setting, with each speaker seeking to convince his audience of the validity of his own position and the unworthiness of his opponents’. This theme was taken up, in turn, by late medieval Italian practitioners and theorists of rhetoric, who emphasized that the subject matter of the art was lite (conflict). Thus, Machiavelli’s insistence upon contention as a prerequisite of liberty also reflects his rhetorical predilections (Viroli 1998). By contrast, monarchic regimes—even the most secure monarchies such as France—exclude or limit public discourse, thereby placing themselves at a distinct disadvantage. It is far easier to convince a single ruler to undertake a disastrous or ill-conceived course of action than a multitude of people. The apparent “tumult” induced by the uncertain liberty of public discussion eventually renders more likely a decision conducive to the common good than does the closed conversation of the royal court.

This connects to the claim in the Discourses that the popular elements within the community form the best safeguard of civic liberty as well as the most reliable source of decision-making about the public good. Machiavelli’s praise for the role of the people in securing the republic is supported by his confidence in the generally illuminating effects of public speech upon the citizen body. Near the beginning of the first Discourses , he notes that some may object to the extensive freedom enjoyed by the Roman people to assemble, to protest, and to veto laws and policies. But he responds that the Romans were able to

maintain liberty and order because of the people’s ability to discern the common good when it was shown to them. At times when ordinary Roman citizens wrongly supposed that a law or institution was designed to oppress them, they could be persuaded that their beliefs are mistaken … [through] the remedy of assemblies, in which some man of influence gets up and makes a speech showing them how they are deceiving themselves. And as Tully says, the people, although they may be ignorant, can grasp the truth, and yield easily when told what is true by a trustworthy man ( Discourses CW 203).

The reference to Tully, that is, Cicero (one of the few in the Discourses ) confirms that Machiavelli has in mind here a key feature of classical republicanism: the competence of the people to respond to and support the words of the gifted orator when he speaks truly about the public welfare.

Machiavelli returns to this theme and treats it more extensively at the end of the first Discourse . In a chapter intended to demonstrate the superiority of popular over princely government, he argues that the people are well ordered, and hence “prudent, stable and grateful”, so long as room is made for public speech and deliberation within the community. Citing the formula vox populi, vox dei , Machiavelli insists that

public opinion is remarkably accurate in its prognostications…. With regard to its judgment, when two speakers of equal skill are heard advocating different alternatives, very rarely does one find the people failing to adopt the better view or incapable of appreciating the truth of what it hears ( Discourses CW 316).

Not only are the people competent to discern the best course of action when orators lay out competing plans, but they are in fact better qualified to make decisions, in Machiavelli’s view, than are princes. For example,

the people can never be persuaded that it is good to appoint to an office a man of infamous or corrupt habits, whereas a prince may easily and in a vast variety of ways be persuaded to do this. ( Discourses CW 316)

Likewise, should the people depart from the law-abiding path, they may readily be convinced to restore order:

For an uncontrolled and tumultuous people can be spoken to by a good man and easily led back into a good way. But no one can speak to a wicked prince, and the only remedy is steel…. To cure the malady of the people words are enough. ( Discourses CW 317)

The contrast Machiavelli draws is stark. The republic governed by words and persuasion—in sum, ruled by public speech—is almost sure to realize the common good of its citizens; and even should it err, recourse is always open to further discourse. Non-republican regimes, because they exclude or limit discursive practices, ultimately rest upon coercive domination and can only be corrected by violent means.

Machiavelli’s arguments in favor of republican regimes also appeal to his skeptical stance toward the acquisition of virtù by any single individual, and hence the implication that a truly stable principality may never be attainable. The effect of the Machiavellian dichotomy between the need for flexibility and the inescapable constancy of character is to demonstrate an inherent practical limitation in single-ruler regimes. For the reader is readily led to the conclusion that, just because human conduct is rooted in a firm and invariant character, the rule of a single man is intrinsically unstable and precarious. In the Discourses , Machiavelli provides a psychological case that the realities of human character tend to favor a republic over a principality, since the former “is better able to adapt itself to diverse circumstances than a prince owing to the diversity found among its citizens” ( Discourses CW 253).

Machiavelli illustrates this claim by reference to the evolution of Roman military strategy against Hannibal. After the first flush of the Carthaginian general’s victories in Italy, the circumstances of the Roman required a circumspect and cautious leader who would not commit the legions to aggressive military action for which they were not prepared. Such leadership emerged in the person of Fabius Maximus, “a general who by his slowness and his caution held the enemy at bay. Nor could he have met with circumstances more suited to his ways” ( Discourses CW 452). Yet when a more offensive stance was demanded to defeat Hannibal, the Roman Republic was able to turn to the leadership of Scipio, whose personal qualities were more fitted to the times. Neither Fabius nor Scipio was able to escape “his ways and habits” ( Discourses CW 452), but the fact that Rome could call on each at the appropriate moment suggests to Machiavelli an inherent strength of the republican system.

If Fabius had been king of Rome, he might easily have lost this war, since he was incapable of altering his methods according as circumstance changed. Since, however, he was born in a republic where there were diverse citizens with diverse dispositions, it came about that, just as it had a Fabius, who was the best man to keep the war going when circumstances required it, so later it had a Scipio at a time suited to its victorious consummation ( Discourses CW 452).

Changing events require flexibility of response, and since it is psychologically implausible for human character to change with the times, the republic offers a viable alternative: people of different qualities fit different exigencies. The diversity characteristic of civic regimes, which was so reviled by Machiavelli’s predecessors, proves to be an abiding advantage of republics over principalities.

This does not mean that Machiavelli’s confidence in the capacity of republican government to redress the political shortcomings of human character was unbridled. After all, he gives us no real indication of how republics manage to identify and authorize the leaders whose qualities are suited to the circumstances. It is one thing to observe that such variability has occurred within republics, quite another to demonstrate that this is a necessary or essential feature of the republican system. At best, then, Machiavelli offers us a kind of empirical generalization, the theoretical foundations of which he leaves unexplored. And the Discourses points out that republics have their own intrinsic limitation in regard to the flexibility of response needed to conquer fortune. For just as with individual human beings, it is difficult (if not impossible) to change their personal characteristics, so

institutions in republics do not change with the times … but change very slowly because it is more painful to change them since it is necessary to wait until the whole republic is in a state of upheaval; and for this it is not enough that one man alone should change his own procedure. ( Discourses CW 453)

If the downfall of principalities is the fixed structure of human character, then the failing of republics is a devotion to the perpetuation of institutional arrangements whose time has passed. Whether it is any more plausible to hold out hope for the creation of more responsive republican institutions than to demand flexibility in the personal qualities of princes is not directly examined by the Discourses .

Machiavelli thus seems to adhere to a genuinely republican position. But how are we to square this with his statements in The Prince ? It is tempting to dismiss The Prince as an inauthentic expression of Machiavelli’s “real” views and preferences, written over a short period in order to prove his political value to the returned Medici masters of Florence. (This is contrasted with the lengthy composition process of the Discourses .) Yet Machiavelli never repudiated The Prince , and indeed refers to it in the Discourses in a way that suggests he viewed the former as a companion to the latter. Although there has been much debate about whether Machiavelli was truly a friend of princes and tyrants or of republics, and hence whether we should dismiss one or another facet of his writing as ancillary or peripheral, the questions seems irresolvable. Mark Hulliung’s suggestion that “both” Machiavellis need to be lent equal weight thus enjoys a certain plausibility (Hulliung 1983).

What is “modern” or “original” in Machiavelli’s thought? What is Machiavelli’s “place” in the history of Western ideas? The body of literature debating this question, especially in connection with The Prince and Discourses , has grown to truly staggering proportions. John Pocock (1975), for example, has traced the diffusion of Machiavelli’s republican thought throughout the so-called Atlantic world and, specifically, into the ideas that guided the framers of the American constitution. Paul Rahe (2008) argues for a similar set of influences, but with an intellectual substance and significance different from Pocock. For Pocock, Machiavelli’s republicanism is of a civic humanist variety whose roots are to be found in classical antiquity; for Rahe, Machiavelli’s republicanism is entirely novel and modern. The “neo-Roman” thinkers (most prominently, Pettit, Skinner and Viroli) appropriate Machiavelli as a source of their principle of “freedom as non-domination”, while he has also been put to work in the defense of democratic precepts and values (McCormick 2011). Likewise, cases have been made for Machiavelli’s political morality, his conception of the state, his religious views, and many other features of his work as the distinctive basis for the originality of his contribution.

Yet few firm conclusions have emerged within scholarship. (The unsettled state of play in current research on Machiavelli is well represented in Johnston et al. 2017.) One plausible explanation for the inability to resolve these issues of “modernity” and “originality” is that Machiavelli was in a sense trapped between innovation and tradition, between via antiqua and via moderna (to adopt the usage of Janet Coleman 1995), in a way that generated internal conceptual tensions within his thought as a whole and even within individual texts (Nederman 2009). This historical ambiguity permits scholars to make equally convincing cases for contradictory claims about his fundamental stance without appearing to commit egregious violence to his doctrines. This point differs from the accusation made by certain scholars that Machiavelli was fundamentally inconsistent (see Black 2022) or simply driven by “local” agendas (Celenza 2015). Rather, salient features of the distinctively Machiavellian approach to politics should be credited to an incongruity between historical circumstance and intellectual possibility. What makes Machiavelli a troubling yet stimulating thinker is that, in his attempt to draw different conclusions from the commonplace expectations of his audience, he still incorporated important features of precisely the conventions he was challenging. In spite of his repeated assertion of his own originality (for instance, Prince CW 10, 57–58), his careful attention to preexisting traditions meant that he was never fully able to escape his intellectual confines. Thus, Machiavelli ought not really to be classified as either purely an “ancient” or a “modern”, but instead deserves to be located in the interstices between the two (a point recently underscored by Pedullà 2023, for whom “Machiavelli resembles the mythical Janus, the Roman god of openings and ending …” [xi]).

• Machiavelli, Opere , Corrado Vivanti (ed.), 3 volumes, Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1997.
• The Prince (in Volume 1, pp. 10–96)
• Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius (in Volume 1, pp. 175–532)
• The Art of War (in Volume 2, pp. 561–726)
• [MP] The Prince , Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (eds.), (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• [MF] Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence , James B. Atkinson and David Sices (eds.), Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.
• Anglo, Sydney, 2005, Machiavelli: The First Century , (Oxford-Warburg Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Baluch, Faisal, 2018, “Machiavelli as Philosopher”, The Review of Politics , 80(2): 289–300. doi:10.1017/S0034670517001097
• Benner, Erica, 2009, Machiavelli’s Ethics , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2013, Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653638.001.0001
• Bogiaris, Guillaume, 2021, Machiavelli’s Platonic Problems: Neoplatonism, Eros, Mythmaking, and Philosophy in Machiavellian Thought , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Black, Robert, 2022, Machiavelli: From Radical to Reactionary , London: Reaktion Books.
• Briggs, Charles F. and Cary J. Nederman, 2022, “Mirrors of Princes in the Christian Occident (12 th -15 th Century)”, in A Companion to the “Mirrors of Princes” Literature , Noëlle-Laetitia Perret and Stéphane Péquignot (eds.), Leiden: Brill, 160–196.
• Capponi, Niccolò, 2010, An Unlikely Prince: The Life and Times of Machiavelli , Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.
• Cassirer, Ernst, 1946, The Myth of the State , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Celenza, Christopher S., 2015, Machiavelli: A Portrait , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Coleman, Janet, 1995, “Machiavelli’s Via Moderna : Medieval and Renaissance Attitudes to History”, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays , Martin Coyle (ed.), Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 40–64.
• Connell, William (ed. and trans.), 2005, The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli with Related Documents , Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
• Croce, Benedetto, 1925, Elementi di politica , Bari: Laterza & Figli.
• Dietz, Mary G., 1986, “Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception”, American Political Science Review , 80(3): 777–799. doi:10.2307/1960538
• Dyer, Megan K. and Cary J. Nederman, 2016, “Machiavelli against Method: Paul Feyerabend’s Anti-Rationalism and Machiavellian Political ‘Science’”, History of European Ideas , 42(3): 430–445. doi:10.1080/01916599.2015.1118335
• Femia, Joseph V., 2004, Machiavelli Revisited , Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press.
• Fischer, Markus, 2000, Well-Ordered License: On the Unity of Machiavelli’s Thought , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Grazia, Sebastian de, 1989, Machiavelli in Hell , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Holman, Christopher, 2018, Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Hörnqvist, Mikael, 2004, Machiavelli and Empire , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490576
• Hulliung, Mark, 1983, Citizen Machiavelli , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Johnston, David, Nadia Urbanati, and Camila Vergara (eds.), 2017, Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Lee, Alexander, 2020, Machiavelli: His Life and Times , London: Picador.
• Mansfield, Harvey C., 1996, Machiavelli’s Virtue , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Mattingly, Garrett, 1958, “Machiavelli’s Prince : Political Science or Political Satire?”, The American Scholar , 27(4): 482–491.
• McCormick, John P., 2011, Machiavellian Democracy , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Meinecke, Friedrich, 1924 [1957], Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte , München-Berlin: Druck und Verlag von R. Oldenbourg. Translated as Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History , Douglas Scott (trans.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Najemy, John M. (ed.), 2010, The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521861250
• Nederman, Cary J., 2009, Machiavelli , Oxford: Oneworld.
• –––, 2023, The Rope and The Chains: Machiavelli’s Early Thought and Its Transformations , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield.
• Nederman, Cary J. and Guillaume Bogiaris, 2018, “Niccolò Machiavelli”, in The History of Evil in the Early Modern Age: 1450–1700 CE , Daniel M. Robinson, Chad Meister, and Charles Taliaferro (eds.), (The History of Evil, 3), London: Routledge, 53–68.
• Nederman, Cary J. and Nellie Lahoud, 2023, “’This is the Way I Pray’: Precatory Language in the Writings of Niccolò Machiavelli”, Intellectual History Review 15(1): 161–182.
• Olschki, Leonardo, 1945, Machiavelli the Scientist , Berkeley, CA: Gillick Press.
• Parel, Anthony J., 1992, The Machiavellian Cosmos , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Patapan, Haig, 2006, Machiavelli in Love: The Modern Politics of Love and Fear , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Pedullá, Gabriele, 2011 [2018], Machiavelli in tumulto: Conquista, cittadinanza e conflitto nei «Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio» , Rome: Bulzoni Editore. Translated as Machiavelli in Tumult: The Discourses on Livy and the Origins of Political Conflictualism , revised and updated, Patricia Gaborik and Richard Nybakken (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2023, On Niccolò Machiavelli: The Bond of Politics , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Pettit, Philip, 1997, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198296428.001.0001.
• Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, 1984, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Prezzolini, Giuseppa, 1954 [1967], Machiavelli anticristo , Rome: Gherardo Casini Editore; translated as Machiavelli , Gioconda Savini (trans.), New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Pocock, John, 1975, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Rahe, Paul A., 2008, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511509650
• Skinner, Quentin, 1978, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume I: The Renaissance , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1998, Liberty before Liberalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139197175
• –––, 2002, Visions of Politics, Volume II: Renaissance Virtues , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sorensen, Kim A., 2006, Discourses on Strauss: Revelation and Reason in Leo Strauss and His Critical Study of Machiavelli , Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Strauss, Leo, 1958, Thoughts on Machiavelli , Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
• Vatter, Miguel E., 2000, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom , Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Second edition, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
• –––, 2013, Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’: A Reader’s Guide , London: Bloomsbury.
• Viroli, Maurizio, 1998, Machiavelli , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198780885.001.0001
• –––, 1999 [2002], Repubblicanesimo , Roma-Bari: Laterza. Translated as Republicanism , Anthony Shugaar (trans.), New York: Hill and Wang
• –––, 2006 [2010], Dio di Machiavelli e il problema morale dell’Italia , Roma-Bari: Laterza. Translated as Machiavelli’s God , Antony Shugaar (trans.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
• –––, 2014, Redeeming the Prince: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Vivanti, Corrado, 2013 Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Von Vacano, Diego A., 2007, The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Winter, Yves, 2018, Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wood, Neal, 1967, “Machiavelli’s Concept of Virtù Reconsidered”, Political Studies , 15(2): 159–172. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.1967.tb01842.x
• Zuckert, Catherine H., 2017, Machiavelli’s Politics , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2018, “Machiavelli: A Socratic?”, Perspectives on Political Science , 47(1): 27–37. doi:10.1080/10457097.2017.1385358

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• available at Medieval Sourcebook , Fordham University.
• available at Project Gutenberg
• The Art of War
• Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius
• History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy from the Earliest Times to the Death of Lorenzo the Magnificent
• Italian Translations of Machiavelli’s works , at IntraText CT.

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Essays on Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat, philosopher, and writer who is best known for his political treatise, ""The Prince."" His work has had a profound impact on political thought and has sparked numerous debates and discussions about ethics, power, and leadership. As a result, there are countless essay topics that can be explored in relation to Machiavelli's ideas and theories.

The Importance of the Topic

Machiavelli's writings have had a lasting impact on political theory and have influenced the way we think about power and leadership. As such, exploring essay topics related to Machiavelli can provide valuable insights into the nature of politics and the complexities of human behavior. Additionally, by studying Machiavelli's ideas, students can gain a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural contexts in which he lived and wrote.

Advice on Choosing a Topic

When choosing a topic for an essay on Machiavelli, it is important to consider the specific aspects of his work that interest you the most. Do you want to explore the ethical implications of Machiavelli's advice for rulers? Or do you want to examine the historical and political context in which he wrote? Perhaps you are interested in comparing Machiavelli's ideas to those of other political theorists. By narrowing down your focus and choosing a specific aspect of Machiavelli's work to explore, you can create a more focused and compelling essay.

There are countless essay topics that can be explored in relation to Machiavelli's work. Whether you are interested in the ethical implications of his ideas, the historical context in which he wrote, or the impact of his work on political thought, there are numerous avenues for exploration. By choosing a topic that resonates with you and delving into the complexities of Machiavelli's theories, you can gain a deeper understanding of the nature of power and leadership. As you embark on your essay writing journey, consider the advice provided and take the time to carefully choose a topic that will allow you to engage with Machiavelli's ideas in a meaningful and thought-provoking way.

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Florentine Street Scene with Twelve Figures (Sheltering the Traveller) (1540-60), anonymous artist. Courtesy the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The battles over beginnings

Niccolò machiavelli’s profound insights about the violent origins of political societies help us understand the world today.

by David Polansky   + BIO

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: ‘Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind.’ With apologies to Nietzsche, the ‘questions of origins and beginnings’ are in fact more controversial and hotly debated. The ongoing Israel-Gaza war has reopened old debates over the circumstances of Israel’s founding and the origins of the Palestinian refugee crisis. Meanwhile, in a speech he gave on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin insisted that ‘since time immemorial’ Russia had always included Ukraine, a situation that was disrupted by the establishment of the Soviet Union. And in the US, The New York Times ’ 1619 Project generated no small amount of controversy by insisting that the United States’ real origins lay not with its formal constitution but with the introduction of slavery into North America.

In other words, many conspicuous political disputes today have a way of returning us to the beginnings of things, of producing and being waged in part through strong claims about origins. Yet doing so rarely helps resolve them. Because these debates have become ubiquitous, we may not realise how unusual our preoccupation with political origins really is. Beginnings are, after all, far removed from the issues at hand as to be a source of leverage in ongoing controversies or a source of controversy themselves. Why should the distant past matter more than the recent past or the present? To better understand why we remain bedevilled by the problem of origins, and perhaps to think more clearly about them in the first place, it may help to turn to a familiar but unexpected source: Machiavelli.

Niccolò Machiavelli is better known for his hard-headed political advice – it was he who wrote ‘it is better to be feared than loved’ – but he was also preoccupied with the role of violence in establishing (and re-establishing) political societies. Few thinkers have dealt so thoroughly and so troublingly with the theme of political origins as Machiavelli, leading the French philosopher Louis Althusser to call Machiavelli the ‘theorist of beginnings’. For Machiavelli, origins are chiefly of interest for two reasons: first, they reveal essential truths about the impermanence of political life that are otherwise obscured by ordinary politics; and, second, their violent conditions are in principle replicable always and everywhere.

Machiavelli’s perspective is moreover useful to us – because of the way he stands outside of our liberal tradition. Every society in history has had its origin stories, but the question of beginnings poses particular challenges for those of us living in the kinds of modern states that first began to take shape in the 17th century. For their legitimacy rests upon their deliberative and representative character. Nearly all existing states – even non-democratic ones – have some claim to represent a given people. Representative government is one of the ways that we assure ourselves that political power isn’t mere domination, and its rules and processes are intended to preserve the rights of the people who establish them. Consequently, we locate the origins of political society with that moment of establishment. The great liberal philosopher John Locke, for example, insists in the Second Treatise of Government (1689) that ‘the beginning of politic society depends upon the consent of the individuals, to join into, and make one society; who, when they are thus incorporated, might set up what form of government they thought fit.’

However, what about the right of any given people to establish political orders in the first place? And if some do claim to establish a new political order, who gets to decide which individuals are included among ‘the people’ and which are not? Who decides what territory is rightfully theirs for establishing government? And how did it happen in the first place?

T hese are questions that modern liberalism is largely unable to face. John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971), perhaps the most influential work of political theory in the past 50 years, admits that his considerations of justice simply assume the existence of a stable and self-contained national community. Earlier, Thomas Hobbes and, later, Immanuel Kant had faced this question more squarely, but both warned against enquiring about the origins of our societies at all, for, as Hobbes wrote in 1651, ‘there is scarce a commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified.’

It is not that the liberal political tradition (which is the tradition of most of the world’s developed countries) is simply unaware of political origins; but it deals with them in a deliberate and abstract way that is removed from the messy historical realities behind the formation of states and nations. The opening words of the ‘Federalist’ essay, written by Alexander Hamilton in defence of the nascent US Constitution, posed the question two and a half centuries ago:

whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

The US founders, in other words, consciously sought to create a wholly new society based upon just principles rather than the contingent events that gave rise to past governments, thus providing a model for future liberal constitutions. But accident and force are simply mainstays of history. And, as it happens, they are also Machiavelli’s bread and butter (or bread and olive oil).

Two of Machiavelli’s major political works, both published posthumously in 1531-32 – the Discourses on Livy , his magisterial treatment of the ancient Roman republic, and his Florentine Histories – open with discussions of the sources of populations themselves. Such questions concerning the origins of populations remain pressing even today, as indicated by the trendiness of the concept of ‘indigeneity’ – that is, the attempt to identify an authentically original people with a title to the land that precedes all others – which has been applied to places as disparate as Canada, Palestine, Finland and Taiwan. One sees a similar impulse behind certain Right-wing nationalist claims, like Jean-Marie Le Pen’s insistence that the true French nation traces back to the 5th-century coronation of Clovis I. We want an unambiguous point of origin to which a legitimate claim to territory might be fixed. Machiavelli, however, denies us such a stable point.

All natives were once foreign, their situation but the end result of some prior (possibly forgotten) conquest

At the outset of the Discourses , Machiavelli claims that all cities are built by either natives or foreigners, but then proceeds to give examples – such as Rome, Athens and Venice – consisting solely of peoples who were either dispersed or compelled to flee from their ancestral place into a new one by an invading force – that is to say, by foreigners. In many cases, the invaders who sent the natives fleeing were themselves fleeing conditions of war. Migrations, forced or voluntary, are very difficult to prevent. It is not the case, for example, that a general improvement of living conditions might ensure demographic stability. Desperation is only one cause of migrations. In the case of the Franks and Germans, not desperation but prosperity, leading to overpopulation, compelled men to find new lands to inhabit. Such was the origin of the populations that destroyed the Roman Empire, according to Machiavelli, reproducing the cycle that initially produced Rome in the first place by invading Italy and establishing the kingdoms of the early medieval period.

Machiavelli thus makes clear that all natives were once foreign (either the possibility of an ‘original’ people is ruled out or they are too archaic to speak of), and further that it may be assumed that their situation is but the end result of some prior (and possibly forgotten) conquest.

With this discussion of the foundation of Rome, Machiavelli illustrates the artificiality of ‘legitimate’ origins. He first claims that Rome had both a native founder in Romulus and a foreign founder in his ancestor, Aeneas, who settled in Latium after escaping the destruction of Troy. But this immediately undercuts any ancestral claim Romulus might have to the territory, insofar as it derives from the Trojan Aeneas’ conquest of the Latins (chronicled in Virgil’s Aeneid ).

Moreover, Romulus is compelled to replicate the actions of his ancestor – for, as Machiavelli sees it, the founding of a new society is always a violent affair, entailing a crime of some great magnitude. Romulus provides the paradigmatic example with the killing of his brother Remus and his ally Titus Tatius. Of these terrible acts, Machiavelli makes the striking remark that ‘while the deed accuses him, the effect excuses him’. That is to say, the extraordinary act of founding a new city (and ultimately an empire) absolves – and, for that matter, requires – the crimes committed in the process. Romulus is just one among a number of quasi-mythical founders whom Machiavelli exalts as the most ‘excellent’ examples in The Prince , along with Theseus, Cyrus, and Moses. All secured the establishment of their new societies through violence. Even for Moses, the most consequential act is not the flight from Egypt or receiving the Commandments at Sinai but the slaughter of 3,000 Israelites (a number Machiavelli raises to ‘infinite men’) for the sin of worshipping a golden calf.

The mythopoeic truths societies offer for their origins can still be truths, even when the first beginnings remain shrouded in myth. Machiavelli claims he could provide ‘infinite examples’ – a favourite term of his – of the role of violence in forming and reforming political societies.

Machiavelli adds that the example of Hiero of Syracuse may also serve as a useful model. This move, however, pulls the whole discussion sideways: first, Hiero did not found anything – the city of Syracuse already existed when he came to power; and second, though Machiavelli will not tell us this here, Hiero is more commonly known as a tyrant, which is to say someone who acquires monarchical power rather than inheriting it. Machiavelli’s description of how Hiero acquired power is amusing and brief: ‘Hiero eliminated the old military and organised a new one; he left his old friendships and made new ones. And when he had friendships and soldiers that were his, he could build any building on top of such a foundation. So, he made a great deal of effort to acquire power, but little to maintain it.’

Machiavelli subsequently reveals that Hiero came to power through a conspiracy – employing mercenaries to seize control of Syracuse and then brutally cutting them to pieces while claiming political power for himself. In other words, if we want to understand what the origins of things really look like, we must consult such troubling histories.

E arly in The Prince , Machiavelli notes of established rulers: ‘In the antiquity and continuity of the dominion, the memories and causes of innovations are eliminated …’ That is to say, most rulers – what he calls ‘hereditary princes’ – are the beneficiaries of some prior terrible actions on the part of a conquering ancestor who initially took the throne. To us they may not be soaked in blood but, go back far enough, and you will find a Romulus – or a Hiero.

Later in the work, Machiavelli remarks that it is relatively easy for a ruler to hold provinces with similar customs that he has already controlled for a long time. But by way of example, he offers France’s rule over Burgundy, Brittany, Gascony and Normandy; of these, the first two had been conquered only within Machiavelli’s own lifetime, and the third in 1453, less than two decades before Machiavelli’s birth. The ease with which the French crown held these possessions – as well as the fact that these regions are now simply thought of as French – is due not to their lasting ties but to the success with which they were initially pacified.

Whenever one identifies a situation of stable and orderly government, it can be traced back to some form of conquest, whether ancient or recent. The story of political societies is much like Woody Allen’s definition of comedy: tragedy plus time. As Machiavelli’s French examples indicate, the amount of time required may not even be significant if the act of conquest is a successful one.

You might have to kill your brother to found a great city, but what about your proposal on urban streetlights?

Machiavelli even emphasises that the violence involved in establishing societies can never be left fully behind. Machiavelli praises Cleomenes of Sparta for slaughtering the magistrates who stood in his way of renewing the laws of the city’s founder, Lycurgus – in an act that earns him comparison with Romulus himself. He also acknowledges the 15th-century Florentine rulers for their insight when they say it was necessary to put ‘that terror and that fear in men’ of the violence of foundings ‘every five years’.

Many readers of Machiavelli have difficulty reconciling his account of origins with our actual experience of political life. It is all well and good, they may think, to know that you might have to kill your brother to found a great city, but what if you just want to find a quorum for your proposal on urban streetlights?

Or, how does Machiavelli’s teaching about political origins help us understand the present world? For one thing, it offers insight into the recurring forms of violence that continue (and will continue) to break out along unstable borders and in places where states are still in the process of being formed.

The list of horrors surrounding the creations of 20th-century nation-states alone would include ( inter alia ): the genocidal expulsion of the Armenians in 1915; the postwar expulsions of ethnic Germans from neighbouring eastern European states; the mutual expulsions of Hindus and Muslims from Pakistan and India (respectively) during partition in 1947; the mutual expulsion of Arabs and Jews from Israel and its neighbours (respectively) from 1947-49; the flight of the pieds-noirs from Algeria in 1962; the displacement of Armenians and Azeris from Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1980s and ’90s; the mutual ethnic cleansings throughout the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and more. Yet we still see these as exceptions to the rule of political order.

The chain of events that we associate with the formation of our modern states (and that provide the source of much ongoing controversy) is really only the latest series of links in a much longer chain that has no known beginning.

A ccident and force still lie beneath the surface of our day-to-day politics, threatening to re-emerge. This is not an easy thing to accept. Even in quieter times, our consciences still trouble us, like Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke after he deposes Richard II. Moreover, we want to see our own foundations as not only just but secure . To see them otherwise is to acknowledge that our circumstances remain essentially in a state of flux. If all things are in motion, then what shall become of us?

Something like this anxiety seems to lie behind how we talk about political origins today. And, thinking with Machiavelli, we can see how the liberal tradition of political thought going back hundreds of years now has not prepared us well to think ethically about our historical origins. The result, when confronted with the subject, tends to be either a flight into defensive nationalism or moralistic condemnation.

While Machiavelli’s work can easily read like cynicism, a decent measure of cynicism is just realism. And an attitude of realism about political life can inoculate us from both sanctimony and despair, allowing us to honestly acknowledge the crimes that contributed to the formations of our own political societies without requiring us to become despisers of our countries.

We may learn from examples of the dramatic stakes involved in maintaining our political order

Similarly, it would be easy enough to read Machiavelli as debunking the edifying tales that surround the foundation of new societies, from the myths of ancient Greece to modern Independence Day celebrations. ‘This is what really happened,’ he seems to say. But it is important to recognise that his account of political origins is not intended to be incriminating but instructive.

For his work also bears a warning: the lawless and uncertain conditions surrounding our origins reflect enduring possibilities in political life. These are crucial moments in which our existing laws are revealed to be inadequate, because they were formulated under different circumstances than those we may presently face, thus requiring daring acts of restoration undertaken in the same spirit in which the laws were originally established.

We may not be obliged to follow directly in the footsteps of such tyrannical figures as Cleomenes of Sparta or the Medici of medieval Florence, all of whom employed terrible violence in the acts of restoration. But we may learn from such examples of the dramatic stakes involved in maintaining our political order – as the philosopher Claude Lefort put it in his magisterial 2012 work on Machiavelli: ‘This is the truth of the return to the origin; not a return to the past, but, in the present, a response analogous to the one given in the past.’

This is part of the value we gain from reading Machiavelli: facing the troubling implications of our own origins may help us better prepare ourselves for the continued vicissitudes of political life. After all, it may be that our own established order is the only thing standing in the way of someone else’s new origins.

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