Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 - 1527) was a Florentine diplomat, official, historian, and political theorist, generally regarded as a founder of modern political science. [1] His short treatise The Prince, written in 1513 and published after his death, examined how rulers acquire and retain power without reference to conventional moral prescription, and made his name a byword for political calculation. [2] His longer Discourses on Livy set out a case for republican government that influenced later constitutional thought. [3]
Early life and public service
Machiavelli was born in Florence on 3 May 1469 into a family of modest means but old standing; his father was a lawyer, and Machiavelli received a humanist education in Latin literature. He entered public life in 1498, shortly after the fall of the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola, becoming second chancellor of the Florentine Republic and secretary to the Ten of War. [1]
For fourteen years he handled diplomatic correspondence and undertook missions to the French court, the imperial court, and the papacy. He observed Cesare Borgia's campaigns in the Romagna at close range, and Borgia's combination of decisiveness and ruthlessness supplied material for his later writing.
Fall from office
The republic collapsed in 1512 when Spanish forces restored the Medici to power in Florence. Machiavelli was dismissed from office, and the following year he was implicated in an alleged conspiracy, imprisoned, and tortured before being released under an amnesty. He withdrew to his small estate at Sant'Andrea in Percussina, south of the city. [1]
There, in enforced idleness, he wrote. A letter to Francesco Vettori describes him changing into court dress each evening to read the ancient historians and composing the work that became The Prince. He dedicated it to a Medici ruler, apparently in hope of returning to public employment. [3]
Political writings
The Prince analyses the acquisition and preservation of political power in a period of foreign invasion and unstable Italian states. It treats fortune and virtù, meaning capability and resolve rather than moral virtue, as the governing forces of politics, and argues that a ruler must be prepared to act against conventional morality when the survival of the state requires it. The book's final chapter appeals for the expulsion of foreign armies from Italy. [2]
The Discourses on Livy, written over the same years, takes the early Roman republic as its subject and argues that liberty is best preserved by a mixed constitution, popular participation, and the productive management of civic conflict rather than its suppression.
He also wrote The Art of War, published in his lifetime, a History of Florence commissioned by the Medici, and the comedy La Mandragola, which is still performed. [1]
Death and reputation
Machiavelli regained limited official favour in his last years but lost it when the Medici were expelled in 1527; his association with the previous regime told against him. He died on 21 June 1527 and is buried in the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. [1]
The Prince was published in 1532 and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. Early readers treated Machiavelli as an advocate of tyranny, and the adjective derived from his name entered European languages as a term of abuse. Later interpreters, from Rousseau and the republican tradition onward, have read him variously as a covert defender of liberty, an empirical analyst of power, and the first writer to separate political analysis from theology. His works remain foundational texts in political theory and in the study of statecraft. [4]
