Machiavelli

Florentine diplomat, historian and political theorist (1469–1527), an official of the Florentine Republic for fourteen years as secretary of the Second Chancery, a post from which he undertook numerous diplomatic missions that allowed him to observe first-hand the real workings of power in the Italian and French courts, and above all the figure of Cesare Borgia, a direct model for some of his political ideas. Dismissed and imprisoned in 1512 with the Medicis' return to power, tortured and finally exiled to his country estate, he wrote there, in a few months and never again able to pursue the political career he so loved, the work that would bring him fame both immortal and infamous: The Prince (1513, published posthumously in 1532), a brief treatise analysing, with a realism stripped of moralism, how political power is acquired, maintained and lost, bluntly advising deceit, calculated cruelty and dissimulation when reasons of state require it, and formulating his most famous and controversial maxim: it is safer to be feared than loved, if one cannot be both. This work made him synonymous, still today, with cynical, unscrupulous politics — 'Machiavellian' — though his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, much longer and less read, reveal a passionate republican thinker, an admirer of the civic virtues of ancient Rome and a defender of mixed government based on popular participation and productive conflict among social classes, leading many modern scholars to read him as one of the earliest and most lucid theorists of political realism, not merely an apologist for tyranny.

10 works

• Ai Palleschi
• Discorso delle cose fiorentine dopo la morte di Lorenzo
• Discorso fatto al Magistrato dei Dieci sopra le cose di Pisa
• Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius
• History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy
• La mandragola - La Clizia - Belfagor
• Machiavelli, Volume I
• Parole da dirle sopra la previsione del danaio
• The Art of War
• The Prince