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The Renaissance occupies a paradoxical place in the history of political thought. It is famous for having nurtured two diametrically opposed, although similarly extreme theoretical positions: republicanism and absolutism. Yet neither position was remotely characteristic of Renaissance political theory as a whole. The result is an understandable, but nonetheless unfortunate skewing of the literature on Renaissance political philosophy. Because republicanism and absolutism are taken to be the signal theoretical contributions of the period, and because these ideologies tend to be of most interest to contemporary scholars, they receive a disproportionate amount of attention in chapters such as this one. In contrast, the overwhelmingly dominant political ideology of the age, which might be described as princely humanism, tends to be obscured by its more celebrated, but far less ubiquitous rivals. To put the matter a bit differently, the reader of most surveys of Renaissance political thought could be forgiven for concluding that, when taken together, republicanism and absolutism accounted for close to 90 percent of published Renaissance political writings. The truth of the matter, however, is quite the reverse: taken together, these two ideologies probably accounted for less than 10 percent of the political literature of the period. The analysis which follows aims to take seriously the dominance of princely humanism in Renaissance political thought, while at the same time explaining how the various tensions within it inspired important republican and absolutist critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times many studies have been dedicated to the fortunes of Machiavelli and his works. They have examined the sometimes fierce reactions to his opinions and they have elucidated the slow process by which his realistic views on the exercise of power in the state were assimilated into the political thought of early modern Europe. Little by little nearly every country has received its due attention as for instance in Felix Raab's admirable book on England. Whereas more generally oriented interest in Machiavelli's theories for a long time concentrated on what might be called the literature of the raison d'état, we are now, thanks especially to the work of J.G.A. Pocock, able to discern too how important and profound Machiavelli's influence as a republican has been in Europe and America. It is remarkable, however, that, at least until recently, nowhere in the surveys of Machiavelli's reputation as old Nick or as a republican has the Dutch Republic been taken into account. We must ask ourselves why this has been the case. Did one of the most important republican states of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries abstain from the discussion about Machiavelli? Did the special features of the Dutch state, so often emphasised by Dutch scholars, or the rather orthodox character of Calvinism practised in the country, perhaps prevent an open reaction? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the prologue to the History of Florence (Istorie Florentine), which Machiavelli wrote between 1520 and 1525 and which comprises the period between the decline of the Roman republic and the end of the Quattrocento, the author explains the ‘ordini e modi’ which he followed in writing this history. While praising the ‘two excellent historians’ Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini for their ‘description of the wars waged by the Florentines against foreign princes and peoples’, he also criticises them for having neglected what he considered the specific and crucial element in the history of his city: ‘civil discord and internal strifes and their consequences’ or, as he writes a little later, ‘the hatreds and divisions in the city’. The Istorie Florentine does not only deal, as did the Prince, with ‘the actions of the great men’, but with actions that seemed ‘insignificant’ and ‘unworthy’ to be described in detail and to become part of historical memory. This vision of Florentine history seemed so crucial to Machiavelli as even to cause him to alter his original project. Initially, he intended to start with the year 1434 when Cosimo il Vecchio returned from exile to Florence and established his regime, and this was probably due to fact that it was a Medici – Cardinal Giulio and future Pope Clement VII – who had conferred this task upon him. It was precisely his interest in understanding civil discord that made him go back to the origins of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘E principali fondamenti che abbino tutti li stati, cosi nuovi, come vecchi e misti, sono le buone leggi e le buone armi. E perchè non può essere buone leggi dove non sono buone armi, e dove sono buone armi conviene sieno buone leggi, io lascerò indrieto el ragionare delle leggi e parlerò delle armi.’ By starting with so well-known a quotation, for which I apologise, I want to emphasise two initial points. Machiavelli's reputation as a writer on military matters is not dependent on the Arte della Guerra or even on the collection of shorter pieces on war; it lies at the heart of his whole thinking and depends on Il Principe and the Discorsi as much as on the more specific works. One has, in fact, to draw a distinction between his practical ideas, both on past warfare, which fill the Storie Florentine, and on future possibilities, as in the Arte della Guerra, and the conceptual ideas on the role of war in politics and state-building which are much more widely diffused throughout his writing. Federico Chabod when he wrote of Machiavelli that ‘he who was in his political thought a man of the Renaissance, became a man of the thirteenth century when he turned to military matters’ was thinking essentially of the practical side, as was Piero Pieri when he concentrated on Machiavelli as an organiser of militia and a proponent of a new infantry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If there is a single point on which scholars have reached a wide consensus, it is that Machiavelli created a new theory or a new science of politics. Be it his sin or his greatest contribution to modern culture, what seems to be beyond dispute is that Machiavelli rejected the republican idea of politics and provided us with a new account of what politics is all about. Against the classical view that politics is the art of establishing and preserving a good community, Machiavelli, it has been argued, emphasised that the goal of politics is the pursuit of power and that the ‘political man’ cannot be the ‘good man of the ancients’. While several scholars have stressed that the originality of Machiavelli lies in the redefinition of the aim of politics, others have emphasised his contribution to a new methodology of political enquiry. This agreement among contemporary scholars, could easily be corroborated by the opinions of the political writers of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries who called Machiavelli the corruptor of the true (Aristotelian) idea of politics and pointed to him as the thinker who transformed the most noble of humane arts into the art of tyrannical rule. For instance, Innocent Gentillet wrote that Machiavelli invented ‘des Maximes tous meschantes, et basty sur icelles non une science politique mais tyrannique’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is impossible in Machiavelli's writings not to feel the pressure of the events of his time. His reflections and his political proposals refer directly to those events. Hence scholars, although using very different criteria for their interpretations, have often considered Machiavelli's major writings to be a direct and passionate response to the crisis of the republics or, on a wider plane, to that of the small Italian states – a crisis which he lived through without being able to witness its final outcome. This is the dominant theme in Federico Chabod's classic work on The Prince. But this same general conception already underlies Pasquale Villari's and Oreste Tommasini's massive nineteenth-century biographies, in which the Florentine secretary's life, his writings and his ‘times’ are tightly interwoven. This basic interpretation has recently been used, for instance, by Corrado Vivanti, who considers the Discourses to be not a theoretical work, but rather a concrete political proposal, a sort of manifesto for refounding the Italian republics in a political situation in which it was not yet clear what the final outcome would be. ‘Machiavelli and the crisis of the Italian republics’ is hence much too broad and much too widely debated a problem for me to be able to discuss it without restricting it somewhat and without making some preliminary remarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]