Niccolo Machiavelli

As he suggests in a justly famous letter written to a friend in 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli (b. 1469–d. 1527) lived most fully when he communed in thought with the great ancient writers on the greatest deeds of Antiquity—and in succeeding centuries he continued to live on in the thoughts and through the writings of such great thinkers as Spinoza and Tocqueville; Marlowe and Shakespeare, Fichte and Nietzsche, not to mention indirectly in the deeds of Cromwell, Robespierre, Mazzini, and Lenin. Machiavelli comes to us wrapped in this diverse and contested tradition but also and more immediately in the garb of contemporary scholarship, where diversity and contestation abound, as well. One thing all scholarly parties can agree on is that the Florentine was vastly important—be it as a preeminent expression of the cyclonic intellectual activity of a time we now call the Renaissance, as the restorer of classical republican ideals, the founder of the modern world, the apostle of power politics, or the father of modern revolutionary thought. Born at a time of relative stability for Italy due in no small part to the successful machinations of Florence’s Medici rulers, Machiavelli’s young adulthood saw the stability vanish with the invasion of Italy by the French and the expulsion from Florence of the Medici. By 1498 he found himself serving the republican government of Florence that, in 1512, was itself brought down, leading to Machiavelli’s political banishment and to the writing of the works that would cause him to be counted among the greatest figures of the Renaissance and of the intellectual history of the Western world.