Machiavelli, Aristotle and Popular Republicanism

The first comprehensive investigation to date of the Aristotelian roots of Niccolò Machiavelli’s radical republican thought. Arguing that the conceptual language of Aristotelianism shapes key aspects of Machiavelli’s radical ideas, this book is required reading for those interested in the political thought of one of the most important authors of modernity. Machiavelli, Aristotle and Radical Republicanism shows how Machiavelli draws upon Greek and Aristotelian sources to challenge classical republicanism and examines influence of the Early Modern Aristotelian intellectual context on the development of Machiavelli’s political thought. This approach helps to overcome many of the problems in understanding Machiavelli’s relationship with ancient sources and reveals the selective and deeply strategic character of Machiavelli’s appropriation of the premodern tradition. Working from an interdisciplinary perspective, the book combines sources and methods from the history of political thought, the history of philosophy, literature, and political theory. Machiavelli, Aristotle and Radical Republicanism gives an original interpretation of Machiavelli’s radical ideas following from his encounter with five different but intertwined Aristotelian themes: 1) the relationship between prudence and fortune, 2) the reservation of tyranny, 3) the wisdom of the crowd, 4) the idea of democracy and its relationship to poverty and 5) the problem of civil religion. It provides an unprecedented engagement with several Latin and vernacular Aristotelian texts that circulated in Machiavelli’s time and with Aristotelian authors who were contemporary to Machiavelli such as Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), Giovanni Pontano (1436–1503), Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525).