How should we live? This question lies at the core of what it means to be human. In volume II we explore the “best which has been thought and said” from the middle ages through the early renaissance. Today’s session is on Machiavelli’s The Prince.

A Florentine like Dante, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) stands on the frontier between the Renaissance and modernity. Or rather he saw the necessary next phase of history to be a return to the classical past: the renaissance, or rebirth, of Italy by a kind of revolution back to a pre-papal Rome. Often considered the father of modern political science, Machiavelli had extensive experience in government service as an elected official of Florence’s Second Chancery, a role he filled from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici family was out of power. He went on diplomatic missions, and therefore encountered Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, who provided the original model for The Prince. With the return of the Medici, Machiavelli was forced out of office. After being tortured, he retired to his estate and wrote his most famous work in 1513. This exile from politics, so painful to him, also stimulated his creativity: all his major writings come from this time.

Along with Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, The Prince was de rigueur reading for every educated European during the 16th century.  In Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli initially saw a conjunction of virtù (ability or skill) and fortuna (good fortune). At Borgia’s court, he sent for a copy of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives: for Machiavelli, political science meant attending to both literary exemplars as well as directly observing contemporary actors. By 1513, Machiavelli’s hopes were on a Medici coordination of papal and Florentine power to meet the demands of the hour. But to his core, Machiavelli was committed to republican, that is, mixed, government. John Adams valued him as a political philosopher.