Niccolo Machiavelli 1469 – 1527

Niccolo Machiavelli was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, historian, and political philosopher of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, often described as the founder of modern political science. He served the Florentine republic in diplomatic and military roles until the return of the Medici family ended his career. His most famous work, The Prince, written in 1513 during his enforced retirement, analyses the practical conduct of political power without appeal to theological or moralistic categories. His longer and more substantive Discourses on Livy is a republican meditation on the political experience of ancient Rome. His name became synonymous in English with cynical realpolitik, often unfairly: his political thought is more nuanced and is now read as a foundational text of modern political philosophy.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was a Florentine diplomat, political theorist, and historian whose work has fixed the modern philosophical vocabulary of political realism. He served the Florentine Republic as Second Chancellor and as a diplomatic envoy from 1498 to 1512, observing the courts of Cesare Borgia, Louis XII, and Maximilian I, before being dismissed, imprisoned, and tortured upon the Medici restoration in 1512.

The Prince (1513), written during Machiavelli's enforced retirement at his country estate, is the most famous and most misread work of political philosophy in the Western tradition. The book offers practical advice to a prince attempting to acquire and hold political power under conditions of constant external threat and internal faction; its philosophical innovation is to bracket questions of how rulers ought to behave according to inherited moral and theological frameworks and ask instead how they actually behave in conditions of competing power. The Discourses on Livy (also written in the 1510s, published posthumously in 1531) develops a republican political philosophy from the same realist starting point.

Machiavelli was rehabilitated by the Florentine republic briefly in 1527 but died shortly thereafter. His shadow on subsequent political philosophy is enormous: every subsequent realist tradition — from Hobbes through the modern science of politics — works in the space he opened.