The Pragmatic Realism of Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography
by Corrado Vivanti
Princeton University Press, 2013, 280 pages, US$27.95

The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made
by Philip Bobbitt
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013, 240 pages, US$24

Politics has become a dirty word for many. While some on the Right tend to want to limit democracy and replace politics with the market through initiatives such as deregulation and privatisation, many left-wing ideologues demand that politics give way to a commitment to human rights law or to an “impartial” bureaucratic control, and therefore claim that the politician should be overruled by the judge or the mandarin. Here, active political participation is no longer seen as a means to pursue greater human perfection. Thus the rejection of politics, the privatisation, legalisation or bureaucratisation of the public sphere, extends to the cultivation through political engagement of character and morality.

In reply, of those who are in favour of politics, many believe that an active participation in deliberative democracy is a process that promotes virtues such as tolerance and moderation, and thus builds moral character. Among those who have been inspired by Niccolò Machiavelli, these themes are associated with J.G.A. Pocock’s classical republicanism and Hans Baron’s civic humanism (Bürgerhumanismus).

Machiavelli is best known as the author of The Prince, which is responsible for his unsavoury reputation as a political philosopher. The main focus of this notorious work is on the steps a “new” prince needs to take in order to secure and maintain power. In writing what I believe was obviously a job application, Machiavelli made a number of observations about the universal nature of mankind and politics. Rather than talking about men as they should be, he insisted on the necessity of talking about men as they are. As a political scientist, he strove to be realistic and empirical, while rejecting the abstract and the ideal. He attempted to create an autonomous space, an independent arena, for political theory, and did so by excluding the non-political from the political. This he did explicitly. Writing about the ecclesiastical principalities of Italy, he sarcastically says, “since they are controlled by a higher power [God], which the human mind cannot comprehend, I shall refrain from discussing them”. He also excludes morality, religion and theology from his discussion of Realpolitik, and was arguably the first to break with medieval modes of thought in doing so, which is what makes him the father of modern political theory.

In addition to The Prince, he also wrote Discourses on Livy, a work that advocates the cause of republicanism. Thus he is both a famous republican thinker and an even more infamous political theorist. Two contrasting works on this fascinating thinker have been published this year: Corrado Vivanti’s Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography and Philip Bobbitt’s The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made. 

One of my university professors used to contrast traditional Japanese scholarship, influenced by German methodology, which emphasised both a close reading of primary materials and an empirical form of argument, to a more modern approach which stressed theory (often French) and theoretical elegance. The two books under discussion reflect this contrast. On the one hand, Vivanti, an eminent and thoroughly well-versed scholar, makes a close, empirical and cautious reading of Machiavelli’s entire oeuvre, including the correspondence. Vivanti’s biography is a contextualised analysis that makes use of the primary materials and the secondary literature to depict Machiavelli and his thought while avoiding the urge to grind any modern axes. On the other hand, Bobbitt develops bold theoretical interpretations, drawing not on Foucault as it happens but Bobbitt himself. Focusing on only several of the works, notably The Prince and the Discourses, his book argues for Machiavelli’s contemporary relevance. Machiavelli is often used by modern writers to fight modern battles, and Bobbitt is no exception. “It is tempting to enlist Machiavelli in the debates of political philosophers today,” he says, succumbing happily to temptation without so much as a sigh of regret. He presents Machiavelli as a neo-con warrior. It is not doing either author much injustice to say that one presents the historical, the other a de-historicised, Machiavelli. 

Machiavelli was born in Renaissance Florence in 1469 and died in 1527. In his lifetime, the Protestant Reformation, the schism within Western Christianity, had begun (the starting point was Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in 1517). He knew individuals such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. His Italy was not a unified nation-state, but consisted of city-states, namely Florence, Milan, Naples, Rome and Venice. Although cultured and wealthy, the Italian states were no longer militarily competitive.

Even more than other city-states, Florence was culturally rich, materially wealthy and militarily weak. It was ruled ably from 1469, the year of Machiavelli’s birth, until 1492, by Lorenzo the Magnificent, a member of the de’ Medici family and patron of the arts. The House of Medici were bankers, and the Medici Bank was the largest in Europe in the fifteenth century.

Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo, had created a peace on the Italian peninsula based on balance of power. This peace lasted until 1494, when Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, invited the French to enter the peninsula, promising to support French aspirations to the crown of Naples. The French King, Charles VIII, demonstrated with a brutal finality the enormous military gap that had widened between one of the powers and Italy, and in doing so opened a new and tragic chapter in Italian history. The small, pre-modern, and militarily weak city-states of Italy were increasingly exposed to the predatory desires of powerful European powers such as France and Spain.

The French army marched southwards from Milan to Naples, passing Florence on the way. Piero de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo, abandoned the city, and a change of government was effected in the shadow of French military superiority. Naturally, the new regime, the Republic, was anti-Medici and pro-French. At first, Florence was run by a religious firebrand, the Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola, the “unarmed prophet” also known for his Bonfire of the Vanities. He was executed in 1498 and replaced by Piero Soderini. Immediately after Savonarola fell the twenty-nine-year-old Machiavelli was appointed to a leading position in the Florentine bureaucracy, becoming secretary of the second Florentine chancery. This symbolised a transition, in Vivanti’s words, from “the age of faith”, the religious Middle Ages, to “the age of science”, secularism, and the Renaissance.

The Florentine Republic was led by an aristocratic elite, members of which held political office for only a short time before being replaced. Continuity was supplied by a less prestigious bureaucracy, of which Machiavelli was now a leading figure. Although often described as an ambassador, Machiavelli did not in fact ever have the social status that would enable him to be sent abroad as an official ambassador. However, he was sent on diplomatic missions to papal, royal and imperial courts, meeting the King of France and the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. In Italy, Cesare Borgia impressed (and frightened) him the most, but he also met Pope Julius II, the “warrior pope”. 

From 1498 to 1512 Machiavelli worked as an elite government bureaucrat, intimately involved in domestic political affairs and foreign relations. Moreover, since Florence was involved in a military struggle with Pisa, he became an expert in military matters. Machiavelli abhorred the practice of using mercenaries, and agitated for and finally won permission for the creation of a militia. These years were a time of uneasy peace, crisis and war. Apart from the European powers, the greatest threats the republic faced were posed by the de’ Medici family in exile, and (initially) the Borgias and (later) Julius II in Rome. Since the republic was created as a consequence of French influence, it was dependent on France remaining a power in the peninsula.

As French power waned, so did the republic’s fortunes. Its balancing act came to an end when Julius II enlisted Spain to help him drive France out of Italy. In 1512, Spanish troops, with the de’ Medici family in tow, marched on Florence, which surrendered. Soderini was deposed, the de’ Medici reinstated, and the republic ended.

Machiavelli was removed from office in late 1512. This was the pivotal moment in his life. Post res perditas—after all was lost—was how he described life out of office. In early 1513 a plot to assassinate the de’ Medici rulers was uncovered, and he was arrested and tortured. Just a week later, Giovanni de’ Medici was elected Pope Leo X. An amnesty was announced in Florence, and he was released and exiled to the countryside. He commenced work on The Prince and finished it by December 1513. Thus the political experiences of his chancery career were utilised in a second career as a theorist.

Machiavelli embarked on a long and slow campaign to seek rehabilitation, to woo the de’ Medici rulers of Florence. When he realised that his hopes of quickly regaining high office were unrealistic, he sought new outlets for his talents. By the summer of 1517 he had joined the literary and philosophical circle of humanistic writers—a salon—in the Rucellai family garden, the Orti Oricellari. According to Vivanti, in 1518 he wrote the louche play and satirical comedy Mandragola (this date has been contested). Mandragola is generally regarded as the greatest play written during the Italian Renaissance. In 1521, he published The Art of War.

By 1520, Machiavelli’s efforts to ingratiate himself to the de’ Medici had started to pay off, and he was commissioned to write a history of Florence. This he completed in 1525, and he travelled to Rome to present his history to Giulio de’ Medici, now Pope Clement VII. Ironically, the church and Rome now provided the patronage he so desperately wanted. In 1526 he discussed the fortifications of Florence with Clement VII and was subsequently appointed Secretary and Quartermaster of the Curators of the Walls. In 1527 Rome was sacked by the army of Charles V. At the same time, in Florence, the de’ Medici regime, which was of course closely associated with the papacy, was overthrown again, and the republic restored.

Machiavelli was initially viewed with suspicion by the de’ Medici because he had been so close to Soderini. Just as he succeeded in ingratiating himself to the de’ Medicis, the family was ousted from power, and Machiavelli’s friends and colleagues, who now viewed him with suspicion as a turncoat, seized the reins of government once more. He was not reappointed to his old chancery position, and he died broken-hearted in June 1527.

Thus the first quarter of a century of Machiavelli’s life was characterised by stable government and a flourishing of the Renaissance. The post-1494 period was one of instability and the chaos of war, during which the European powers, France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, marched up and down the peninsula, leaving in their wake carnage and destruction.

The life and times are ably discussed in Vivanti’s biography. As is the case with Bobbitt, Vivanti is interested in Machiavelli’s political philosophy. Those who write about Machiavelli often return to a number of central questions. His two most important political works, The Prince and the Discourses, discuss two very different political systems. Here as elsewhere, he draws on ideas from the classical world in which three main types of political system are distinguished—monarchy (rule by one), oligarchy or aristocracy (rule by the few), and democracy (rule by all). The Prince is a textbook for a system in which one rules; the Discourses advocates the cause of republicanism or rule by all. Which did he believe in? We will return to this question later.

Another central issue revolves around the relationship between two concepts—virtù and fortuna—that Machiavelli emphasised in an attempt to distinguish between those conditions which could and those which could not be mastered. These concepts correspond to ability and luck. Machiavelli compared fortune to a goddess who can be swayed by bold and resolute risk-taking, and to a river which can be tamed by dams and dykes. Sometimes of course dams collapse, but that is not a reason to abandon the attempt to build them. Neither fortune nor rivers in other words can be mastered, but they can be nudged this way or that by determined action (virtù).

Fortune or luck plays a significant role in Machiavelli’s writing—and fortune favours the brave, not the good. He provides case studies from history and from his own experiences—Cesare Borgia for instance for what to do, the French in Italy for what not to do. The advice he gives has led to the term Machiavellian. When a prince conquers new territory, he needs to ensure that he avoids causing small harms: “men should either be caressed or crushed; because they can avenge slight injuries, but not those that are very severe”. And he does mean “crushed”. One step he recommends is to “wipe out” the previous prince’s family.

Fortune or conditions change. These changes open up opportunities for action. A successful state needs to be able to change and adapt in ever-changing conditions, while an ambitious would-be prince needs to be able to exploit the current prince’s failure to adapt. The post-1494 crisis was created because circumstances had changed but Italian city-states had not.

Machiavelli’s writings can be understood as a despairing call on political leaders to face the need to adapt and so to become true statesmen. As Vivanti says, “The sole principle governing his judgment … was the necessity to adapt to the times.”

Machiavelli’s role model is Cesare Borgia. Cesare made the most of his abilities, making his own luck and changing his fortune as he did so, until a series of unforeseen and unlucky circumstances brought him down. He committed acts of brutal cruelty, but Machiavelli emphasises that these acts were neither sadistic nor gratuitous, but rather were tactical and even strategic. Here, he is thinking of ends and means. After conquering the Romagna, Cesare despatched a henchman, Remirro de Orco, to restore order. This was energetically accomplished with great severity. In order to ensure that the hatred people had come to feel for Remirro was not transferred to himself, Cesare had Remirro cut into two, and displayed the body in a “terrible spectacle” that left the inhabitants of Romagna “both satisfied and amazed”. In relating this, Machiavelli hardly bothers to hide his admiration of Cesare’s version of a shock-and-awe campaign.

Corrado Vivanti, who died in 2012, edited one of the standard Italian editions of the complete works, Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli. His Niccolò Machiavelli is characterised by a thorough acquaintance with Italian scholarship, much of it little known in the English-speaking world. It is a biography that privileges the works and thought over the life, and so concentrates on the mature man, while largely ignoring the birth, family background, and early years (a mere handful of pages cover the early life).

Machiavelli’s life is often divided into three parts: the early years, from his birth until his ascent to the office of Secretary in 1498; the chancery years until 1512; and finally the years out of office. While Vivanti’s biography also consists of three parts, he starts with the Florentine secretary. The first part examines the early letters and official communications, together with diplomatic and political activities. The second part looks at the immediate years after 1512, and analyses the trilogy of political writings—The Prince, the Discourses and The Art of War—which were written by 1520. And the final part follows Machiavelli’s slow path back towards rehabilitation, looking at the literary writings such as The History of Florence.

Philip Bobbitt’s The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made appears to be one of a series entitled “Books That Changed the World” in the USA (“Books That Shook the World” in the UK). While ostensibly a book about The Prince, it also devotes much space to other works, and in particular the Discourses. This is not a criticism: since the other works are so often ignored, it is a relief to see them accorded due respect. The problem is that The Prince was the first work completed after the pivotal period of 1512, and many if not all of the other works were written after Machiavelli began moving in the humanist circles of the Orti Oricellari. One needs to be aware that, arguably, a realist and political period was followed by a more idealistic and humanistic period, and that therefore using the Discourses as a prism through which to interpret The Prince will tend to lead to a softer view of the harsher aspects of that work.

Bobbitt is a constitutional theorist and the author of a number of well-received works, including The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (2002) and Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (2008). In The Shield of Achilles, Bobbitt traced the historical evolution of the state or constitutional order in five steps—“princely state” (named after The Prince), “kingly state”, “territorial state”, “state-nation”, and “nation-state”—and identified the “market state” as the next step. The princely state emerged as a consequence of changes in military technology and strategy: gunpowder and artillery made walls obsolete, Bobbitt says, and military evolution made necessary a change in constitutional order.

While The Shield of Achilles is a sweeping philosophy of history, the same broad brush-strokes do not work as well when analysing a single life. In The Garments of Court and Palace, Machiavelli, “the poet-philosopher of the princely state”, is cited as “the pre-eminent political philosopher” and “the most prescient observer and the most skilled analyst” of the princely state, the first modern or “neoclassical” state. Since we are now also experiencing the beginning of a transition, Bobbitt believes, from nation-state to market state, Machiavelli remains relevant: “we can be alerted by him”. Bobbitt identifies with Machiavelli, as can be seen in claims such as:

like most visionaries, his insights seemed unrealistic because they challenged the assumptions of the era. Then, as now, the emergence of a new constitutional order loomed over men whose eyes were firmly fixed on the ground, even as it was shifting beneath them.

The ruling classes of the major city-states of Machiavelli’s Italy were, Bobbitt claims, troubled by a lack of legitimacy. Machiavelli had an answer: “the creation of the neoclassical state itself”. This was a process in “which the princely state was objectified and separated from the body of the prince”. This argument has a number of flaws. If Machiavelli was arguing for the princely state, why did he never write a book stating that that was what he was doing? Why keep his intentions hidden—and hidden so well that it has taken five centuries to reveal them?

The argument does however allow Bobbitt to develop the position that Machiavelli’s advice to the prince was advice about what was required to protect and maintain the state, or institutional morality, and therefore that the cruelties he advocated must be judged by a different set of criteria from those aimed to promote the self-interest of the prince, or personal morality. This allows Bobbitt to claim that Machiavelli “was interested in the ethical consequences of the newly emerging neoclassical state—principally, the requirements of a new ethos of individual action when a person acts on behalf of the state”. Evil somehow becomes less than evil if the evil-doer is acting in the interests of all, “the good of the state”, rather than self, “the good of the prince”. Bobbitt’s argument that Machiavelli clearly distinguished the two is unpersuasive. But even if we grant him this point, does it justify what even Bobbitt would agree is otherwise an evil act?

The answer would appear to be affirmative. Bobbitt claims as an “insight” a position he attributes to Machiavelli, which is “that officials must disregard their personal moral codes in carrying out the duties of the state”. Here a distinction similar to that made by legal positivism is made between a private moral code which does not justify otherwise illegitimate action and the public interest which does. Bobbitt’s Machiavelli is a consequentialist, a realist. Usually those who stress this aspect of his thought also argue that he rejected idealism and morality. However, Bobbitt says that he was also an “intense moralist” and “a profoundly ethical writer”.

After mentioning modern issues such as torture, Bobbitt continues:

Machiavelli is not advising a prince to disregard the conventional, Christian and classical virtues when this is necessary to protect the state; he requires this of a prince who has been given responsibility for the protection of the state, because it is sometimes a necessity.

An official who does what is necessary need not feel troubled by conscience: “Machiavelli’s distinction between a personal and a governing ethos … redirects the official and leaves his personal morality uncompromised.”

Much of this is deeply unpersuasive. It is true that Machiavelli noticed that Cesare’s cruelty led to peace and stability in the Romagna, whereas Florence’s efforts to avoid cruelty led to the destruction of Pistoia. In a number of works such as Mandragola, The Prince and the Discourses, he does in effect say that the ends justify the means, and is often believed to have advocated a calculating and immoral policy of doing “whatever it takes”. As both Vivanti and Bobbitt emphasise, however, he did not recommend violence for its own sake. Violence for him was a means to an end, or as he once argued, when the means accuse, the end must excuse. And the end was political stability, or in other words less violence. In Sheldon S. Wolin’s elegant phrasing, political crimes must be judged not by morality but by history. He was arguing for an “economy of violence”. This is a position based on pragmatic realism, not moral philosophy.

In The Prince Machiavelli often writes of what immoral acts are required to maintain the state. Can the needs of the state legitimise the acts? Machiavelli had no trouble in answering in the affirmative. If, as Bobbitt argues, he is a moralist, and if one accepts that a governing ethos exists, then his morality is that of the state. Others including Vivanti have outlined similar positions. Vivanti for instance writes: “the distinction between politics and morality … should be seen not as a recourse to amoral practices but as an affirmation of a new, more coherent, and higher social morality”.

But a distinction between a private and a public ethos? Did Machiavelli believe that Cesare was disregarding his own personal moral codes in acting the way he did? Almost certainly not. Was Cesare’s cruelty a duty of state? No—or at least not unless we redefine the meaning of the state and have Cesare echo what it is sometimes claimed Louis XIV said, “L’État, c’est moi”.

Machiavelli is often seen as an advocate of a cynical and cruel position. To be Machiavellian is to be calculating and diabolical, to practise guile, to lie. Bobbitt and Vivanti help us realise that this view is one-sided, and that there is more to Machiavelli than the popular caricature. Nevertheless, I remain uncomfortable with the use of terms such as “moral”. Bobbitt obviously has the War on Terror in mind. If a public official has a suspected terrorist in custody, and believes that torture will help to provide information, and that this information could help to avert a terrorist attack, then of course the question as to whether or not torture can be justified will be asked. We know what Machiavelli’s reply would have been. After all, Francesco Guicciardini, who was a close friend, once said that Machiavelli “always finds great delight in extraordinary and violent remedies”. However, even if we agree that torture can be justified, nothing is gained by calling the decision to use torture “moral”. It might be expedient, or pragmatic, or realistic. But it is an answer to a question which has but two answers: the bad or the worse. Ultimately, the problem perhaps is not so much that Machiavelli argued that the new prince needed to lie and deceive and kill, but that he gave the impression of enjoying the thought.

Five assumptions or theories, Bobbitt writes, have shaped our understanding of The Prince—the claim that it is a mirror book, that it was written to serve the new prince and thus is anti-republican, that it solves the problem of fate (fortuna) and action (virtù), that it was written as an application for work, and finally that it separates morality from politics. Bobbitt’s work attempts to refute all five assumptions and instead to postulate the notion that Machiavelli was a constitutional writer, and that understanding his constitutionalism helps to shed new light on them.

Of the five points, the first is a furphy. Bobbitt agrees with much of the secondary literature that The Prince is not a mirror book as much as an anti-mirror, anti-Ciceronian work—in many cases, it advises the prince to do the opposite of what mirror books argue he should do. Bobbitt also sees it as a constitutional treatise, but to do so has to read it as a chapter of the Discourses. This leads to the second point, and the claim that there is no contradiction between The Prince and the Discourses. “I think Machiavelli is best understood as having written one great constitutional treatise … with chapters on republics and chapters on principalities.” Reading The Prince through the Discourses allows for an interpretation characterised by the strong republicanism of the latter. (Mandragola, on the other hand, with its cynical and robust anti-clericalism and its sensual enjoyment of guile and cunning, would provide a very different interpretation.)

Bobbitt is insightful on the tension between fortuna and virtù. And the notion that the synthesis of the two can be compared to the outcome of a democratic solution to internal conflict and debate is thought-provoking. One interesting claim is that Machiavelli believed that individual virtù is limited when it comes to combating destiny but that what Bobbitt calls a “collective virtù” promises more effective outcomes. Again, Bobbitt is relying on the Discourses, but here he is more persuasive. Much of The Prince consists of dry analysis. The final chapter, however, is an emotional plea to the new de’ Medici ruler of Florence to unite Italy in order to repulse the European powers running amok across the peninsula. This is often seen as a rhetorical flourish and an unsubtle hint that Machiavelli wanted to work in government again. Bobbitt however sees it not as a “departure” from the rest of the book but as a “culmination”. Again, The Prince is a constitutional work which argued for a new constitutional order, the princely state. A precondition for this order was unity and independence—exactly what the last chapter calls for.

On the final point, the issue of the separation of morality and politics, Bobbitt is unpersuasive. He is skating on thin ice when he argues that Machiavelli was a moralist, and he does little to help his cause when he claims that Machiavelli’s “ethical code” was not “antithetical to Christianity”. Machiavelli’s arguments were “misread”, he says, “as brutal and uncivilized advice … Machiavelli’s separation of a prince’s personal morality from his duty to protect the state baffled and horrified critics with its separation of Christian ethics from political action”. This is, he insists, a misreading. “Despite many claims to the contrary, Machiavelli did not separate ethics from political action, nor did he deride Christian virtues.” In fact, Machiavelli was clearly anti-clerical and irreligious. He may also have been anti-Christian, even atheist.

Bobbitt’s conclusions are that Machiavelli’s long constitutional work

proposes an ethics of service to the state … measures the success of [political] leaders by their contribution to the common good (as opposed to the personal gain of the prince) … favours republicanism and the rule of law because these have the best chance of furthering that good … [and argues for a new united state because] such a state is the way of bringing about a political governance in service of the common good.

This brings us back to The Prince and the Discourses and the relationship between the principality of the former and the republic of the latter. Many would agree that the two works seem to contradict one another. Both Vivanti and Bobbitt tackle this question. In discussing Machiavelli, some focus on The Prince. Leo Strauss argued that he was “a teacher of evil”, and asks an obvious question: “What other description would fit a man who teaches [that] princes ought to exterminate the families of rulers whose territory they wish to possess securely?” For thinkers such as Strauss, the Machiavellian position was that of unscrupulous calculation, and he was a cynical and amoral thinker. On the other hand, others concentrate on the Discourses. As we have already seen, J.G.A. Pocock viewed Machiavelli as a founding father of classical republicanism. For thinkers such as Pocock, he was an egalitarian who championed the cause of democracy.

Rather than focusing on one or the other, Vivanti considers both. He views Machiavelli as a thorough-going pragmatist. “The Prince appears strictly applicable to a particular situation,” he says. At the time Machiavelli was writing it, conditions “seemed to favor a quick and decisive solution to Italy’s problems”. By the time of the Discourses, however, conditions had changed. “It was necessary to think about a long-term operation, the formative process of a people becoming a state.” In other words, The Prince offered short-term solutions to Italy’s problems at a time when such solutions might have worked; under different circumstances, when Machiavelli believed these solutions would no longer work, the Discourses discussed a long-term solution.

Bobbitt also considers both. As we have already seen, he sees the two as a single text. However, he comes close to echoing Vivanti on short- and long-term solutions: Machiavelli believed that the principality and the republic were “better at different roles”: the former at “establishing”, the latter at “maintaining” the state. Here, the two works might be seen as reflecting a belief that the fundamental state-creating reforms to establish stable government required one strong man, who is discussed in The Prince, while the long-term management of government once it has been created is best left to a republic, which is discussed in the Discourses.

Vivanti notices that Machiavelli contrasted and opposed civilisation to corruption. Once civilisation has been achieved, a republic offers the best chance for a long-running and stable government. However, in order to realise the transition from corruption to civilisation, a prince may be necessary, or at least more efficient. According to this reading of Machiavelli, The Prince functions to create the circumstances under which the lessons of the Discourses can be implemented.

Although The Garments of Court and Palace is a book to be quarrelled with, it is lively, current, and at times stimulating. While more modest in his aims, Vivanti provides the greater contribution to Machiavelli scholarship; those who wish to read about the life and times will prefer to start with his book.

Politics will not be privatised, legalised or bureaucratised away. We need to consider the realities of political activity, and Machiavelli in Renaissance Florence still remains one of the best places to start.