Dr. Fleming on Machiavelli

A comment on this post:

Machiavelli is a multi-faceted man, and I cannot say that I have studied him with the attention he deserves. I can offer a few conclusions I have formed. First, he is the first philosopher/thinker to have studied power as an essential aspect of what he called the state. In my view, this was not attempted in the classical and Medieval world, because the state in our sense of the word did not really exist except in embryo. Thucydides and Tacitus were as cynical as M in their evaluation of political conduct and motivation, but the apparatus of the state did not exist. M did not invent the state but he is the first to have seriously studied it. His disciples--Pareto, Mosca, Sorel, Burnham, Francis--have provided invaluable analysis.

Second, he was a Florentine patriot and an Italian, who wanted to restore the Florentine Republic or at least preserve Florentine independence and to keep the filthy barbarians--Germans and French--out of Italy. If this had to be done through the agency of a Borgia Pope and his "nephew," so be it, but his preference was always for a free republican government. He was no mere theorist. When The Florentines made their final great effort to restore the republic, with the guidance of Piero Soderini, Machiavelli was responsible for the militia--he alone, it seems, understood how dangerous mercenaries had become.

Third, he is one of the great masters of the Italian language, and his commentaries on Livy constitute the deepest reflections on the nature of liberty.

It is in this context that one has to read his extremely melancholy masterpiece, The Prince. I have a wonderful copy, by the way, published in the early 1990's. It is contains Napoleon's notes--he left his copy behind in his carriage at Jena, with an introduction by a neophyte politico named Silvio Berlusconi.