the works of machiavelli niccolo machiavelli

The term Machiavellian, referring to the ruthless pursuit of an end by any means, badly misinterprets the ideas that he expounded in The Prince and Discourses on Livy, which he wrote around the same time. He notes that if you search the New York Times archive, Machiavelli has been mentioned more than 48,000 times since 1851.īut there is a problem. “Machiavelli and Plato are the only two political thinkers whose names have become adjectives and that are still used in contemporary parlance,” says Ioannis Evrigenis, an associate professor of political science at Tufts. While The Prince failed to get Machiavelli back into the government, it influenced great political thinkers across the centuries, including René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Montesquieu and John Locke. It was called The Prince, and its 500th anniversary this year was cause for a resurgence of reconsiderations of the brief, and in some ways shocking book that laid the cornerstone for modern politics. There being no blogs, Machiavelli retreated to his farm outside of Florence to write a treatise for the new rulers on how to govern-a document he hoped would convince them to rehire him.

He had been secretary to the chancery for the Republic of Florence since 1498, but the Medici family retook the city-state by force and installed their prince as leader, banishing Machiavelli from government. Niccolò Machiavelli lost his job in 1512.

The works of machiavelli niccolo machiavelli