Machiavelli

Among the most original thinkers of the Renaissance is a brilliant and slightly figure, NiccolÐ"І Machiavelli (1469-1527), he was from the city of Florence (The Prince, i). Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his name would be synonymous with deviousness, cruelty, and destructive rationality; no thinker was every so misunderstood than Machiavelli. The source of this misunderstanding is his most influential and widely read on government. When Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Italy was not unified country. Instead, it was a collection of city-states, each with its own court and ruler, each attempting to gain power over others. One of the major Italian city-states, the Republic of Florence, however, was crushed in 1512 and Soderini’s government fell from power and the Medici’s were installed as rulers of Florence once again (Rise/Grafton 140).

These political developments had a serious impact on the life and career of Machiavelli. He had actually served for the past thirteen years as a counselor and diplomat for the former rulers of Florence. When Florence fell into the hands of his princely enemies, he was accused of treason, after torture he was exiled to his farm outside the city (Rise/Grafton 140).

After he was leaving Florence, Machiavelli wrote a letter to a friend in which he described his evening activities alone the countryside: Every night, apparently, he would take off his work clothes (he was living on a farm), and would put on the royal and curial robes he used to wear at court. Only when he was so attired, Machiavelli told his friend, did he feel ready to join in the company of ancient kings and princes. In other words, he was ready to write about them in The Prince (Rise/Grafton 77).

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Machiavelli wrote The Prince in an attempt to integrate himself with the Medici princes who had recently taken over the government of his native city, Florence. He intended this book to describe his uncoupling of political theory and he was the first to discuss politics and social phenomena in his own terms without recourse jurisprudence. For Machiavelli, politics was about one and only one thing: getting and keeping power. Machiavelli begins The Prince by dividing all governments into two kinds: republics and principalities вЂ" those ruled by a prince, or single ruler. He dismisses the first kind of government as being outside of his argument. He then goes onto subdivide the principalities, he writes, are of two kinds: there are those which have been ruled by a family for a long time, and those which are newly conquered (The Prince, Chap I, p 4).

In his first book declared that a republic was the ideal form of government, not a state governed by the authority of a prince. And yet, we must note that Machiavelli never says anywhere in The Prince that he likes the notion of government by princes. He merely states that if a country is going to be governed by a prince, particularly a new prince, he has some advice as to how that prince should rule if he wishes to be great and powerful. In other words, Machiavelli’s book is absolutely practical and not at all idealistic. We could notice how Machiavelli spends the rest of The Prince describing different ways in which the new prince can acquire and maintain the greatest amount of power.

At first Machiavelli considers Mixed Principalities, or new territories annexed to the older ones. The new prince The new prince of such a state, he writes, should extinguish the family line of his predecessors, and take care not to change the old laws вЂ"if need be, he should

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live there himself, and learn the customs of his new subjects, so they won’t consider him a stranger. He should also set up colonies of his own men in the new lands, and should weaken any strong neighboring enemies so that he will have no rival conquerors. In all things, Machiavelli writes, the new prince should not only keep an eye on present dangers, but on possible future dangers вЂ" a good example of this is the Roman rule of new provinces (The Prince, Chap. III, p 6).

Machiavelli considers the relationship between luck and skill in the process to get and keep power. He introduces two key terms: fortune, which means luck, chance, accident, or fortune, and virtu, which means, literally, manliness, and which can also be defined as skill, cunning, power, ability, or strength (The Prince p xviii). Machiavelli suggests, over and over, that a prince is better off relying on virtu than on fortune. However, one of the key advantages of virtu is that it enables a prince better to exploit and master fortune. He will say later fortune is a woman and must be dominated. Here, though, he stresses the connections between fortune and virtu as necessary for successful rule. A prince must be able to seize opportunities through skill in what Machiavelli calls a “lucky shrewdness” (The Prince Chap XXV).

A virtuoso prince will not alienate the people he governs, but he will not let the need to be loved by them take precedence over the necessity of being feared by them. In order to maintain his power, a prince must earn the loyalty of his subjects, and he can best do this by protecting them. And any prince who shows himself to be strong enough to protect his subjects must also show himself to be strong enough to be feared by them вЂ" though, of course, never gratuitously cruel to them(The Prince Chap XVII) . Above all, a virtuoso prince must acknowledge the fact that he does not live in an ideal world. He should therefore “learn not to be