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Essay on Niccolo Machiavelli
Among the most original thinkers of the Renaissance is a brilliant and slightly tragic figure, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his name would be synonymous with deviousness, cruelty, and willfully destructive rationality; no thinker was every so demonized or misunderstood than Machiavelli. The source of this misunderstanding is his most influential and widely read treatise on government, The Prince, a remarkably short book that attempts to lay out methods to secure and maintain political power (Planet Papers, 2003).
It seems that Machiavelli had no political commitments or political stripe: he seems to have been on nobody's side politically. For when the Medici came to power, he began to work overtime to get in good with them. It seems that either he was ruthlessly ambitious or believed in serving in government no matter what political group or party was in charge. The Medici, however, never fully trusted him since he had been an important official in the Republic. They imprisoned and tortured him in 1513 and eventually banished him to his country estate at San Casciano (all this torture and imprisonment, however, didn't stop him from trying to get in good with the Medicis). It was during his exile in San Casciano, when he was desparate to get back into government, that he wrote his principle works: the Discourse on Livy, The Prince, The History of Florence, and two plays. Many of these works, such as The Prince, were written for the express purpose of getting a job in the Medici government.
Machiavelli was the first to discuss politics and social phenomena in their own terms without recourse to ethics or jurisprudence. In many ways you could consider Machiavelli to be the first major Western thinker to apply the strictly scientific method of Aristotle and Averroes to politics..............
