Machiavelli in Context Guidebook.pdf

Machiavelli in Context

Part I

Professor William R. Cook

T HE T EACHING C OMPANY ®

William R. Cook, Ph.D.

Distinguished Teaching Professor of History,

State University of New York at Geneseo

William R. Cook was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, and attended public schools there. He is a 1966

graduate of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana ( cum laude , Phi Beta Kappa). He received Woodrow

Wilson and Herbert Lehman fellowships to study medieval history from Cornell University, where he received his

Ph.D. in 1971.

In 1970 Dr. Cook was appointed Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York at Geneseo, the

honors college of SUNY. He has taught there for 35 years and holds the rank of Distinguished Teaching Professor

of History. At Geneseo, Dr. Cook has taught courses in medieval and ancient history, the Renaissance and

Reformation periods, and the Bible and Christian thought. Recently, he has taught a course on Alexis de

Tocqueville, as well as freshman seminars that focus on several aspects of African American history and American

politics. In 1992 Dr. Cook was named CASE Professor of the Year for New York State. He received the first-ever

CARA Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Medieval Studies from the Medieval Academy of America in 2003.

He was recently named the alternate for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, receiving a prize of

$15,000, plus a substantial award to his department.

After publishing several articles on Hussite theology and monastic thought, Dr. Cook has, for the last 30 years,

focused much of his research on St. Francis of Assisi. Since 1989 he has published three books about Francis and

the ways he was represented in paintings in Italy. Dr. Cook has also contributed to the Cambridge Companion to

Giotto and is the editor of and a contributor to The Art of the Franciscan Order in Italy , published by Brill in

Leiden, The Netherlands.

Professor Cook spends part of each year doing research and teaching in Italy. From his base in Siena, he works

frequently in Florence as well as Assisi. He has taken students from SUNY Geneseo to Italy on eight occasions and

conducts study tours for the public.

In recent years, Dr. Cook has been a lecturer and site visit leader for the Young Presidents’ Organization, a group of

young CEOs from around the world. He has participated in their programs in Florence, Prague, Istanbul, and

Dublin. In 2005 he was invited by the Friends of Florence, a group of philanthropists dedicated to preserving works

of art in Tuscany, to make presentations for the group’s meeting in Florence.

Dr. Cook has directed 10 Seminars for School Teachers for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

since 1983; six have had St. Francis as their subject and have been conducted in Siena and Assisi, Italy. In 2003 he

directed an NEH seminar for college teachers in Italy entitled “St. Francis and the Thirteenth Century.” This

seminar will be repeated in the summer of 2006.

In addition to his research in Italy, Professor Cook has studied the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. This interest

came about primarily after his unsuccessful run in 1998 for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He has

authored two volumes of local history and writes a weekly column for his local newspaper. He was a frequent

contributor to the editorial pages of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 2004–2005.

Table of Contents

Machiavelli in Context

Part I

Professor Biography ............................................................................................i

Course Scope .......................................................................................................1

Lecture One Who Is Machiavelli? Why Does He Matter?.............3

Lecture Two Machiavelli’s Florence ..............................................5

Lecture Three Classical Thought in Renaissance Florence...............8

Lecture Four The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli .............................10

Lecture Five Why Did Machiavelli Write The Prince ? ................12

Lecture Six The Prince , 1–5—Republics Old and New .............14

Lecture Seven The Prince , 6–7— Virtù and Fortuna .......................16

Lecture Eight The Prince , 8–12—The Prince and Power ..............18

Lecture Nine The Prince , 13–16—The Art of Being a Prince ......20

Lecture Ten The Prince , 17–21—The Lion and the Fox .............22

Lecture Eleven The Prince , 21–26—Fortune and Foreigners ..........24

Lecture Twelve Livy, the Roman Republic, and Machiavelli ...........26

Timeline .............................................................................................................28

Glossary .............................................................................................................29

Biographical Notes ............................................................................................31

Bibliography ......................................................................................................33

Machiavelli in Context

Scope:

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is a name that triggers powerful responses, even from people who have never

read a word of his writings. The adjective Machiavellian , found in English as early as the Shakespearean era,

conjures up the image of an amoral (at best) political leader, wheeling and dealing and lying to achieve his ends—

and often sinister ends at that. The historical figure Niccolò Machiavelli certainly would not recognize that

interpretation or caricature of what he wrote and believed.

Everyone who has seriously studied the works of Machiavelli agrees that he was a dedicated republican, that is,

someone who believed in the superiority of a republican form of government, defined as a mixed constitution with

elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Machiavelli’s own career in government service was during a

republican revival in his hometown of Florence following the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. Yet most people

today know Machiavelli only as the author of The Prince , a work he wrote immediately after he went into a

semivoluntary exile following the return of the Medici to power in Florence in 1512. In that short work, Machiavelli

implores the Medici to exercise strong and, if need be, ruthless leadership in Italy and to expel the “barbarians”

(foreign troops). This counsel hardly sounds like the exhortation of a devoted republican. However, once we

recover the context of the writing of The Prince and analyze it, along with a longer work started about the same

time, his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy , we will see clearly that The Prince can be read as a book

designed to guide leaders in the creation—for Machiavelli, the restoration—of republican government in Italy.

Before exploring the corpus of Machiavelli’s writings, we will need to examine three distinct types of background.

First, we shall consider Florence and its political history before and during Machiavelli’s lifetime. Second, we will

look at the developing culture in Machiavelli’s time, which we usually call the Renaissance, focusing on how

writers and political leaders made use of ancient political thought. Third, we will examine Machiavelli’s life story.

In doing so, we will focus on his education, his service to the Florentine Republic, and his years in exile on his

estate a few miles south of Florence and how each of those periods of his life affected the writings he has left for

posterity. When possible, we will glance at Machiavelli’s personal letters to grasp how he reacted to the world

around him.

Only after laying these foundations can we profitably consider Machiavelli’s most important writings. Ideally, we

would survey each of his surviving books, even including his plays. However, because Machiavelli’s principal

legacy is in his political thought, we shall focus our attention on three works that will get us to the heart of what this

man believed about how human societies should be organized and governed.

First, we will look at The Prince . After attempting to reconstruct the reasons that Machiavelli wrote this little book,

I shall systematically examine its contents, focusing not so much on its technical advice but on the broad political

analysis that Machiavelli provides. Is this a manual for a ruthless prince—we might say dictator—or a work

suggesting the necessity for decisive action in an anarchic and chaotic Italy as a prelude to the establishment of a

republican form of government?

We shall next undertake a careful analysis of what many scholars consider Machiavelli’s most thoughtful and

important contribution to political thought, his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy . This long work is much

more than a commentary on Livy’s (64 B.C.–A.D. 17) early history of Rome. Often, Machiavelli juxtaposes ancient

and modern examples, demonstrating that history cannot be repeated, but its lessons must be adapted to new

circumstances. Although a thorough knowledge of the Roman Republic and its most important historian is useful, I

shall provide just enough of that background to make Machiavelli’s meatiest work concerning republican

government intelligible and useful.

Somewhat briefly, we will look at Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories , written under Medici patronage but hardly

uncritical of that illustrious family. We will use this book to bring together some of the elements of Machiavelli’s

thought that we found in sketchier form in his earlier works.

Finally, we will turn to an examination of the reception and spread of Machiavelli’s works. First, we will consider

how Machiavelli’s works were disseminated and received in his own century. This will lead to a wider

consideration of how Machiavelli the republican became known primarily for his Prince and how the adjective

rooted in his name became a synonym for craftiness and duplicity. We shall also see that Machiavelli’s republican

thought influenced the development of institutions and values both in Europe and in America. When all is said and

done, we must ask whether the work of Niccolò Machiavelli has contributed to the creation and spread of

participatory government in the world, or instead, if it has provided a “how-to” manual for those who would

concentrate power in their own hands.

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