9 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Florentine commander who led Florentine forces and was known for his austerity and self-denial — mentioned by Machiavelli as an example of a civic-minded military leader in contrast to mercenary captains.
Italian nobleman — son of Pope Alexander VI — who carved out a principality in central Italy through a combination of military force, cunning, and ruthless elimination of opponents, and whom Machiavelli held up as the model of the new prince in The Prince.
Machiavelli's 1525 comedy — adapted from Plautus's Casina — about an aging Florentine (Nicomaco) who competes with his own son for a young ward, demonstrating that passion makes fools of men regardless of age and wisdom.
Machiavelli's commissioned history of Florence — from the city's founding through Lorenzo de' Medici's death in 1492 — applying his political analysis to Florentine history and demonstrating through historical narrative how factional conflict and the failure of civic virtue destroyed republican Florence.
Machiavelli's comic masterpiece — a 1518 play about Callimaco's scheme to sleep with the beautiful Lucrezia (wife of the foolish Nicia) through an elaborate deception involving a fake mandrake root potion — generally regarded as the greatest Italian Renaissance comedy.
Italian-American political philosopher at Princeton who is a leading interpreter of Machiavelli — and whose Machiavelli and the Republican Idea argues that Machiavelli is best understood as a civic republican rather than an amoralist — and who has written on republicanism and patriotism.
Governor appointed by Cesare Borgia to impose order on the Romagna through harsh methods — who was then cut in half and left in the public square of Cesena with a bloody knife beside him when Borgia wanted to demonstrate that the cruelty was the governor's, not the prince's.
Mythological founder-king of Athens — who killed the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of Crete, unified Attica under Athens, and instituted democratic reforms — and whom Machiavelli cited as one of the four great armed prophets alongside Moses, Romulus, and Cyrus.
Leo Strauss's 1958 study of Machiavelli — arguing that Machiavelli was a profoundly immoral teacher who deliberately broke with the entire Western philosophical and theological tradition, making him 'a teacher of evil' — and reading the Prince and Discourses esoterically to reveal their hidden atheism and subversion.