Niccolo Machiavelli

His life spanned the greatest period of cultural achievement in Florence to its ultimate downfall. This period was marked by political instability, fear, invasion, intrigue, and high cultural achievement as the tiny states of Italy, including the Papal States, were pulled into the politics and wars of Europe by the immense gravity of two large states, Spain and France. His life began at the very start of this process: in 1469, when Ferdinand and Isabella married and through this marriage created a new, large kingdom of Spain composed of Castile and Aragon, Machiavelli was born to a wealthy Florentine lawyer. In his lifetime, he would see the efflorescence of Florentine culture and political power under the brilliant political genius of Lorenzo de'Medici. He would also see the twilight of the Medici power as Lorenzo's son and successor, Piero de'Medici, was thrown from power by the Dominican monk, Savonarola, who set up a true Florentine Republic. When Savonarola, fanatic about reform, was himself thrown from power and burned, a second Republic was set up under Soderini in 1498. Machiavelli was the secretary of this new Republic, an important and distinguished position. The Republic, however, was crushed in 1512 by the Spanish who installed the Medici's as rulers of Florence once again.

It seems that Machiavelli really 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 desperate 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.

The tremendous innovation of both the Discourses on Livy and The Prince was Machiavelli's uncoupling of political theory from ethics. Throughout the Western tradition, as in the Chinese tradition, political theory and policy was closely linked to ethics. Aristotle summed up this connection when he defined politics as merely an extension of ethics. Throughout the Western tradition, then, politics had been understood in terms of right and wrong, just and unjust, temperate and intemperate, and so on. The moral terms used to evaluate human actions were employed to evaluate political actions.

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. He did so by observing the phenomena of politics, reading all that's been written on the subject, and describing political systems in their own terms. For Machiavelli, politics was about one and only one thing: getting and keeping power or authority. Everything else--religion,