The essential writings of Machiavelli - By Niccolo Machiavelli & Peter Constantine Page 0,2

has become a kind of museum—an architectural and artistic monument, a memorial to the great artists and writers of its past (from Dante and Giotto to Alberti, Donatello, and Lorenzo, to Michelangelo and Machiavelli himself)—as a raw, raunchy, vital, profoundly human place. At the same time, he invents (or so it is claimed) the scientific study of politics, takes lengthy strides toward modern ideas of the writing of history, and makes a crucial contribution to the refounding of a secular dramatic theater, which would reach its zenith less than a hundred years later, in the England of Shakespeare.

All of these works, most of which are represented in this collection in whole or in part, deserve their own, separate consideration, which, alas, they cannot receive in an introduction of this kind. Together they represent a powerful, anguished response to a crisis not only in Machiavelli’s own life and in the life of his beloved Florence, but in that of the Italian peninsula and of Europe generally. The elements of that crisis are well known: the rise of the nation-state (France, Spain, England), which would soon render the independent states of Italy obsolete; the discovery of an unknown world that both unsettled traditional understandings of human society and unleashed a frenzied pursuit of imperial dominion and economic hegemony; the fragmentation of Christianity with the Lutheran-Protestant revolt (whose first warning shot—the Lutheran theses—was directed at the gaudy worldly papacy of Leo and was heard in the same year we believe Machiavelli completed The Prince, 1517); and so on and on. Machiavelli’s writings, especially the ones on politics and history represent an extreme response to an extreme situation—and they betray the angry if often bitingly funny awareness that traditional theocentric ways of thinking and established institutions (whether Florentine republicanism or the Catholic Church itself) were incapable of coping with a menacing tide of drastic changes.

It is tempting to find in this experience, Machiavelli’s experience, an allegory of our recent history and present state: the decay and evident inadequacy of protodemocratic institutions; wars between superpowers that carry along the rest of the world in their wake; globalization driven by economic exploitation and the exportation of an imperial culture; fierce, at times violent, attacks motivated by religious intolerance (most obviously between Protestants and Catholics, but the expanding Muslim world, in the form of the Ottoman Empire, was an increasingly present worry for Europe); a world in which terror is a weapon of first resort. No doubt, Machiavelli would tell us if he could, such parallels have their limitations, but also their uses.

Which brings me to a last point, one that encapsulates my own admiration of and wariness about this courageous, dangerous, ever-innovative author: Machiavelli’s political thought places us at the very top of the intellectual and ethical “slippery slope” one hears so much about—that is, in a world of politics, society, and culture no longer grounded in sacred truths or moral imperatives, no longer able to count on long-cherished principles of order and understanding. But, we should ask ourselves—as Machiavelli’s best readers have asked themselves since his own time—does he invent this slippery slope, or does he simply reveal that it has been the uncertain ground beneath our feet all along? Does he create or does he expose the perils of a historical world of contingency where our neighbors’ (and perhaps even our own) intentions are frequently bad, where justice is often an empty, crowd-pleasing spectacle, where human rights and freedom are not divinely given and “unalienable” but, if they exist as such at all, hard won and easily lost?

There is no easy answer to this question—which is in some ways the question we face today—but the reading of Machiavelli in all of his many facets, in the complexity of his thought and of his imagination, demands of us that we address it before it is too late.

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ALBERT RUSSELL ASCOLI is Gladys Arata Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has held research fellowships from the NEH and ACLS, and was awarded the Rome Prize for study at the American Academy in Rome in 2004–5. His publications include Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1987) and Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2007). With Victoria Kahn he co-edited Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature (Cornell, 1993), which includes his essay “Machiavelli’s Gift of Counsel.”

1. Clizia, Preface; see also The Discourses, Book II, Preface and chapters 39 and 43,