Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli was born in Florence to a lawyer's family in decline. In 1498, after the Medici were expelled and Savonarola burned, the twenty-nine-year-old entered the republic's government as second chancellor, responsible for diplomacy and war. For fourteen years he was sent on missions to France, Rome and Germany, observed Cesare Borgia, Pope Julius II and Louis XII at close range, and organised a citizen militia for Florence.

In 1512 the Medici returned behind Spanish troops; he was dismissed, and the next year arrested on suspicion of conspiracy and tortured on the rope. Released, he withdrew to the countryside, where by day he played cards with the peasants and by evening dressed in court robes to enter his study and converse with the ancients. In those months he wrote The Prince. He dedicated it to the Medici in hope of re-employment and failed; then followed the Discourses on Livy, The Art of War, the Florentine Histories and the comedy Mandragola.

The shock of The Prince is that it refuses to say how a prince ought to be and asks only how he can actually keep power: he must learn how not to be good when necessary; it is safer to be feared than loved; seeming virtuous is more useful than being so. The Discourses show that his real preference was for republics, where civic virtue and liberty are the roots of a state's strength. Both books share one mode of thought: politics has its own logic, unconstrained by Christian morality. His name became a synonym for cunning, but Rousseau called him a republican who, while teaching princes, gave a great lesson to the people.