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Machiavelli: Experience and Speculation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Leonid M. Batkin
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Extract

The extremely pernicious and paganly immoral principles stated by the Florentine secretary run counter to all national thought and have incontestably exercised a corrupting influence on it.

F. Schlegel

We must be grateful to Machiavelli and other writers who like him have openly and without dissimulation shown not how men ought to act, but how they do normally act.

F. Bacon

The interpretation of Machiavelli's philosophy of history encounters specific difficulties. His contribution to the history of thought is unique and yet rooted in the culture that was typical of the Renaissance; it constitutes—something rarely found among the creative spirits of the High Renaissance—the logical-historical limit of that culture, the critical point at which the contradictions that characterize it tragically come to light.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 27 , Issue 107 , September 1979 , pp. 24 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 In 1977 Machiavelli's jubilee was celebrated in the Soviet Union with a series of scientific conferences devoted to him, especially in Leningrad, within the cadre of the Scientific Council of World Culture, an organ of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

2 Virgilio Titone, Il pensiero politico nell'età barocca, Caltanissetta, Rome, 1974, pp. 38, 40, 44-45.

3 Chrestomathy of four centuries of reflections on Machiavelli edited in Boston in 1960 with the title Machiavelli-the Cynic, the Patriot, the Politician.

4 All the letters quoted here are from the edition Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere, Vol. VI, Lettere, ed. F. Gaeta, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1961.

5 Letter to Francesco Vettori, December 10, 1513.

6 Ponzo was an adversary of Savonarola.

7 Alberto is most probably Alberto da Orvieto, sent to Florence by Alexander VI in 1495. He may also be the monk in the second novella of the Fourth Day in the Decameron.

8 The arabic numerals refer to pages in the Penguin edition of The Prince, translated by George Bull, 1964.

9 Roman numerals followed by arabic numerals refer to books and chapters of Discourse on the First Decade of Livy ("Discorsi") from Machiavelli, Le Opere, ed. Gian Berardi, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1973.

10 Lettere, op. cit., p. 304.

11 This is my underlining (L.B.).

12 F. De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana (quoted from the Russian edition: Istoria italianskoj literatury, Vol. II, Moscow, 1964, pp. 133-34).

13 Luigi Firpo, "Nel V Centenario del Machiavelli," in Il pensiero politico di Machiavelli e la sua fortuna nel mondo, Florence, 1972, pp. 4-7.

14 D. Barberi-Squarotti, La forma tragica del "Principe," Florence, 1966.

15 Fanatic partisans of Savonarola belonging to the lowest strata of society.

16 Luigi Firpo, op. cit., p. 18.