Marat said:
Hey, I've been trying to figure out a topic on Machivelli. I thought about
1. exploring the concept of "Machiavellian"
2. exploring Machiavelli in relation to other political philosophers.
3. exploring which political figure Machiavelli most likely based "The Prince" on.
4. exploring Machiavelli's intended purpose and genre for his work "The Prince".
Any help would be most appreciated.
I won't go into one of my infamous tirades about nothing, although I need to say something on that.
If you consider Machiavelli as 'Machiavellian', you'd be wrong.
The Prince is about realpolitik, ie realistic politics. However what most people don't realise is that it's about this kind of politics within a certain government and state -- a monarchy. Machiavelli sees the monarchy as how humans prefer to build early governments. He's quite critical of humans and communities, and seems to say that, descriptively, humans are stupid and evil. This is why he's famous, and where the term 'Machiavellian' comes from.
However,
Discourses on Livy was about republican politics. Since Machiavelli couldn't really say 'republics are better' (which is probably what he thought), he had to pretend to investigate a republic, namely Rome. He did this by going through, among other things, the works of Livy. The work largely praises republicanism and hints at it being a higher level of government. He's saying that whilst others had monarchies and tribes, the Romans had republicanism, and that it served them well.
This contrasts with
The Prince entirely, most Machiavelli scholars (Rousseau being the most famous) believe that Machiavelli was pro-Republicanism, but saw that some of the political mechanics outlined in
The Prince were unavoidable. Essentially, Machiavelli saw
The Prince as an outline of what happens, and
Discourses as an outline of what should happen.
