Niccolo machiavelli brief biography of harper

Others view The Prince as a manual, teaching would-be tyrants how they should seize and maintain power. Even though Machiavelli has become most famous for his work on principalities, scholars also give attention to the exhortations in his other works of political philosophy. While less well known than The Princethe Discourses on Livy composed c.

Machiavelli married Marietta Corsini in Machiavelli was born in a tumultuous era. The Italian city-statesand the families and individuals who ran them could rise and fall suddenly, as popes and the kings of France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire waged acquisitive wars for regional influence and control. Political-military alliances continually changed, featuring condottieri mercenary leaderswho changed sides without warning, and the rise and fall of many short-lived governments.

Machiavelli was taught grammar, rhetoric, and Latin by his teacher, Paolo da Ronciglione. Shortly after the execution of SavonarolaMachiavelli was appointed to an office of the second chancery, a medieval writing office that put Machiavelli in charge of the production of official Florentine government documents. In the first decade of the sixteenth century, he carried out several diplomatic missions, most notably to the papacy in Rome.

Florence sent him to Pistoia to pacify the leaders of two opposing factions which had broken into riots in and ; when this failed, the leaders were banished from the city, a strategy which Machiavelli had favoured from the outset. At the start of the 16th century, Machiavelli conceived of a militia for Florence, and he then began recruiting and creating it.

By February he was able to have four hundred farmers marching on parade, suited including iron breastplatesand armed with lances and small firearms. Machiavelli's success was short-lived. The experience would, like Machiavelli's time in foreign courts and with the Borgia, heavily influence his political writings. The Florentine city-state and the republic were dissolved, with Machiavelli then being removed from office and banished from the city for a year.

Machiavelli then retired to his farm estate at Sant'Andrea in Percussinanear San Casciano in Val di Pesawhere he devoted himself to studying and writing political treatises. During this period, he represented the Florentine Republic on diplomatic visits to France, Germany, and elsewhere in Italy. Politics remained his main passion, and to satisfy this interest, he maintained a well-known correspondence with more politically connected friends, attempting to become involved once again in political life.

When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold, I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and I put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There, I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing and was born to savour.

I am not ashamed to talk to them and ask them to explain their actions and they, out of kindness, answer me. Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty or frightened of death. I live entirely through them. Machiavelli died on 21 June from a stomach ailment [ 37 ] at the age of 58 after receiving his last rites.

It was sculpted by Innocenzo Spinazziwith an epitaph by Doctor Ferroni inscribed on it. Machiavelli's best-known book Il Principe contains several maxims concerning politics. Instead of the more traditional target audience of a hereditary prince, it concentrates on the possibility of a "new prince". To retain power, the niccolo machiavelli brief biography of harper prince must carefully balance the interests of a variety of institutions to which the people are accustomed.

Machiavelli suggests that the political benefits of stability and security can be achieved in the face of moral corruption. Machiavelli believed that public and private morality had to be understood as two different things in order to rule well. Machiavelli believed that, for a ruler, it was better to be widely feared than to be greatly loved; a loved ruler retains authority by obligation, while a feared leader rules by fear of punishment.

Scholars often note that Machiavelli glorifies instrumentality in state building, an approach embodied by the saying, often attributed to interpretations of The Prince" The ends justify the means ". Force may be used to eliminate political rivals, destroy resistant populations, and purge the community of other men strong enough of a character to rule, who will inevitably attempt to replace the ruler.

It would become one of Machiavelli's most famous maxims. Due to the treatise's controversial analysis on politics, inthe Catholic Church banned The Princeputting it on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. As a treatise, its primary intellectual contribution to the history of political thought is the fundamental break between political realism and political idealismdue to it being a manual on acquiring and keeping political power.

In contrast with Plato and AristotleMachiavelli insisted that an imaginary ideal society is not a model by which a prince should orient himself. Concerning the differences and similarities in Machiavelli's advice to ruthless and tyrannical princes in The Prince and his more republican exhortations in Discourses on Livya few commentators assert that The Princealthough written as advice for a monarchical prince, contains arguments for the superiority of republican regimes, similar to those found in the Discourses.

In the 18th century, the work was even called a satirefor example by Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Scholars such as Leo Strauss — and Harvey Mansfield b. The Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci — argued that Machiavelli's audience was the common people, as opposed to the ruling class, who were already made aware of the methods described through their education.

The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Liviusniccolo machiavelli brief biography of harper aroundand published inoften referred to simply as the Discourses or Discorsiis nominally a discussion regarding the classical history of early Ancient Romealthough it strays far from this subject matter and also uses contemporary political examples to illustrate points.

Machiavelli presents it as a series of lessons on how a republic should be started and structured. It is a larger work than The Princeand while it more openly explains the advantages of republics, it also contains many similar themes from his other works. Major commentary on Machiavelli's work has focused on two issues: how unified and philosophical his work is and how innovative or traditional it is.

There is some disagreement concerning how best to describe the unifying themes, if there are any, that can be found in Machiavelli's works, especially in the two major political works, The Prince and Discourses. Some commentators have described him as inconsistent, and perhaps as not even putting a high priority on consistency. Some have argued that his conclusions are best understood as a product of his times, experiences and education.

Others, such as Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfieldhave argued strongly that there is a strong and deliberate consistency and distinctness, even arguing that this extends to all of Machiavelli's works including his comedies and letters. Commentators such as Leo Strauss have gone so far as to name Machiavelli as the deliberate originator of modernity itself.

Others have argued that Machiavelli is only a particularly interesting example of trends which were happening around him. In any case, Machiavelli presented himself at various times as someone reminding Italians of the old virtues of the Romans and Greeks, and other times as someone promoting a completely new approach to politics. Many scholars note that Machiavelli seems particularly original and that he frequently seems to act without any regard for his predecessors.

That Machiavelli had a wide range of influences is in itself not controversial. Their relative importance is however a subject of ongoing discussion. It is possible to summarize some of the main influences emphasized by different commentators. Gilbert summarized the similarities between The Prince and the genre it imitates, the so-called " Mirror of Princes " style.

This was a classically influenced genre, with models at least as far back as Xenophon and Isocrates. While Gilbert emphasized the similarities, however, he agreed with all other commentators that Machiavelli was particularly novel in the way he used this genre, even when compared to his contemporaries such as Baldassare Castiglione and Erasmus.

One of the major innovations Gilbert noted was that Machiavelli focused on the "deliberate purpose of dealing with a new ruler who will need to establish himself in defiance of custom". Normally, these types of works were addressed only to hereditary princes. Xenophon is also an exception in this regard. Commentators such as Quentin Skinner and J.

Pocockin the so-called "Cambridge School" of interpretation, have asserted that some of the republican themes in Machiavelli's political works, particularly the Discourses on Livycan be found in medieval Italian literature which was influenced by classical authors such as Sallust. The Socratic school of classical political philosophy, especially Aristotlehad become a major influence upon European political thinking in the late Middle Ages.

It existed both in the Catholicised form presented by Thomas Aquinasand in the more controversial " Averroist " form of authors like Marsilius of Padua. Machiavelli was critical of Catholic political thinking and may have been influenced by Averroism. But he rarely cites Plato and Aristotle, and most likely did not approve of them. Leo Strauss argued that the strong influence of Xenophona student of Socrates more known as a historian, rhetorician and soldier, was a major source of Socratic ideas for Machiavelli, sometimes not in line with Aristotle.

Niccolo machiavelli brief biography of harper

While interest in Plato was increasing in Florence during Machiavelli's lifetime, Machiavelli does not show particular interest in him, but was indirectly influenced by his readings of authors such as PolybiusPlutarch and Cicero. The major difference between Machiavelli and the Socratics, according to Strauss, is Machiavelli's materialism, and therefore his rejection of both a teleological view of nature and of the view that philosophy is higher than politics.

With their teleological understanding of things, Socratics argued that by nature, everything that acts, acts towards some end, as if nature desired them, but Machiavelli claimed that such things happen by blind chance or human action. Strauss argued that Machiavelli may have seen himself as influenced by some ideas from classical materialists such as DemocritusEpicurus and Lucretius.

Strauss however sees this also as a sign of major innovation in Machiavelli, because classical materialists did not share the Socratic regard for political life, while Machiavelli clearly did. Some scholars note the similarity between Machiavelli and the Greek historian Thucydidessince both emphasized power politics. Yet Thucydides never calls in question the intrinsic superiority of nobility to baseness, a superiority that shines forth particularly when the noble is destroyed by the base.

Therefore Thucydides' History arouses in the reader a sadness which is never aroused by Machiavelli's books. In Machiavelli we find comedies, parodies, and satires but nothing reminding of tragedy. One half of humanity remains outside of his thought. There is no tragedy in Machiavelli because he has no sense of the sacredness of "the common".

Amongst commentators, there are a few consistently made proposals concerning what was most new in Machiavelli's work. Machiavelli is sometimes seen as the prototype of a modern empirical scientist, building generalizations from experience and historical facts, and emphasizing the uselessness of theorizing with the imagination. He emancipated politics from theology and moral philosophy.

He undertook to describe simply what rulers actually did and thus anticipated what was later called the scientific spirit in which questions of good and bad are ignored, and the observer attempts to discover only what really happens. Machiavelli felt that his early schooling along the lines of traditional classical education was essentially useless for the purpose of understanding politics.

Nevertheless, he advocated intensive study of the past, particularly regarding the founding of a city, which he felt was a key to understanding its later development. Machiavelli denies the classical opinion that living virtuously always leads to happiness. For example, Machiavelli viewed misery as "one of the vices that enables a prince to rule.

But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved. Because cruelty and fraud play such important roles in his politics, it is not unusual for certain issues such as murder and betrayal to be commonplace within his works. A related and more controversial proposal often made is that he described how to do things in politics in a way which seemed neutral concerning who used the advice — tyrants or good rulers.

The Prince made the word Machiavellian a byword for deceit, despotism, and political manipulation. Leo Strauss declared himself inclined toward the traditional view that Machiavelli was self-consciously a "teacher of evil", since he counsels the princes to avoid the values of justice, mercy, temperance, wisdom, and love of their people in preference to the use of cruelty, violence, fear, and deception.

Machiavelli is generally seen as being critical of Christianity as it existed in his time, specifically its effect upon politics, and also everyday life. While Christianity sees modesty as a virtue and pride as sinful, Machiavelli took a more classical position, seeing ambition, spiritedness, and the pursuit of glory as good and natural things, and part of the virtue and prudence that good princes should have.

Najemy has argued that this same approach can be found in Machiavelli's approach to love and desire, as seen in his comedies and correspondence. In doing so he made not a few enemies. Machiavelli was married from till his death, with his wife Marietta bearing seven children. His extramarital activities were occasionally a source of scandal.

Machiavelli was removed from office in the change of regime and was arrested for conspiracy against the Medici. Machiavelli produced his most important literary and political writings during the subsequent years when he retired to his estate outside Florence, while not abandoning his political ambitions. He gained a basic humanist education and may have studied at the University of Florence.

For the first 23 years of his life, Florence was ruled by the Medici family — and the ruler, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo was noted for his generous patronage of the arts, which helped Florence became a centre for Renaissance art. However, inafter the death of Lorenzo, Florence became a Republic, and the ruling Medici family were expelled.

In the new Republic, Machiavelli was given an important administrative post and served as a diplomat, travelling around Europe and frequently to the Vatican. Machiavelli was well-suited to his career as a diplomat due to his skills in analysing the character and motives of the people he dealt with. On his travels, he became acquainted with the brutal methods of Cesare Borgia an Italian niccolo machiavelli brief biography of harper who was trying to forge his own power in Italy.

He included more citizens in the army, distrusting foreign mercenaries. Machiavelli was arrested and accused of conspiracy against the Medici. Despite being tortured being hanged from his bound wrists behind his back he refused to confess, and after a few weeks he was released. After his release, he retired to his farm and estate near San Casciano in Val di Pesa, where he concentrated on writing.

He maintained a connection with politics by writing to his politically connected friends. The Prince was written in haste, at a time when Machiavelli was keen to regain political influence. In addition to The PrinceMachiavelli wrote the treatise On the Art of Waramong others, and several poems and plays, including 's satirical The Mandrake. In his later years, Machiavelli resided in a small village just outside of Florence.

He died in the city on June 21, His tomb is in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, which, ironically, he had been banned from entering during the last years of his life. Today, Machiavelli is regarded as the "father of modern political theory. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!