Machiavelli, like many people of Florence, was however not a full citizen of Florence, due to the nature of Florentine citizenship in that time, even under the republican regime.

While Gilbert emphasizes the similarities however, he agrees 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.

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.

With the end of the Middle Ages however, Aristotle's approach, especially concerning formal and final causes, was criticized by authors such as Niccolò Machiavelli, in the field of political thinking, and Francis Bacon, concerning science more generally.

Xenophon however, like Plato and Aristotle, was a follower of Socrates, and his works show approval of a " teleological argument ", while Machiavelli rejected such arguments.

On this matter, gives evidence that Machiavelli may have seen himself as having learned something from Democritus, Epicurus and classical materialism, which was however not associated with political realism, or even any interest in politics.

In addressing the question of whether it is better to be loved or feared, Machiavelli writes, “ The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other ; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both .” As Machiavelli asserts, commitments made in peace are not always kept in adversity ; however, commitments made in fear are kept out of fear.

Niccolò Machiavelli believed that Sparta lasted a long time because " she did not permit strangers to establish themselves in the republic " and remarked that the Roman Republic took the opposite course of Sparta spelling her doom. It is to be noted, however, that the population of Sparta was in irreversible decline from the time of its victory in the Peloponnesian Wars, falling from 9, 000 Spartiates in 640 to 1, 000 after the battle of Leucra in 371, due to the refusal of miscegenation, selective infanticide and the desertion of patrician scions to more attractive foreign parts.

The utopian temptation to return to the cocoon of cosmological or radical unity, however, survived even in the U. S. Whether reform was from Woodrow Wilson, or more foreign influences such as Rousseau, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, these saw division of power – and the tradition that sustained its tension – as the central societal problem of modern times, with the task of reform to remove these impediments to a restored unity.

Machiavelli felt that his early schooling along the lines of a traditional classical education was essentially useless for the purpose of understanding politics.

Much of Battleline Publications line, including Wooden Ships and Iron Men and the Diplomacy variant based on Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli was republished by Avalon Hill, along with the popular Diplomacy.

Following an interpretation of power similar to that of Machiavelli, Foucault defines power as immaterial, as a " certain type of relation between individuals " that has to do with complex strategic social positions that relate to the subject's ability to control its environment and influence those around itself.

In contrast with Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli insisted that an imaginary ideal society is not a model that a prince should orient himself by.

One of the major innovations Gilbert noted was that Machiavelli focused upon the " deliberate purpose of dealing with a new ruler who will need to establish himself in defiance of custom ".

Leo Strauss argued that the strong influence of Xenophon, a student of Socrates more known as an historian, rhetorician and soldier, was a major source of Socratic ideas for Machiavelli, sometimes not in line with Aristotle.

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.

A copy was also possessed by the Catholic king and emperor Charles V. In France, after an initially mixed reaction, Machiavelli came to be associated with Catherine de ' Medici and the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

As reports, in the 16th century, Catholic writers " associated Machiavelli with the Protestants, whereas Protestant authors saw him as Italian and Catholic ".

They accepted the need for a prince to be concerned with reputation, and even a need for cunning and deceit, but compared to Machiavelli, and like later modernist writers, they emphasized economic progress much more than the riskier ventures of war.

In his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, John Adams praised Machiavelli, with Algernon Sidney and Montesquieu, as a philosophic defender of mixed government.

* Machiavelli on the Net, a Machiavelli webliography with a short introduction.

* Machiavelli and the Italian City on the BBC's In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg ; with Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge ; Evelyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London ; Lisa Jardine, Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London

John Locke, on the other hand, who gave us Two Treatises of Government and who did not believe in the divine right of kings either, sided with Aquinas and stood against both Machiavelli and Hobbes by accepting Aristotle's dictum that man seeks to be happy in a state of social harmony as a social animal.

the whole innuendo of the Thucydidean treatment of history agrees with the fundamental postulate of Machiavelli, the supremacy of reason of state.

* Chandragupta Maurya captures Magadha: Chandragupta, with the help Chanakya ( Kautilya ), who is also known as the Indian Machiavelli, destroyed the Nanda rulers of Magadha and established the Mauryan empire.

Forty-four years after his death, on 7 June 1871, his remains were brought to Florence, and with all the pride, pomp and circumstance of a great national mourning, found their final resting-place beside the monuments of Machiavelli and Alfieri, of Michelangelo and Galileo, in the church of Santa Croce, the pantheon of Italian glory he had celebrated in Dei sepolcri.

It was discussed for a long time with Francesco Vettori, a friend of Machiavelli who he wanted to pass it and commend it to the Medici.

The types of political behavior which are discussed with apparent approval by Machiavelli in The Prince were perceived as shocking by contemporaries, and its immorality is still a subject of serious discussion.

Xenophon also, as Strauss pointed out, wrote a dialogue, Hiero which showed a wise man dealing sympathetically with a tyrant, coming close to what Machiavelli would do in questioning the ideal of " the imagined prince ".

On the topic of rhetoric Machiavelli, in his introduction, stated that “ I have not embellished or crammed this book with rounded periods or big, impressive words, or with any blandishment or superfluous decoration of the kind which many are in the habit of using to describe or adorn what they have produced ”.

It has been suggested that due to such things as this and his style of writing to his superiors generally, there was very likely some animosity to Machiavelli even before the return of the Medici.

Strauss argued that Machiavelli may have seen himself as influenced by some ideas from classical materialists such as Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius.

Despite the classical precedents, which Machiavelli was not the only one to promote in his time, Machiavelli's realism and willingness to argue that good ends justify bad things, is seen as a critical stimulus towards some of the most important theories of modern politics.

* Machiavelli at the Marxists Internet Archive, including some of his works

His psychological insights into the behaviour of kings are ahead of their time, reminiscent in some ways of his contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli.

Although the work advises princes how to tyrannize, Machiavelli is generally thought to have preferred some form of free republic.

This chapter shows a low opinion of flatterers ; Machiavelli notes that “ Men are so happily absorbed in their own affairs and indulge in such self-deception that it is difficult for them not to fall victim to this plague ; and some efforts to protect oneself from flatterers involve the risk of becoming despised .” Flatterers were seen as a great danger to a prince, because their flattery could cause him to avoid wise counsel in favor of rash action, but avoiding all advice, flattery or otherwise, was equally bad ; a middle road had to be taken.

Machiavelli is indicating in this passage, as in some others in his works, that Christianity itself was making Italians helpless and lazy concerning their own politics, as if they would leave dangerous rivers un-controlled.

Machiavelli argued, for example, that violent divisions within political communities are unavoidable, but can also be a source of strength which law-makers and leaders should account for and even encourage in some ways ( Strauss 1987 ).

Bodin's secular attitude to history therefore goes some way to explain his perceived relationship to Machiavelli.

There is general agreement that Russian-French writer and political activist Matvei Golovinski fabricated the text for Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire, as a work of counter-revolutionary propaganda prior to the 1905 Russian Revolution, by plagiarizing it, almost word for word in some passages, from The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a 19th century satire against Napoleon III of France written by French political satirist and Legitimist militant Maurice Joly.

Guicciardini was critical of some of the ideas expressed by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy, " Guicciardini's principal objection to the theories which Machiavelli advanced in the Discourses was that Machiavelli put things ' too absolutely.

It is the burial place of some of the most illustrious Italians, such as Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, Foscolo, Gentile and Rossini, thus it is known also as the Temple of the Italian Glories ( Tempio dell ' Itale Glorie ).

The idealized Prince bears some resemblance to Tacitus's Tiberius ; a few ( most notably Giuseppe Toffanin ) have argued that Machiavelli had made more use of Tacitus than he let on.

This continued interest in Machiavelli as a military thinker was not only caused by the fame of his name ; some of the recommendations made in the Art of War-those on training, discipline, and classification, for instance-gained increasing practical importance in early modern Europe when armies came to be composed of professionals coming from the most different social strata.