Interpretations of Machiavelli are legion. No other political author has provoked either the same volume of critical responses or caused such sharp disagreement about his purposes. Machiavelli is variously described as the Galileo of politics, the first political scientist, a realist, a pragmatist, a cynic.

Conversely, he is artistic and intuitive, rather than scientific. Or, he is the founder of the doctrine of ‘reason of state’ he is an [...]

In The Prince Machiavelli puts the case for political expediency in its starkest, most electrifying form. Here, he is associated with the divorce of politics from conventional morality; the justification of all means even the most unscrupulous in the quest for political power. As a result, he has been denounced as a man inspired by the devil, as an immoral writer, an anti-Christian, an advocate of cruelty and tyranny and [...]

Machiavelli’s status as a political thinker rests in part on the novelty he claimed for his method of political enquiry. A common interpretation of Machiavelli hails him as the founder of modern political science and as a pioneer of empiricism and what is now known as the inductive method of reasoning – a process of inferring generalisations from the observation of particular examples.

Machiavelli’s new method consisted of collecting facts [...]

Machiavelli is a pivotal figure in the history of political thought. His views of human nature, society and government mark a break with medieval philosophy and sixteenth century political thought based on assumptions about God’s purposes for man.

Machiavelli divorced politics from Christian morality and from religion. He conceived the state as functioning solely for human purposes and constructed rules of conduct that were informed by a realistic and [...]