Crick Bernard - The Discourses

I must confess that over nearly thirty-five years my views on the nature and importance of the political have not changed, so for reasons both good and bad I have decided to let my original Introduction stand, but to shorten the original Preface and to purge and update Suggestions for Further Reading. The last thirty years have seen great advances in Machiavelli scholarship. They are most clearly encapsulated in the work of Quentin Skinner, the mentor and originating editor of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought one of the great contemporary enterprises of historical scholarship.

Some points of my Introduction could stand revision, the references and examples could now be richer and I might claim less for Machiavellis originality and more for his success in presenting what were becoming commonplaces of humanist thought. But while sharing many of the Cambridge schools presuppositions, I think there is something more, at least something different. There is a difference between political theory and the history of political ideas. Once a text has been placed in its context (intellectual, political and biographical) to recover the meaning that the concepts had to the authors contemporaries, then one can, and I believe should, move from the mode of history of ideas into the mode of political thinking; one should then consider the truth and general validity of the propositions asserted in that text. To know an authors intentions is essential, but any great thinker and writer will, in the creative activity of thinking and writing, go beyond premeditated and planned intentions and speak, in part at least, home truths to us as well as to contemporaries. Meanings change over time and are, indeed, essentially contestable, so to be always on guard against gross anachronism and to respect historical method; but in some texts sufficient meaning remains to justify talking of some perennial values and important theories that stand the test of time. Such a case is that very tradition of civic republicanism which Professor Skinner sought to recover in Machiavelli, but is now too often and mistakenly regarded as dead. This needs reviving in an age of technocrats and professionals and modernizers who are so often two-faced about active citizenship.