Machiavelli Niccolò - On Machiavelli : the search for glory

On Aristotle: Saving Politics from Philosophy

On Politics: A History of Political Thought:
From Herodotus to the Present

Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education

John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism

Bertrand Russell: A Political Life

Property

Property and Political Theory

J. S. Mill

The Philosophy of the Social Sciences

The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill

Copyright 2014, 2012 by Alan Ryan

Portions previously published in On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present

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CONTENTS

I N THE INTRODUCTION TO On Politics , I suggested that one measure of the books success would be the readers who went and read the works of the authors I discussed. Some readers suggested that I might encourage them to do so by taking chapters of On Politics and adding to them substantial extracts from the works I hoped they would read. What follows is exactly that, with a short introduction to provide some of the context that the chapters original placement in On Politics would have provided. As before, I am grateful to Bob Weil and William Menaker at Liveright, as well as to the Norton production team, for their help in making an authors life as easy as it can plausibly be made. I should also acknowledge how indebted I am to Sheldon Wolin, Isaiah Berlin, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli for their penetrating insights into Machiavelli.

T HE DECADE DURING WHICH Machiavelli wrote, but could not publish, his two great contributions to political thinking was an extraordinary one both in the history of political thinking and in European political and military history. Our concern is with the former, but Machiavellis own concerns were with the latter until he was forced to be a spectator of events he could not influence. In 1513 Machiavelli began work on The Prince , in 1516 Thomas More published Utopia , and in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the cathedral of Wittenberg. Machiavellis beloved Florentine Republic, which he had served since 1498, was overthrown by the combined forces of Spain and the papacy in 1512, and the exiled Medici were restored to power. He set about writing The Prince sometime after April 1513, after being released from the Bargello prison, where the new regime had had him interrogated under torture; he was wrongly but not implausibly suspected of involvement in a plot to restore Piero Soderini to power and send the Medici into exile once again. As his letter to Francesco Vettori suggests, he had made a lot of progress by the end of 1513, but he must have thought the work finished only after March 1516 when Giuliano de Medici died, and Machiavelli dedicated the work instead to Lorenzo de Medici, duke of Urbino. Manuscript copies appear to have circulated around this time.