De principatibus

What Hacker News says

1. toygDec 2021
   The author misunderstands Machiavelli. Works like De Principatibus are meant to help "subversive" democratic efforts to recognize, reveal, and hence counter tyrannical strategies. Machiavelli was a supporter of democratic governments, which were rare and revolutionary in his times, and had been burnt by the success of counter-revolutionary forces; so he described what were effectively catalogs of tyrannical behaviors, in order to help people avoid their traps. The fact that tyrants also ended up reading his works and treating them like manuals, was a side-effect.
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2. hodgesrmDec 2021
   Machiavelli wrote De Principatibus to get a job with the Medici after losing his position when they returned to Florence. There are a lot of interpretations of the work but the simplest is that it's a manual for an autocrat and that Machiavelli believed that the maxims he described were true. The most important is that the ends justify the means.

   It's quite a different question whether Machiavelli personally believed in autocracy. In the Discourses he discussed the management of republics. He also worked for the Florentine Republic for many years. There's no question he saw the strengths of republics, but his views are also conflated with admiration for Rome, which was Republican after 510 BC.

   I think the simplest answer is that Machiavelli believed in Florence, desired the unity of Italy against foreign invaders, and wanted to be part of the action. That's just my own opinion.

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli#The_P...

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