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Machiavelli
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Of Machiavelli's minor poems, sonnets, capitoli and carnival songs there is not much to say. Powerful as a comic playwright, he was not a poet in the proper sense of the term. The little novel of Belfagor claims a passing word, if only because of its celebrity. It is a good-humoured satire upon marriage, the devil being forced to admit that hell itself is preferable to his wife's company. That Machiavelli invented it to express the irritation of his own domestic life is a myth without foundation. The story has a medieval origin, and it was almost simultaneously treated in Italian by Machiavelli, Straparola and Giovanni Brevio.
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It is worth noting in passing that Machiavelli is the first spin doctor, stressing that it is important for the people to believe in the noble qualities of their leaders. The primary reason for this is the necessity of convincing men to die for the good of the state. Modern armies, raised from the populace, must be inspired, motivated, indoctrinated. This can best be accomplished by the effective use of religion, which completes the trinity required for a good state: good laws, good arms, good religion. Without religious belief, no durable state can be created, no effective laws can be established, and no effective army can be maintained. Not any religion, of course; only a religion that stresses the common good, and that inspires men to fight for it. Machiavelli believes Christianity contains these themes, but it has been corrupted.
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Machiavelli's works had enormous influence from the moment of the printing of most of his works in 1532 through the eighteenth century. Although the Index of Prohibited Books forbade the publication, holding, or reading of all of Machiavelli's works, numerous printings and translations, some of them under fictitious names, appeared in the sixteenth century and the following centuries. And writers responded to Machiavelli because he posed the basic political question, can political success and the moral law be reconciled? The view that they could not was expressed in terms of "reason of state" (an expression Machiavelli did not use), the argument that for the good of the state a ruler or government may commit evil actions, such as killing innocent family members of political rivals, an action Machiavelli endorsed in The Prince.
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In Benedict Spinoza, Machiavelli had another collaborator. As may be seen in his Theological-political Treatise, Spinoza was the first philosopher who was both a democrat and a liberal; he is ... the father of “biblical criticism.”25 His Treatise exalts democracy as “the most natural form of government,” for there “every man may think what he likes, and say what he thinks.”26
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Machiavelli illustrates this claim by reference to the evolution of Roman military strategy against Hannibal. After the first flush of the Carthaginian general's victories in Italy, the circumstances of the Roman required a circumspect and cautious leader who would not commit the legions to aggressive military action for which they were not prepared. Such leadership emerged in the person of Fabius Maximus, "a general who by his slowness and his caution held the enemy at bay. Nor could he have met with circumstances more suited to his ways” (Machiavelli 1965, 452). Yet when a more offensive stance was demanded to defeat Hannibal, the Roman Republic was able to turn to the leadership of Scipio, whose personal qualities were more fitted to the times. Neither Fabius nor Scipio was able to escape "his ways and habits" (Machiavelli 1965, 452), but the fact that Rome could call on each at the appropriate moment suggests to Machiavelli an inherent strength of the republican system.
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Machiavelli shared with Renaissance humanists a passion for classical antiquity. To their wish for a literary and spiritual revival of ancient values, guided by such authors as Plato, Cicero, and St. Augustine, he added a fierce desire for a political and moral renewal on the model of the Roman Republic as depicted by Livy and Tacitus. Though a republican at heart, he saw as the crying need of his day a strong political and military leader who could forge a unitary state in northern Italy to eliminate French and Spanish hegemony from Italian soil. At the moment that he wrote The Prince he envisioned such a possibility while the restored Medici ruled both Florence and the papacy. He had taken to heart Cesare Borgia's energetic creation of a new state in Romagna in the few brief years while Borgia's father, Alexander VI, occupied the papal throne. The final chapter of The Princeis a ringing plea to his Medici patrons to set Italy free from the "barbarians."
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