Niccolò Machiavelli

by

Cary J. Nederman

• LAST REVIEWED: 29 July 2020
• LAST MODIFIED: 29 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0268

Introduction

Niccolò Machiavelli (b. 1469–d. 1527) was a civil servant in the 1498 Florentine Republic who, after he lost his position in the Medici coup of 1512, wrote two of the most influential works of Renaissance Italian political theory, The Prince (1513/1514) and the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy (1514/1515–1518/1519). Both works were published only posthumously—in 1532 and 1531, respectively—but they appear to have circulated widely prior to their printing. Although Machiavelli wrote numerous other works, including poetry and plays as well as history and a treatise on warfare, his reputation as an important author rests primarily upon the two major political compositions just mentioned. The Prince is a short tract that proposes to teach rulers the “actual” precepts that will lead them to govern effectively. The Discourses, by contrast, is a far lengthier tome that defends the superiority of republican government, especially that of Rome. Machiavelli’s thought engendered controversy almost immediately upon its dissemination, and it continues to do so today. He has been condemned, for instance, for founding the doctrine of Realpolitik and for teaching the political necessity of doing “evil.” He has also been venerated for his contributions to the origins of political science and to the formulation of modern republican theory. The scholarly literature on Machiavelli is enormous. A useful guide to 20th-century interpretations is Niccolò Machiavelli: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism and Scholarship, compiled by Silvia Ruffo Fiore (New York: Greenwood, 1990), which covers research from 1935 to 1988 in all major languages. Also valuable is The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, edited by John M. Najemy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which reviews the current state of scholarship on Machiavelli. Online efforts to survey recent literature on Machiavelli are many, but they have proven ephemeral; it may be best to conduct a web search for currently available bibliographies.

Primary Sources

It seems that translations of The Prince are published almost annually, making it difficult to compare and recommend one over the very many others. Machiavelli 2020 and Machiavelli 1994 may be commended for including helpful resources beyond the translation itself. Virtually every word written by Machiavelli has received one or more renderings into English. These may be found, for instance, in Atkinson and Sices 1996, Machiavelli 1970, Machiavelli 2008, and Machiavelli 2019. Nearly the entirety of Machiavelli’s corpus (including his Discourses, Art of War, History of Florence, and minor prose and poetic and theatrical works) is translated by Allan Gilbert in the three volumes of Machiavelli 1965. Machiavelli’s Italian is notoriously difficult to capture in translation, however, due to his highly ambiguous and playful use of language, among other factors. Even readers who have facility in the original find his expression challenging to comprehend. Thus, it is useful to compare translations with the original Italian, if one has the linguistic ability to do so. One widely available and often-cited edition is Machiavelli 2018, edited by Mario Martelli and now in its second edition. Machiavelli 2005 is a commendable three-volume edition. Once Machiavelli 2001– is finished, a definitive scholarly edition will at last exist.

• Atkinson, James B., and David Sices, eds. Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.

  Gathers into a single, well-annotated volume the sum total of all Machiavelli’s known private (as distinct from professional) letters, covering the period from c. 1497 through 1527.

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Chief Works, and Others. Translated by Allan Gilbert. 3 vols. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965.

  Collects together in English translation nearly all of Machiavelli’s writings. Although the renderings tend toward the literary, rather than the literal, the volume is extremely useful to readers who lack knowledge of Italian.

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. The History of Florence and Other Selections. Edited by Myron B. Gilmore. Translated by Judith A. Rawson. New York: Twayne, 1970.

  A selection of Machiavelli’s often underappreciated historical and quasi-sociological works, although the version of the History of Florence is heavily edited.

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. Selected Political Writings. Edited and Translated by David Wootton. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994.

  Contains perhaps the best English translation of The Prince, an extremely readable yet accurate rendering, together with a small selection from the Discourses. A freestanding version of Wootton’s translation of The Prince is also available from the same publisher.

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Niccolò Machiavelli. Rome: Salerno, 2001–.

  When complete, this will be the standard edition of Machiavelli’s complete oeuvre for generations to come.

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. Opere. 3 vols. Edited by Corrado Vivanti. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 2005.

  Vivanti’s edition of Machiavelli’s works offers a more thorough apparatus than may be found in Machiavelli 2018.

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy. Translated by Julia C. Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  A complete translation of the Discourses by two eminent Italianists that succeeds in bridging the fraught divide between literal and accessible renderings.

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. Tutte le opere. Edited by Mario Martelli. 2d ed. Milan: Bompiani, 2018.

  Among the many Italian editions of Machiavelli’s complete works, Martelli’s single-volume collection is one of the most cited and very reliable, although it lacks a critical apparatus that more advanced scholars would find useful.

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. Political, Historical, and Literary Writings. Edited by Mark Jurdjevic and Meredith K. Ray. Trans. by Meredith K. Ray. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

  A selection of texts that includes letters, poems, short prose, and plays as well as excerpts from his best known works. The collection will be useful to historians and literary scholars who wish to teach a range of Machiavelli’s writings rather than just one or two of his “classic” works of his political theory.

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Trans. by Wayne A. Rebhorn. 3d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2020.

  A new version of the classic 1977 version by Robert Adams in the Norton Critical Edition series. In addition to revising Adams’s translation, Rebhorn excises many chapters of older commentary and replaces them with a number of quite recent ones. The volume provides excellent resources for the undergraduate classroom.