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Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469-1527) |
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A Florentine diplomat, civil servant, playwright, and political and military theorist. Machiavelli is now best known for his short book The Prince, which analysed the political world as it was rather than as it ought to be. It thus scandalized the Church, and his name became a byword for cunning, deceit and ruthlessness. His most important work, however, is to be found in the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, where he uses the Roman historian as a foil to advance his own political theory. Machiavelli\'s diplomatic despatches to the Florentine signoria from other Italian city states and from France and Germany, together with the instructions with which he was supplied, are to be found in two of the four volumes of his works translated into English in the late nineteenth century under the title The Historical, Political, and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, vols III and IV (‘The Missions’). More interested in military than diplomatic technique, Machiavelli\'s only explicit reflection on the last (and that entirely conventional) is to be found in his letter of 1522 which was subsequently entitled ‘Advice to Raffaello Girolami when he went as Ambassador to the Emperor’. Nevertheless, Machiavelli is important for students of diplomacy because not only was he the first of the realists (sense 1) but, as Meinecke points out, ‘the first person to discover the real nature of raison d\'état’. See also Guicciardini. |
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