5/27/2023 0 Comments Machiavelli by Miles J. UngerIn an era of constant war and failed states, the Borgia territories were spared the random killings, rapes and pillage that racked so many other Italian regions. “This Lord is of such splendid and magnificent bearing…he never rests, nor does he know weariness or fear.”īorgia conquered and ruled cruelly, but effectively. When, as an envoy from the republic, Machiavelli met the great man in 1502, his admiration for Borgia came through in his dispatches home. As a senior civil servant for the Florentine republic between 14, he went on high-level diplomatic missions, oversaw the city’s militia, and watched with fascination the rise and fall of empire-building Cesare Borgia. He only partially succeeds-Niccolò Machiavelli did possess the intellectual’s fatal attraction to men of action-but the attempt still offers an intriguing portrait of a man marked more by his fervent love for his artistically dazzling city-state than by his political cynicism.īorn in 1469, Machiavelli learned by doing. That’s a reputation Unger sets out to demolish in his lively recap of the Florentine thinker and his tumultuous times. Mostly the former, of course: as an adjective, “Machiavellian” is always a pejorative. The man whose 1513 work The Prince stands as the foundational document of Western political science has ever since been excoriated for his worship of raw power or praised for his grasp of realpolitik.
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