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specialists on machiavelli of ten lament the degree to which his thought is routinely misunderstood-often to a degree unrivalled by misunder- standings of any other thinker in the Western canon. A substantial gap between what Machiavelli actually wrote and what has been attributed to him has prevailed for centuries. The reasons for that gap are complex and vary widely according to historical era-from the Elizabethan demonization of him as an agent of diabolical papal stratagems to Stalin's reading of him as a prophet of totalitarianism. Despite consid- erable geographical and chronological variety, however, these major moments in the history of the misrepresentation of Machiavelli share one important common denominator: they all focus disproportionately on The Prince and they read it with little interest in the circumstances of its composition.
Without wishing in any way to dispute the merits of purely intertextual readings, in the case of Machiavelli there are three wide- spread and enduring assumptions about The Prince that merit revisit- ing. The first, considering the relationship between Machiavelli and The Prince, is that Machiavelli's prevailing outlook of cynicism and pessimism determined the overall direction of the book's arguments, particularly its famously provocative chapters on political ethics. The second, considering the relationship between Machiavelli and political authority, is that, owing to its cynicism and pessimism, The Prince told ambitious and grasping rulers exactly what they most wanted to hear, thereby heralding the new unfettered absolutism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The third, considering the relationship be- tween The Prince and the tradition of Renaissance political thought that preceded it, is that, precisely because of its pessimism, The Prince marks a sharp break from and critical reaction against Renaissance human- ism and its idealist language of civic virtue and moral reform.
I interpret The Prince in particular rather than universal terms, situating its arguments about politics within the context of Machia- velli's political life and his network of friends and professional allies. Given that The Prince was published posthumously, the controversies that it immediately generated, such as the English cardinal Sir Regi- nald Pole's denunciation of Machiavelli as "an enemy of the human race" (Kraye 1997, 275), and generated in the twentieth century-Leo Strauss' conclusion that Machiavelli was "a teacher of evil" (Strauss 1958, 9)-do...