I actually found the essays at the end of this edition to be really helpful in understanding the context and immediate significance of this work. Alas, it has been a while since I’ve brushed up on my medieval European politics and it shows. Right off the bat, I realised that a working knowledge of Italian history, and more broadly European history, would contribute massively to my appreciation of Machiavelli’s argument as he often points to real life examples to provide illustrations. Instead, Machiavelli systematically and critically evaluates historical and contemporary political events to logically demonstrate the effectiveness of various methods of gaining power and then, what is perhaps harder to achieve, retaining it. But neither is it solely theoretical philosophizing about a hypothetical ideal state of human governance. This is not, as I once thought, a veiled political commentary disguised in a fictional account of a prince.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |