Machiavelli: 1469-1527:
His environment:
Italy was battleground of intriguing, embarrassingly complex, depressing and ambitious potentates, local as well foreign.
His Works:
The Prince & The Discoursi
Machiavelli and the Spirit of Renaissance:
1. Machiavelli’s city, Florence, was the center of renaissance. The Renaissance impelled men to re-examine things from other than the clerical point of view.
2. With Renaissance, men instead of God became the chief entity and subject of study.
3. There developed the spirit of individualism and rationalism which viewed God, man and entire universe from the stand point of reason not faith.
4. It produced the concept of nationalism and nation-state which went against medieval church and universalism.
5. It demanded self-assertion, ruthlessness and disregard of conventional morality.
6. The Christian scriptures, the teachings of church Fathers and the conflict for supremacy between the church and the state were quietly put aside by Machiavelli.
7. Machiavelli thought of enlightening the present with the help of the past.
The Method of Machiavelli:
1. Medieval appeal to authority and scriptures and a priori reasoning did not suit him.
2. He relied on HISTORY because he believed that he, who desires to foresee what is going to take place, should consider what has taken place.
3. A realist in politics, he cared very little for political philosophy as such.
4. He concluded that a thing which is immoral for an individual to do might, if necessary in the interest of the state, be justifiably done by the state’s ruler.
5. Machiavelli believed that public morality was something different from private morality.
6. He broke away from the medievalism by denying the parallel existence of two swords, the secular and clerical and by rejecting the doctrine of Natural Law.