ABSTRACT
Certain basic themes permeate Niccolo Machia- velli's personal letters, his plays, and his famous political treatises The Prince and the Discourses. For Machiavelli, "all human things are kept in a perpetual state of movement, and can never remain stable." Time is not only the symbol of motion and change in the physical cosmos but also in the human universe. Machiavelli turns away from the supernatural. History, for Machiavelli, is both the form of human time and the events that give it content. It is the longitudinal shape as well as the record of human affairs-a record that for Machiavelli largely involved politics. Machiavelli's intention and purpose in writing The Prince remain essentially contested interpretative issues. Drawing on the idea of the mixed constitution, which Polybius had elaborated in his history of the Roman republic, Machiavelli argues that order and greatness came not, as medieval Christian humanists had claimed, from social harmony, but from conflict.
