ABSTRACT
Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously proclaims that Machiavelli’s notorious treatise, The Prince, is at base a republican work because it reveals to all the nefarious ways of tyrants in order to prepare peoples to defeat tyranny. In treating civil religion and the necessity of a single lawgiver to render human beings as citizens and free in The Social Contract, Rousseau borrows from Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Despite his reliance on these aspects of Machiavelli’s republican teachings, Rousseau’s understanding of the general will makes obsolete Machiavelli’s version of democratic republicanism that embraces tumults between the plebeians and the patricians.
