ABSTRACT
One could attempt to link up the history of Machiavellism with the history of the literary battle which was fought around Machiavelli. This would be to follow once again the trail which was already broken in the eighteenth century by Johann Friedrich Christ, with his remarkable book on Machiavelli (De Nicolao Machiavello libri tres, Halle, 1731). The same ground was afterwards covered by R. v. Mohl in the third volume of his Geschichte und Literatur der Staatswissenschaften, by Villari in the second volume of his work on Machiavelli, and by Burd in his edition of the Principe (1891). But in the process one would have to cross swords with a whole host of third- and fourth-rate minds. Such a history of the historical verdict pronounced on Machiavelli would certainly constitute a fragment of universal history amid the flux of historical and political thought. But it would be tied too closely to the special questions raised by the personality of Machiavelli himself; and it would have to analyse, often painfully and minutely, the confused and artificial interpretations of earlier centuries. It will be more fruitful to separate the investigation from the personality of Machiavelli, and instead to trace the effects of the spirit which appears in his writings.
