ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli devalues brute force as an instrument for the acquisition of political power or for the aggrandizement of the state. The “Satanic” interpretation of Machiavellian ideas, crude as it may have been, was nevertheless in some crucial respects more accurate than that impassioned glorification of him as a patriot so characteristic of Italian nationalists of the romantic era. Machiavelli follows Polybius in using two concepts of historical explanation, one in terms of chance or fortune, the other in terms of cause and ability. Machiavelli uses the man-beast to symbolize his opposition in political life to an ethic of principles so rigidly held that it would lead to destruction. If Machiavelli saw the state as a dynamic unit with no particular internal goal, a quantity of power awaiting a ruler to achieve direction, so did the great statesmen of the rising sixteenth-century national states.
