ABSTRACT
Alberico Gentili shared moderately critical views of a power released from all restrictions, claiming that sovereign power should be limited by obedience to the universal law of reason; and yet, upon the ascent to the throne of James I, who wanted nothing to do with Bodinesque limitations, the Regales Disputationes which the professor wrote in 1605 saw him headed towards an apologia for absolute power. But Gentili's ambiguity can also be seen in the use that the jurist from San Ginesio made of Machiavelli. For Gentili, Machiavelli's usefulness did not lie in the fact that he had expressed high moral principles or proposed that politics be regulated by ethics; what Gentili appreciated Machiavelli for, not without a certain satisfaction, was his political "cynicism". Machiavelli was, it would seem, both a "battle flag" against royal absolutism, and the paradigm of the flagitious sovereign.
