The title to chapter 1 is already revealing about Machiavelli’s new perspective in The Prince: he will discuss not only the various types of principalities, but the modes by which they are acquired. By contrast, the audience of more traditional books presented to princes is customarily a hereditary ruler who claims a long pedigree, a prince who does not have to “acquire” his state. Although the title promises a discussion of types of principalities, the opening sentence of chapter 1 takes a larger view: “All states, all dominions that have had and do have command over men, have been and are either republics or principalities.” The reader expecting a discussion of the types of principalities immediately learns that a principality is a form of “state,” the other form being a republic. Not only principalities, but republics too will turn out to be the object of acquisition, and in fact some of the most chilling advice Machiavelli offers in The Prince concerns how to acquire a republic. We will take up the difficult question of what Machiavelli means by the term “state” (stato) momentarily, but an initial definition is offered in the first sentence: “dominions that have held and do hold command over men.” States or dominions exercise “command” over men, either as subjects in the case of a principality or fellow citizens in a republic. “Command” (imperio)

might be translated “political power.” “Command” is not the simple exercise of force, but the recognized power to rule, and in this sense Machiavelli anticipates something akin to Weber’s definition of the state as an entity having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Machiavelli’s definition of the state seems “empirical” as opposed to “theoretical,” or to borrow language from later in The Prince, he goes to “the effectual truth of the thing.” All states “that have had and do have” command over men “have been and are” either republics or principalities.What matters is “having” command, and what republics and principalities “are,” and have always been, depends on who exercises this command. After this opening proposition about “all states” being either

republics or principalities, Machiavelli turns to his promised enumeration of the types of principalities and the modes by which they are acquired. “Principalities are either hereditary, in which the lineage of their lord has been prince for a long time, or they are new. The new ones are either completely new, as was Milan for Francesco Sforza, or they are like limbs added to the hereditary state of the prince who acquires them, as is the Kingdom of Naples for the king of Spain.” Whereas Machiavelli gives one example each for the two types

of “new” principalities he lists, he gives no example here of a hereditary principality. A hereditary principality is defined here as a principality in which “the lineage of their lord has been prince for a long time,” that is where the current “lord” (signore) comes from a family that has been “prince” (principe)—that is, has held the status of prince-“for a long time.” How long is “a long time”? Hereditary princes probably do not like to be reminded that at some point their principality was “new,” was acquired by someone, so perhaps Machiavelli declines to give an example of a hereditary principality because doing so would raise this delicate question. This consideration already blurs the tidy distinction Machiavelli draws between hereditary and new principalities. This blurring is also evident in his example of Francesco Sforza as ruling a “completely new” principality. Sforza was in fact the son-in-law of the previous Duke of Milan, who died without any heirs, and the Milanese, after a brief period of unsuccessfully attempting to reestablish a republic, granted the duchy to Sforza. Since the

duchy passed to Sforza’s son after his death, what was in some sense a “new” principality was transformed into a hereditary one. Perhaps all principalities, even all states, are in fact a mixture of “old” and “new.” If so, then the example of the king of Spain adding the Kingdom of Naples to his hereditary state like adding a new “limb” to the “body” of his dominion would in fact be the typical case for all principalities or states. In chapter 3 Machiavelli will term this type of principality or state “mixed.” Once again, we see how the binary categories Machiavelli often uses, here “hereditary” vs. “new,” are not as clear and distinct as they initially seem. The emphasis on acquisition becomes thematic when Machiavelli

turns from the types of principalities to the modes by which they are acquired. “Dominions that are thus acquired are either accustomed to living under a prince or used to being free, and they are acquired either with the arms of others or with one’s own, either by fortune or by virtue.” Just as he presents the types of states as a series of binary categories-republics vs. principalities, hereditary vs. new principalities-so too does he list the modes of acquiring dominions in a series of pairs: accustomed to living under a prince vs. used to living free, acquired with the arms of others vs. acquired with one’s own arms, acquired by fortune vs. acquired by virtue. We will have to watch carefully to see how these seemingly exclusive categories fare as the work progresses. Let us now return to what Machiavelli means by a “state”

(stato). What Machiavelli means by “state” is not what we mean today, so we must first try to understand his conception of a “state.” Today we are accustomed to using the word “state,” or its relative

the “nation-state,” to denote an impersonal entity: “the state.” “The state” so conceived is somehow distinct from its people, or its government, or even its form of government. That is, the people or population of the state might change (e.g., through birth, death, and immigration), its government might change (e.g., from a Republican to a Democratic administration), and even its form of government might change (e.g., from a democracy to an autocracy) without “the state” itself considered to have changed. The state so conceived is somehow the locus of legitimate power, or sovereignty, within its borders or dominion and it stands as an equal alongside other

such “sovereign states” in the international realm, for example in the United Nations. This conception of “the state” fully emerged more than a century after Machiavelli wrote The Prince. Within the realm of politics, the fully modern idea of the state is usually dated from the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the series of treaties that ended the Thirty Years War, the long political and religious conflict generated by the Protestant Reformation, by establishing the principle of state sovereignty with which we are still familiar today. Within the realm of political theory, the first theorist of the modern state and sovereignty is often said to be Thomas Hobbes, whose major work Leviathan was published in 1651. At any rate, other political theorists such as Jean Bodin who might be said to have developed the concept of the sovereign state wrote in the same period, well after Machiavelli. In short, the political and theoretical events that led to the full emergence of the concept of the sovereign state as we now know it today occurred more than a century after Machiavelli’s lifetime. What, then, does Machiavelli mean when he uses the term “state”

(stato)? This issue turns out to be complex and controversial.2

Broadly speaking, though, if the modern conception of the state is impersonal, then the conception of the “state” found in Machiavelli is essentially personal. To return to the first sentence of chapter 1, Machiavelli characterizes “states” as “dominions that have had and do have command over men.” To simplify somewhat for starters, then, the state in this sense is the person or persons actually exercising political authority, or the “regime” in the sense of the reigning power in a given place (a “dominion”) at a given time. For example, wemight speakof the “state” or the “regime” of Henry VIII of England (a younger contemporary of Machiavelli’s), meaning not just that Henry VIII happened to be king of England at the time, but that his exercise of command or his rule in a sense defined or constituted the state or regime then reigning in England. This usage will be familiar to readers of Shakespeare, who for example refers to the king of France as “France,” as though the king is France or France is the king’s personal property. More informally, we might refer to the period during which a sports team, or a company, or some other entity was under the dominant leadership of someone as a “regime,” for example the “Vince Lombardi

Regime” for the Green Bay Packers or the “Bill Gates Regime” at Microsoft. More colloquially, we might say that Serena and Venus Williams “ruled” the tennis world in the early twenty-first century. Conceived in this way, states can be “acquired,” that is the position of command or political authority can be acquired, for Machiavelli and his contemporaries in a way that is difficult for us to grasp with our modern impersonal conception of the state. Machiavelli nonetheless does not simply identify a state with

the person or persons exercising command, but rather for him a state is constituted by who has the status of exercising command. In other words, he distinguishes between the given person exercising political authority at a given time from the position or status of ruling. For example, in chapter 1 he states that in hereditary principalities “the blood of their lord has been their prince for a long time.” The current ruler, the “lord” (signore), is distinct from the “prince” (principe). This distinction reveals something essential about Machiavelli’s use of the term “prince.” In addition to referring to a specific individual who exercises the power of his principality, or the current “lord,” the term “prince” refers to the status of the person within the regime: the “lord” holds the status of “prince,” his “status” as prince is recognized. We can understand something of what he means by recalling that the words “state” and “status” are related, as is the word “estate.” In its original or more traditional meaning, “state” denoted someone’s state, in the sense of his possession or “estate.” Similarly, the nobility had estates and titles that they came to possess through inheritance, grant, or otherwise, and this gave them a certain “status” or made them members of different “estates,” for example the nobility, the clergy, and the people (the “third estate”) in the old regime in France before the Revolution. Machiavelli evokes this traditional meaning when he writes in the Dedicatory Letter: “Nor do I want it to be imputed presumption if a man of low and basest state [stato] should dare to discourse on and give rules for the conduct of princes” (Dedicatory Letter, 40). Machiavelli’s “status” is being a member of the people, as opposed to having the “status” of being a prince. In short, Machiavelli’s conception of the state is not simply personal, in the sense of being bound up with what person or persons are wielding power at a given time, and to that

extent his conception of the state is impersonal and might be said to prepare the modern understanding of the state. Nonetheless, and most importantly, his conception of the state remains personal in the sense that he insists that someone is always exercising command and that the actual exercise of this command defines the state. Since the fact of who has the status of exercising command

differs from one state to another, there are different forms of state. In The Prince Machiavelli confines himself to two: republics and principalities. In so doing, he silently rejects more traditional understandings of political regimes. Most famously and influentially, Aristotle categorized regimes along two dimensions: correct vs. deviant (based on whether the rulers aimed at the common good versus their own good), and the number of rulers (one, few, many). This typology produced six forms of regime: kingship, aristocracy, and polity (a correctly tempered or “mixed” regime) being the correct forms, and tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy (the rule of the many for their own benefit, or what we might call “mob rule”) being the deviant forms. Other ancient and medieval authors offered similar categorizations. We know that Machiavelli was familiar with these traditional categories. For example, in the Discourses on Livy he writes: “some who have written on republics say that in them is one of three states [stati]—called by them principality, aristocrats, and popular-and that those who order a city should turn to one of these according as it appears to them more to the purpose. Some others, wiser according to the opinion of many, have the opinion that there are six types of government, of which three are the worst; that three others are good in themselves but so easily corrupted that they too come to be pernicious” (I.2, 11). In the Discourses on Livy Machiavelli will largely reject the traditional categorization of regimes and, as in The Prince, speak of principalities and republics, but at least he commences his discussion of the forms of states by acknowledging the traditional view. In The Prince, by contrast, he silently sweeps away the traditional understanding of regimes. Once we recognize what is missing from his discussion, the boldness of the first sentence of chapter 1 is apparent: “All states, all dominions that have had and do have command over men, have been and are either republics or