The Rope and the Chains

Abstract

Niccolò Machiavelli counts among the most famous (and infamous) political authors in the history of Western political thought, primarily on account of his book the Prince. Before he wrote that notorious treatise, however, he served for fourteen years as a prominent and active civil administrator in the government of the Republic of Florence. Removed from office in 1512, following a take-over by the Medici dynasty that had ruled the city during much of the fifteenth century, Machiavelli was incarcerated and tortured as a result of unsubstantiated accusations of his involvement in a coup plot. Soon after his release from prison, he composed the Prince, which is generally seen to constitute the beginning of his career as a political theorist as well as a comic playwright, poet and military analyst of note. Yet little attention has been devoted to the large body of writings—in the form of prose and poetry, as well as the hundreds of pages of diplomatic and personal correspondence—that he produced in the course of his public service. In an unprecedented interpretation, The Rope and the Chains carefully examines the neglected pre-Prince texts in order to frame his later theories. The book reveals that Machiavelli’s thought prior to the Prince was largely conventional when judged by the standards of his day. At the same time, it also demonstrates his dissatisfaction with the intellectual worldview in which he was enmeshed. Machiavelli “became” Machiavelli once liberated from the rope and the chains by which centuries of tradition had constrained him.