Discourses on Livy

The republican Machiavelli, the one the textbooks forget. Here he argues that liberty is worth the conflict it brings, that a free state is strengthened rather than weakened by the open clash of its classes, and that civic virtue, the willingness of citizens to act for the common good, is what keeps a republic alive. The man caricatured as the prophet of tyranny wrote, at greater length and with more feeling, the case for freedom.

The Florentine diplomat whose name became an insult, unfairly. He wrote two books that look opposed and are not. The Prince describes how power is taken and kept, with a cold eye and no comfort. The Discourses on Livy is the work of a committed republican who believed liberty was worth the conflict it brought. Read together, they are one mind looking hard at how states actually work, refusing to pretend otherwise. The refusal to pretend is the lasting lesson.