At first glance, Niccolò Machiavelli’s books The Prince and Discourses on Livy seem at odds. The former is chiefly a revolutionary guide to power, reveling in a ferocious spectacle of violence. The latter is a kind of manuscript on good governance that takes ancient Rome as its subject and model.
Machiavelli’s aims in The Prince are at once revolutionary and conservative. For Italy to be united and thus conserved as an independent political unit, a “prince” must arise to overthrow the existing order. Machiavelli aims to return Italians to the “golden times” retold in the Discourses, back to a world of law, order, and virtuous freedom. In this sense, “revolution” signifies eliminating an illegitimate order and reestablishing a state of normalcy. While the system Machiavelli sought to overthrow may have been legally legitimate, he saw it as an aberration in Italy’s history, something to be deconstructed, penetrated, and discarded.
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