Quote · Dwarkesh Podcast
Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time
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The Prince was a job application to Machiavelli's torturers
At 1:20:36 · chapter starts 1:16:57
Machiavelli hand-copied Lucretius from memory. The Renaissance treated antiquity as the only credible source. Original ideas were disguised as Livy or Plato commentary — the Discourses were Machiavelli's prestige vehicle. [1] — Ada Palmer "In the Renaissance, original ideas were out of fashion. If you wanted people to take your thought seriously, you dressed it up as Livy or P…" 1:36:40
Every foreign court in Europe would have paid to hire Machiavelli. He turned them all down and chose to rot in a countryside hamlet, writing The Prince not for fame or publication but as a loyalty demonstration to the men who had tortured and exiled him. He wanted only one job: serving Florence.
Despite being tortured and exiled, Machiavelli refused lucrative positions at foreign courts and chose to remain in rural exile, writing The Prince as a loyalty demonstration to Florence.
Machiavelli did not circulate The Prince broadly; he treated it like classified state intelligence, sharing it only with Florence's rulers and his closest scholarly circle.
'Machiavellian' means calculating and self-serving. Machiavelli gave up wealth, social life, career, and freedom to serve the government that tortured him — refusing to let his political secrets benefit any other state. He is possibly the least Machiavellian person in history.
The Prince was first published in 1532, after Machiavelli's death, by relatives seeking family fame; it was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by 1559.
The Prince drifted in obscurity until Hobbes's Leviathan hit European thought 'like a truck full of bricks.' Philosophers trying to refute Hobbes went back to Machiavelli as the ancestral monster. Then in the 19th century, newly republican governments needed a political framework without God — and Machiavelli was the only major theorist who didn't plug religion in.
Hobbes's Leviathan sparked a 40-year effort by European philosophers to refute it, which led scholars back to Machiavelli as the intellectual ancestor of Hobbesian thought.
