Machiavelli and the Modern State: The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, and the Extended Territorial Republic

This book offers a significant reinterpretation of the history of republican political thought and of Niccolò Machiavelli's place within it. It locates Machiavelli's political thought within enduring debates about the proper size of republics. From the sixteenth century onward, as states grew larger, it was believed only monarchies could govern large territories effectively. Republicanism was a form of government relegated to urban city-states, anachronisms in the new age of the territorial...