The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made
Riddles for centuries, the beginning and ending of Machiavelli’s The Prince have finally found a plausible explanation. Bobbitt finds that explanation in Machiavelli’s abiding desire, expressed in his Discourses on Livy, to see feudal regimes replaced by modern, constitutionally ordered states. This desire accounts for Machiavelli’s otherwise baffling decision to dedicate The Prince to Cesare Borgia, a deeply flawed ruler, albeit one commanding the resources needed to found a modern constitutional state. Machiavelli’s desire for fundamental political change also, in Bobbitt’s view, accounts for the strange conclusion of The Prince, where the author uncharacteristically pleads for the expulsion of foreign armies from Italy, in which he wanted a model new state to emerge. Bobbitt also takes Machiavelli’s commitment to creating political reform as the key to understanding The Prince not, as is commonly supposed, as a mirror book advising individual rulers on conduct but, rather, as an outline of modern constitutional principles that may entail political duties that violate personal morality. A provocative yet plausible foray into oft-­contested terrain. --Bryce Christensen