This is the first translation into English of Guicciardini's Dialogue on the Government of Florence. Written in the early 1520s by the author of the famous History of Italy, as well as a History of Florence and Political Maxims and Reflections, this dialogue presents what is arguably the most searching and comprehensive analysis of the politics of his times. Like Machiavelli, his contemporary and friend, Guicciardini rejects classical republican arguments in the name of the new political realism and acknowledges the important role of patronage and graft in contemporary politics and the illegitimacy of nearly all forms of political power. In this Dialogue he provides one of the clearest expositions of the term 'reason of state', which he was one of the first to employ and which he uses to justify the priority of state interest over private morality and religion.

In Felix Gilbert's skilled analysis, the figures of Niccolo Machiavelli, whose writing changed the way people think about politics, and Francesco Guicciardini, whose History of Italy is one of the first classics of modern historical writing, provide important clues to interpreting the Renaissance.

In this exciting book, Athanasios Moulakis makes available, for the first time in English, the important essay How to Bring Order to Popular Government, by Renaissance thinker Francesco Guicciardini. In addition to his valuable and lucid translation of the essay, Moulakis provides an engaging analysis of this important work. He shows that, far from representing a revival of ancient republicanism, the long maturation of Florentine constitutional thought_brought to lucid expression by Guicciardini_points to a distinctly modern idea of the republican state. Republican Realism in Renaissance Florence is a unique and important book which will be of great value to historians and political theorists alike.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is the most famous and controversial figure in the history of political thought and one of the iconic names of the Renaissance. The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli brings together sixteen original essays by leading experts, covering his life, his career in Florentine government, his reaction to the dramatic changes that affected Florence and Italy in his lifetime, and the most prominent themes of his thought, including the founding, evolution, and corruption of republics and principalities, class conflict, liberty, arms, religion, ethics, rhetoric, gender, and the Renaissance dialogue with antiquity. In his own time Machiavelli was recognized as an original thinker who provocatively challenged conventional wisdom. With penetrating analyses of The Prince, Discourses on Livy, Art of War, Florentine Histories, and his plays and poetry, this book offers a vivid portrait of this extraordinary thinker as well as assessments of his place in Western thought since the Renaissance.

Original scholarly essays by leading philosophers, which bring to life Machiavelli’s lengthiest and most challenging work.

Reconstructs the origins of the idea that social conflict, and not concord, makes political communities powerful.