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.

The Description for this book, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence, will be forthcoming.

The Description for this book, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence, will be forthcoming.

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

The question of order inspired two of the greatest political thinkers of the Renaissance--Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, whose major works on the nature of government are linked in an authoritative new translation. Political adversaries but nonetheless friends, Machiavelli and Guicciardini both reflected on ancient Rome and refined their conceptions of government with an eye to the political turmoil of their own Florence. Based on the definitive Italian editions and including extensive explanatory notes, this new translation re-creates the fascinating conflict that helped to shape the history of political thought.

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.

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