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Of all the figures in the long, complex, and convoluted history of political thought, none is quite as difficult to situate properly as Niccolò Machiavelli. The problem is by now an old one: it bedeviled interpreters from the outset. It arises in large part because Machiavelli penned not one but two political classics and because they appear to be at odds with one another as to whether virtuous republics are decidedly and in all respects preferable to principalities governed ruthlessly in accord with the ruler's self-interest. Machiavelli composed his Prince and his Discourses on Livy in the second decade of the sixteenth century after the collapse of the Florentine republic and the reestablishment of Medici rule. The two works circulated widely in manuscript for some time thereafter, both in Florence and abroad; and, within five years of their author's death in 1527, they were published in Rome under the imprimatur of Machiavelli's patron Clement VII, the second of the two Medici popes. Almost immediately after the appearance of these two works in printed form, an inquisitive English visitor to Florence named Reginald Pole was told by one or more of Machiavelli's compatriots that the author of the Discourses on Livy had written The Prince solely in order to trip up the Medici and bring about their demise. Machiavelli had purportedly acknowledged as much himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans Baron's fame rests largely upon his characterization of what he called “civic humanism.” Central to this is what he saw as the emergence in early fifteenth-century Florence of a new emphasis on the participation of the citizen in the government and civic life of a city-republic, and on the necessity of such participation for the nurturing of individual virtue and the prosperity and liberty of the city. Although his idea stirred controversy from the start, the term itself has become part of the common historical vocabulary, in spite of the shortcomings of Baron's formulation. That formulation has come under attack from both medievalists and Renaissance historians who disagree about the evolution and content of the phenomenon, its connection with republicanism, its chronology, and its geographical origin and extent. In particular, there has been much debate over Baron's claim that civic humanism arose during the intense struggle between Milan and Florence, in which Florence was saved only when Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan died suddenly of plague in September 1402. A review article by James Hankins shows that the controversy continues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]