Machiavelli: A Life Beyond Ideology

Niccolo di Bernardo Machiavelli is not only one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance, an outstanding author and statesman, but indisputably one of its most influential political theorists, whose fundamental contributions to ideas of political power - as well as to the history of modern drama - remain astonishingly pertinent. His adventurous life led him to notable heights as a diplomat and reformer of the Florentine military, with his replacement of mercenaries by a citizen-militia. His fall, exile and eventual rehabilitation followed as briskly as his rise.

Unlike many innovative political thinkers, such as Hume, Hobbes, Locke, Burke and Marx, he developed his radical theories of treachery and social transformation, here explored in terms of their originality, in an atmosphere of violence. Based on his experience of government, his insights led to a shift from understanding statehood, war and society as forms of finitude and stasis to those of process.

The Prince, still contentiously debated, may be seen as exploring his principle of continuous change in terms of language, corruption and liberty, his magnetic Mandragola as doing so in terms of his perfection of the comedy of betrayal.

All this unfolds in Paul Oppenheimer's compelling recreation of Machiavelli's life as he actually lived it.

Paul Oppenheimer is a professor of Comparative Literature at The City College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. He is the author of Rubens: A Portrait, Evil and the Demonic: A New Theory of Monstrous Behaviour and The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness and the Invention of the Sonnet.