Julius Caesar was the first tyrant of Rome, after which Rome was never again free. Steve Christo/Corbis via Getty Images That sort of activity has been called “Machiavellian,” after Renaissance writer ...

In Niccolò Machiavellis Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, a seminal piece of political theory, Machiavelli dissects the rise and fall of republics, drawing on the historical narrative of ...

Niccolò Machiavelli offered a famously dim view of human nature in The Prince. People are so “ungrateful, fickle, [and] false,” he wrote, that a ruler should comfortably abandon conventional morality ...

Surely no reputation is more locked in, at least in the public mind, than that of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). Sometimes referred to as the founder of modern political science, he is better known ...

When something catches you unawares, reach for the classics to interpret it. The news of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s resignation came down Monday morning during a break, and my students — as ...

For most people the word “Machiavellian” carries no connotation of virtue, and it’s never meant as praise. A stock theatrical character of the Elizabethan era was the Machiavel, who “delights in his ...

Marchamont Nedham ’s The Excellency of a Free State of 1656 sums up both Machiavelli’s notoriety and his place in the short-lived English republic: ‘It was a noble saying, (though Machiavel’s), “Not ...

In Wolf Hall, while Thomas Cromwell is getting over his wife’s death, he whiles away the time reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s Principalities: “it is a Latin edition, shoddily printed in Naples, which ...

The resilience of the insurgency that has bedeviled the construction of a republican Iraq confronts the transitional Iraqi government with a quandary: whether to crack down ruthlessly on hotspots such ...