Welcome to the Symposium of the Lotus Heaters. Today we're joined by Bo and Carl.

Hello. And we're going to talk about the essential Machiavelli. We're going to have two parts for this.

And we're going to talk about the text that is considered to be Macavale's best, and also the

text that is considered to be where he exposes the idea that he really held.

Because a lot of people think that in the Prince

he is sort of a bit more scheming.

Well, he's pro-machivalionism in the prince, which is, I always thought the Machiavelli got a pretty rough deal to me

of this because just as my opinion of Machiavellius and he lived in very chaotic and turbulent times he was a diplomat he was imprisoned he was tortured he went through the ringer he saw the reality of politics firsthand, and he was also a scholar.

And so after studying Livian, obviously various other things, he looked at the

right, okay, what do you need to do to win?

What do you need to do to be successful regardless of the morality of this of the thing and of

course this got him stigmatized in his own day but no one could say that he was wrong

because he's not wrong and there are lots of good examples as to why he's not wrong which he gives in fact in all of his works and so there's I mean he's the founder of what we call political realism for a reason but I

never thought of him as a bad person I always saw this as a means to an end for him being essentially a

patriot saying you know it's obviously ideally he would like a strong republic, but given who he was dealing with the prince was just geared towards an autocratic prince.

So I don't, I think he's unfairly maligned to be honest.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean it's interesting that he's most famous for the prince when this book, his

discourse is on livy, is more interesting to me as

as we did a book club on the prince didn't you

quite a while ago, it's still out there if anyone

wants to click back through the earlier library and find that.

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