This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Nicola Machiavelli Italian diplomat and author of The Prince, is in a select group of people,

it includes Freud and Kefka, to have his name turned into an adjective.

So what is it to be a true Machiavellian? What approach to the running of a

state did Machiavelli advocate and why? There's no better person to ask than the eminent

historian of ideas, Quentin Skinner.

Quentin Skinner, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Very nice to be back on the programme.

The topic we're focusing on today is one of the great books in the history of political thought,

Machiavelli's The Prince.

I wonder if you could just say a bit about who Machiavelli was.

Machiavelli didn't expect to be remembered as a man of letters or a political

theorist at all. He has a diplomatic career which is very rudely

interrupted in 1512 and it's between that date and his death in 1527 that he writes all the works by which he is best known.

And of course he was known in his time not merely as a political philosopher, but as a playwright. Some of his plays would still

hold the stage nowadays. But we think of him as the author above all of Il Preencipé, which was written immediately after his fall from power in 1513.

So he was working as a diplomat before he was a political theorist?

Yes, that's absolutely right.

In fact, I think of his early life as coming in two halves.

He's born in 1469. He's a Florentine. Almost nothing is known about his early life until

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