Discourses

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Chapter I: The Various Kinds of Government, and the Ways By Which They Are Established.

Machiavelli begins The Prince with a crucial distinction of political categories. There are, he writes, only two ways in which a state can be organized: as a republic, or as a monarchy. After making this distinction, Machiavelli immediately, without a pause or comment, simply drops the discussion of the “republic.” This doesn’t mean that Machiavelli doesn’t like republics -- republics, after all, are the subject of his other major work of political theory, The Discourses. Rather than accuse Machiavelli of anti-democratic bias, we should note that in this particular book, which meant to describe the proper conduct of a prince, any discussion of princeless republics would be entirely irrelevant. After bracketing the idea of a republic, then, Machiavelli moves on to divide the category of “monarchy” into further sub-categories. Monarchies, he writes, can be either hereditary and governed by the same family for generations, or recently founded. Again, Machiavelli follows one division with another. Leaving aside hereditary monarchies for the moment, he distinguishes two different kinds of recently founded monarchies – those which are entirely new, and those which are new annexations of territory added onto pre-existing hereditary monarchies. As we might expect, within this latter category (the annexed state), there are also two subcategories: Machiavelli points out that some annexed states were previously subject to another ruler, and some were formerly free. And finally, there is yet another kind of subcategory within annexed states: those which were conquered by a prince in war, and those which simply fall to him through luck or skill.





Chapter II: Of Hereditary Monarchies





This chapter begins with Machiavelli’s apology for not discussing republics in this book – in what seems to be an explicit reference to D...