Machiavelli’s State and its Later Reception

Abstract The aim of this article is, first, to reconstruct Machiavelli’s understanding of the nature and aims of the political community (in his language, “state”), and, second, to situate this reconstructed concept within the broader history of political ideas. It will do so through an examination of several passages in the Discourses on Livy , followed by a study of its reception in the seventeenth century. What will emerge is that Machiavelli’s reasoning about the state connects him with several later authors in a manner that suggests the presence of a unique, and previously obscured, strand of argument about the nature of the political community; a strand of argument whose recovery can help us better to understand not only the political struggles of early modern Europe, but also the way of thinking about the state that eventually emerged dominant from them.