Machiavelli’s Art of Power: A Study in the Aesthetics of Politics
Diego von Vacano
Texas A&M University
Assistant Professor
Political Science Department
APSA 2006
Machiavelli’s Three Masks
Do we really know Machiavelli’s overall intentions? To be sure, the Florentine
Secretary is one of the most written-about political theorists of the Western canon. In
large part the abundance of commentaries on his work is owed to the fact that what he
wrote is often quite complex but sometimes is also ambiguous. This has led subsequent
commentators to posit a variety of theses on the nature, intent, and meaning of the oeuvre
of the author of The Prince and The Discourses on Livy.
The fact that he wrote these two apparently different books has been one of the
central problems in Machiavelli scholarship. How could a man who penned a seemingly
immoral description of power politics and tyranny be also the author of a republican
defense of freedom and proto-democracy? This question has animated vast armies of
academics in search of a coherent answer. Much of this search has yielded rich fruits.
However, I want to posit that few have come to terms with the notion that in fact there
are not simply two Machiavellis, in a sense, but rather three.
The third Machiavelli, which stands separate from the immoralist and the lover of
freedom, is in my estimation, Machiavelli the artist. True, most Machiavelli
commentators must eventually face the copious literary, poetic, and dramatic production
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