Analyzing Monarchy and Republicanism in Machiavelli's The Prince: A Corpus-Based Study of Political Representations

Abstract

This research filled a research gap in the utilization of corpus and discourse analysis in The Prince. Niccol Machiavellis paramount treatise, The Prince, persists in generating scholarly discourse and contentious discussions due to its forthright examination of political expediency within the turbulent milieu of Renaissance Italy. Although Machiavelli's impact permeates the discipline of political science, the preponderance of examinations of his oeuvre has been conducted from political and philosophical perspectives, resulting in a dearth of analysis from a linguistic standpoint. Traditional discourse analysis has played a critical role in investigating attitudes, but it tends to focus on a small number of texts only, which leads to concerns from the perspective of statistics. This study aims to use a new prevailing method combining corpus-based research with manual text analysis, to investigate Machiavellis attitudes toward Republics, by analyzing his famous work The Prince. An analytical model based on the attitude schema is proposed to explicate the strategies for encoding attitudes. Analysis shows that Machiavellis attitudes towards Republicanism are characterized by a series of positive judgments of propriety, creating a positive image of Republicanism, whereas when Republicanism is mentioned, his attitudes are characterized by his favor. It is found that negative attitudes are always expressed implicitly by recounting events that elicit the attitudes (i.e. behaviors of the monarchies or republics) and performing speech acts that are motivated by the attitudes.