Machiavelli's The Prince as Memoir

Abstract

A major tendency among recent interpretations of The Prince has been to raise serious doubts about whether the text adequately established (even in Machiavelli's own considered judgment) what, in Thomas M. Greene's question, was a calculus capable of scientific coherence. The view that The Prince was simply an exercise in practical political wisdom rooted in an historical theory of imitable examples can no longer be treated as indisputable. Greene's answer to his own question can stand for what has come increasingly to be the contemporary view of Machiavelli's exemplary reckoning. 'The determination, he writes, proves to be negative: analysis leading to precept is progressively abandoned . . . scientific pretensions are quietly withdrawn as the semblance of conclusive law fades from the text. There emerges, in Greene's reading of Machiavelli's text, a disturbing gap between example and precept.2 From each of several quite different points of view, recent students of Machiavelli's use of examples have all concluded that the connection between the historical materials that Machiavelli narrates and the maxims