Trajectory of Machiavelli’s Concept of State in Early Modern Politics

Abstract

This paper suggests that the trajectory that Machiavelli’s concept of the state took by later political thinkers active in reshaping the character of the political order they were working with fundamentally the shape and direction of the political development of Early Modern Europe. Looking at how later thinkers used Machiavelli’s concept and reframed it for their given political traditions and contexts often lead to how the concept evolved over time. This paper argues that there was a clear arch of how Machiavelli’s concept of the state was reformulated and repackaged by such key legal and political thinkers such as Gentile, Bodin, Grotius and finally Hobbes, whose reformation of Machiavelli’s state is it fundamentally alters it so it radically transformed from what Machiavelli coined.