Perspective

Niccolo Machiavelli was a fifteenth and sixteenth century statesman, scholar and philosopher and something of a Renaissance man. Most of his life was lived in Italy prior to the Protestant Reformation, a period that was characterized by a powerful and corrupt Papacy and a number of reform movements inside and outside of the Catholic Church that had been created in an attempt to reform the church. Machiavelli is deeply influenced by what he sees as general cultural and political decline in Italian due to political corruption, often less from the church and more from the rulers and elite families within Italian city states.

Machiavelli's perspective in The Discourses is to help rulers figure out how to combat human corruption, rule wisely and preserve the liberty of citizens from internal and external threats. Like the political philosophers of antiquity, Machiavelli believed that all forms of government were subject to...