Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

Okay. I'm back with Ada Palmer, who is a science fiction author, composer, historian at the University of Chicago. Ada, this time, I wanna talk to you about Machiavelli. Yes. So he writes the prints. He dedicates it to Lorenzo de Piero de Medici and gives it to him 1513. And he says in the final chapter, you're the only person who can bring Italy from its current place of ruin and ravage. Why were things so bad? What is the historical context in which she's writing the prince?

So I'm gonna give a two part answer to that. Although, of course, with any granular history, there can be many parts. But the papacy is part of it, and then the city state structure of Italy is another part of it. And I'll start with the city state structure. There's a principle in politics that when there's long continuity of a government and the government has been in power a long time, that government has a lot of legitimacy. People believe in its institutions. People are used to it. Even if you complain about it, it's the government, etcetera. When you break that, when you overthrow the ru

Mhmm.

And one of the things that electoral politics does is that it tends to swing, in which those outside of power work hard to get into power with the next regime. Which means if we assume that an the average length of a papacy is ten years in this period, every ten years, you suddenly have a completely unpredictable new monarch who's almost guaranteed to be one of the enemies of the old monarch and will therefore rip up and replace all of the things that that monarch tried to do with new things. So Machiavelli, when he's writing the last chapter of The Prince, is looking around and saying, okay,

So he wants the Medicis basically to not unify Italy, but stabilize Italy at the very least.

Exactly. By having conquered enough of a chunk. Yes. That the papacy fears them and must negotiate with them as opposed to the papacy being surrounded by small weakened powers that will constantly be turned over and turned

over

and

turned over. And the pope now is a Medici. Right?