The Machiavellian Moment

Originally published in 1975, this book remains a landmark of historical and political thought. The book looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. It shows that Machiavelli’s prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, which the book calls the “Machiavellian moment.” After examining this problem in the works of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, the book turns to the revival of republican ideology in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. It argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance and it relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in eighteenth-century thought.