Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy is the book where his real political mind is on full display. The Prince gets all the attention because it is sharp, cruelly observant, and short. But the Discourses—sprawling, rigorous, and grounded in the history of the Roman Republic—shows the full range of what he understood about politics, institutions, and the unpredictable push and pull of human ambition. Reading it after years of re-reading The Prince is like seeing the other half of the puzzle of politics. I read The Prince every four years from 1980 to 2024.
Where The Prince analyzes how rulers seize and hold power, the Discourses tackles something more ambitious: how free states are born, how they endure, and why they decay. Machiavelli uses Livy’s early books on Rome as his framework, not because he is nostalgic or idealistic, but because Rome’s long run of success offers hard lessons for every republic. He praises their mixed constitution, their willingness to balance competing interests, and their acceptance that conflict—especially between elites and the common people—is not a flaw but a source of vitality. That alone makes Machiavelli feel modern: he rejects the fantasy of harmony and insists that real politics is friction managed, not friction eliminated.
What stands out most in the Discourses is the same clarity that makes The Prince so readable. Machiavelli writes with a cold eye for how people behave, not how they ought to behave. His central conviction doesn’t change: ambition, fear, honor, resentment, and self-interest drive political life far more than abstract ideals. That blunt realism is exactly why Hannah Arendt drew on him in On Revolution. She recognized what Machiavelli saw clearly: republican liberty survives only when citizens are involved, vigilant, and willing to defend it. Passivity is fatal. Corruption metastasizes when no one resists it. A republic dies when its people stop caring enough to fight for it.
The Discourses also broadens Machiavelli’s view of power beyond single rulers. He analyzes why Rome rotated offices, why it punished powerful men who threatened equality before the law, and why it preserved civic religion and public rituals—not out of piety but because they reinforced unity and discipline. He argues that law is stronger than any prince because institutions outlast personalities. In that sense, the Discourses is a manual not just for leaders but for citizens who want their republic to endure.
For a reader who already read The Prince many times, the Discourses lands with a different kind of force. It confirms that Machiavelli wasn’t simply the teacher of tyrants he’s often caricatured to be. He was a defender of republican self-government who understood its fragility. His realism doesn’t smother hope—he just refuses to build that hope on illusions.
Reading the Discourses after years of reading The Prince I feel I missed a dimension of Machiavelli's thinking. I should have read Discourses decades ago. One book explains how power is taken; the other explains how political freedom is preserved. And in both cases, he tells you exactly how things actually work. No moralizing, no Platonic ideals, no Utopias—just the hard, clear truths of political life.
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My favorite translator of The Prince is Harvey Mansfield. Here is a sample of that translation with Machiavelli's advice on avoiding flatterers.
