MACHIAVELLI, Niccolo_.

by Niccolo_ Machiavelli

£5,250 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition, a handsome copy, of Machiavelli’s discourses in English translated by Edward Dacres, dedicated by him to James Duke of Lenox. “Hitherto political speculation had tended to be a rhetorical exercise based on the implicit assumption of Church or Empire. Machiavelli founded the science of modern politics on the study of mankind — it should be remembered that a parallel work to ‘The Prince’ was his historical essay on the first ten books of Livy. Politics was a science to be divorced entirely from ethics, and nothing must stand in the way of its machinery” PMM 63. The Discourses on Livy is a major work of political history and philosophy written circa 1517, published posthumously with papal privilege in 1531.The subject is ostensibly the first ten books of Livy’s Ab urbe condita which relate the expansion of Rome through to the end of the Third Samnite War in 293 BCE. Machiavelli saw history in general as a way to learn useful lessons from the past for the present, and also as a type of analysis which could be built upon, as long as each generation did not forget the works of the past.Machiavelli frequently describes Romans and other ancient peoples as superior models for his contemporaries. The Discourses in this first English translation had a very great impact in England in the following years particularly on the Levellers. The classic Levellers pamphlet the ‘Vox Plebis’ quoted, almost verbatim, many passages from Dacres’ translation of the Discourses. “Machiavel

• Printing: later
• Binding: Hardcover

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