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council of the Ten (foreign and defence matters). Both

posts, which Machiavelli held until his dismissal from

o ce in 1512, allocated him the position of a middle-

ranking political o cer. However, since the members

of the council of the Ten were elected only for short

periods his political inﬂuence was considerably greater

than this position would suggest. He undertook a

number of important missions, for example, to the

French court, to the Holy Roman emperor Maxi-

milian, to the Roman Curia, and to Cesare Borgia,

who had conquered a new duchy in Romagna shortly

before. His task on these missions was to explain

Florentine politics and also to make enquiries to assess

the aims and intentions of the people he visited.

Through this role a particularly trusting relationship

developed between Machiavelli and Piero Soderini,

voted gonfaloniere a

Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469–1527)

Machiavelli became a political writer because of his

failure as a practical politician. For this reason his

political thought does not centre on the systematic

development of principles of worthy life or norms of a

just society. Instead it represents an attempt to

describe practical problems, with recourse to his-

torically comparable situations as paradigmatic chal-

lenges and to develop general rules for successful

political activity from these examples. In Il Principe

(The Prince) Machiavelli developed these rules prin-

cipally in the perspective of the political activist, while

the Discorsi (Discourses on Livy) place more emphasis

on the long-term development perspectives of political

communities. In this respect two diﬀering perspectives,

from theories of action and from theories of structural

analysis can be found side by side in Machiavelli’s

political thought. When Machiavelli addresses po-

tential political activists his considerations are de-

veloped for the most part from a perspective of action,

whereas when he addresses educated political obser-

vers, the emphasis is more on structural aspects. In all

his writing he emphasised that his reﬂections were

based on two sources; his own political experiences as

well as the ‘wisdom of the ancients’: the works of the

classical writers and historians. The armative al-

lusion to classical antiquity identiﬁes Machiavelli as a

representative of Humanism; however his judgement

of classical knowledge measured against his own

experiences goes beyond the conventions of Human-

ism and classiﬁes Machiavelli as the ﬁrst modern

political thinker in early modern Europe.

ita (chief magistrate for life), in

1502, who entrusted Machiavelli repeatedly with the

most di cult and conﬁdential tasks.

The most important of these was the project to

recapture Pisa, which Florence had lost in 1494. After

all attempts to retake the port with the help of

mercenary soldiers had failed, Machiavelli was com-

missioned to establish a Florentine militia, which

forced Pisa into a capitulation within 3 years. The

ensuing victory celebrations in Florence appeared to

represent the climax of Machiavelli’s political career.

His exceptional position within the political admini-

stration of Florence was also expressed in the fact

that he tried to develop a more long-term strategy in a

series of political memoranda. This strategy was based

on a lasting stabilization of the republican system on

the inner front, and aimed for the preservation of

Florence’s political sovereignty on the outer front.

Through his notorious emphasis on the exemplary

nature of Rome he sought to develop an alternative

conception of the republic to Savonarola’s Christian

moralization program. Here he was not concerned

with a political program of action, but with a political

ideology from which Florence could gain conﬁdence

and courage in di cult and threatening situations.

Due to the energy and decisiveness Machiavelli

showed in the tasks allotted to him he advanced

rapidly to the spiritus rector of the Florentine republic

and stood out especially in contrast to the hesitations

and procrastinations of other Florentine politicians.

He always held a strong aversion to all forms of

waiting and delaying, which made him a sharp critic of

every policy of neutrality. His singular importance in

Florentine politics was also recognized by his contem-

poraries, seen in the fact that he was the only politician

1. Biography and Work

Machiavelli was born in the Santa Trinita

quarter of

Florence on May 3, 1469, as son of a jurist and minor

political o cer. Little is known of his childhood or

the early years of his professional life. The only cer-

tainty is that he received a humanist education in

accordance with his father’s wishes which was to

enable him a career in the Florentine administration.

In 1498, after the execution of the Dominican monk

Girolamo Savonarola, who had tried to reform the

republic on the basis of a moralization of the city

society orientated by Christian ascetic ideals, he was

voted secretary of the second chancery (domestic

administration) and later additionally secretary of the

9107

Macchia

elli, Niccolo

(1469–1527)

to be removed from o ce when the Medici returned to

Florence with the support of Spanish troops in

November 1512, apart from the chief magistrate

Soderini. Shortly afterwards Machiavelli was sus-

pected of taking part in a conspiracy against the

Medici. He was thrown into prison and questioned

under torture, but there was no proof against him. He

was freed in the course of a general amnesty on the

occasion of Giovanni de’ Medici’s election to Pope, on

condition that he no longer entered the City of

Florence and did not hold any political o ce.

Machiavelli then began composing political writing

on his estate in San Andrea in Percussina. At ﬁrst this

was more as a compensation for his forced political

inactivity, but it soon aimed to bring his name into

conversation among the then ruling groupings in

Florence. He gained the reputation of an experienced

and well-versed politician that could be entrusted with

practical political tasks once again. The Medici appear

to have mistrusted him to the end, however, and he

received only a few unimportant missions along with

permission to enter Florence again. In the meantime

Machiavelli had made himself a name as a writer, with

the comedy Mandragola (1517) among other writing,

and was commissioned to write a history of Florence

in 1519, which summarized all the existing annals and

chronicles. He completed his Istorie Fiorentine in 1525,

and it was a masterpiece of political history, scanning

from the time of the migration of peoples to the death

of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492. Machiavelli had

previously written Il Principe and the Discorsi , which

both remained unpublished until after his death, but

which circulated as copies among the political in-

tellectual circles of Florence during his lifetime. In

1520 Machiavelli also wrote the Dialogo dell’ arte della

guerra , a dialogue modeled on a humanistic form on

the reform of Italian warfare, as well as the historical

novel Vita di Castruccio Castracani , in which he

describes the conditions of political success using the

example of a political adventurer from Lucca.

Machiavelli’s life took a paradoxical turn; it was only

his failure as a political actor that forced him into

his existence as a political writer, through which he

won success and recognition in his lifetime, and fame

and infamy after his death.

Machiavelli himself, however, valued practical poli-

tics more highly than political writing, which is the

reason why he immediately ran for political o ce after

the Medici were successfully ousted in 1527. For many

he appeared by now, however, to be one of the

Medici’s faithful and he lost the vote for the post he

had held until 1512. Machiavelli did not survive this

disappointment; he fell ill with acute peritonitis and

died a few days later on the June 21, 1527 in Florence.

Shortly before his death he is reported to have told

friends of a dream he had, in which he saw a crowd of

miserable and ragged-looking men, who explained

that they were on their way to paradise. Then he saw

a group of noble and serious-looking men, among

them the great classical philosophers and historians

Plato, Plutarch, and Tacitus, who were damned and

on their way to hell. Machiavelli is reported to have

said to his friends that he would rather discuss politics

in hell with the great men of antiquity than die of bore-

dom with the blessed and holy in paradise. ‘Machia-

velli’s dream’ is not substantiated and most likely

expresses the impression which some of his contemp-

oraries and many of his successors had of him. Yet it

does illustrate certain characteristics of Machiavelli’s

life and thinking—his enjoyment of discussing poli-

tical problems, his veneration of classical philosophy

and historiography, and his contempt for lives given

over to Christian contemplation; in fact so well that it

has been used and abused in research literature on

Machiavelli throughout the years.

2. Machia

elli as Political Scientist

What allows us to characterize Machiavelli’s pol-

itical writing and his suggestions for successful politics

as scientiﬁc, and to understand Machiavelli as the

founder of a form of political science not derived from

philosophical-theological norms, but based on an

independent rationality of political action? Neither the

sympathy he held all his life with the republic nor the

dry irony of his descriptions, neither the cynicism of

some of his advices nor the strict internal worldliness

of his ideas are su cient, but only the speciﬁc method

with which Machiavelli ordered his material and

developed his ideas. It is a process of contrasting two

terms or options that are so arranged as to include and

sort antithetically all possibilities on one theoretical

level. States are drawn up either as republics or

autocracies, begins the argumentation of Il Principe

and the Discorsi , and everything that falls between

these two variants can be ignored. Among the auto-

cracies, according to the further speciﬁcation in Il

Principe , there are hereditary and newly acquired

forms. Among the newly acquired forms there are in

turn those that have come to their conqueror as a

result of his virtue (

), whilst in the other cases

fortunate circumstances ( fortuna ) were of the most

importance. And the latter is the very subject of Il

Principe : the government of newly acquired auto-

cracies gained through fortunate circumstances. The

claim to validity of Chaps. 15–19 of Il Principe ,in

which Machiavelli advises the use of pretence and lies,

deceit and cruelty, relates to this speciﬁc situation, and

is in no way to be understood as a general rule of

political success, a fact which is often overlooked in

the literature on Machiavelli.

The process of antithetical contrast not only repre-

sents the material ordering principle in Machiavelli’s

political thought, but also decides the characteristic

style of his thinking and arguments: one must decide

on one option or the other, and every attempt to avoid

this decision or to leave it open is the beginning of

political failure. Thus, Machiavelli turns away from

irtu

9108

Macchia

elli, Niccolo

(1469–1527)

the characteristic thinking and pattern of argument of

Humanism of both–and ( et–et ) and replaces it with an

either–or (

incomplete information, classical antiquity would not

be a real comparison, but merely an addition to the

present. For Machiavelli, however, classical republics

diﬀer from contemporary republics universally

through their speciﬁc civil-religious foundation. He

warned repeatedly of the politically negative eﬀects of

a Christianity strongly inﬂuenced by contemplation,

and saw Christianity as responsible for the fact that

there were fewer republics in his time than there were

in classical antiquity. Since Christianity, or its pre-

vailing interpretation, extolled the virtues of humble

citizens sunk in contemplation rather than those of

men of action, it had ‘rendered the world weak and a

prey to wicked men, who can manage it securely,

seeing that the great body of men, in order to go to

Paradise, think more of enduring their beatings than

in avenging them.’ In contrast, he praised the religion

of the ancient Romans, which had played an important

part in ‘commanding the armies, in reuniting the plebs,

both in keeping men good, and in making the wicked

ashamed.’ Machiavelli saw religion as an unavoidable

element of people’s belief systems, and attempted to

explain the diﬀerences between classical and renais-

sance republics in view of this political-cultural di-

mension. With respect to his own time Machiavelli

made several references to the example of Savonarola,

who carried out his project of moralizing Florence

with the help of sermons and prophecies, with a

complementary program of widening political par-

ticipation to the petty bourgeoisie . Machiavelli seems

to have developed certain sympathies with this project

in hindsight, mentioning Savonarola several times in

positive comments. His only criticism is that he was an

‘unarmed prophet’ who did not have the means to

constrain those who did not believe in his sermons and

prophecies into obedience at the decisive moment,

using armed force. He would have had great sympathy

for the appearance of an ‘armed prophet’ as a political

reformer or as a founder of a state, as which he saw

Moses for example. Machiavelli blamed in the main

the pope and the Roman Curia for the fact that Italy

had become a plaything for foreign powers, in the ﬁrst

place through the degeneration of morals spread from

papal Rome throughout Italy, and secondly through

the Curia’s vested interest in a political fragmentation

of Italy. Both these ideas were taken up in the Italian

Risorgimento and made fertile for lay anticlerical

politics.

el ), which determines a decision.

Although Machiavelli takes at the decision its own

value as a decision at various points, Il Principe and

the Discorsi can be read over long stretches as giving

advice on making the right decision. To this end he

adds comparative methods to the process of anti-

thetical contrast, with which he examines the results

and prerequisites of examples from his own time and

from classical history. One can therefore describe

Machiavelli as the founder of comparative political

science. Others before him had argued comparatively,

yet always within a given normative frame, whereby

the comparison had merely the function of testing out

political options as to the realisation of the normative

given. Machiavelli on the other hand seeks to work

without such moral-philosophical or theological-

based guidelines and develops his suggestions for

action only out of the comparison, whereby the success

of the action or the project provides the scale. What

success is, is determined for Machiavelli in view of the

prevailing conditions of political action, which are a

given factor for the political activists and not optional.

He compares, for example, Rome and Sparta, which

he recognizes as extremely successful political projects,

and which can therefore serve as political models. The

more exact comparison shows, however, that Sparta

existed longer than Rome, but that the latter had a

greater capacity for expansion in the confrontation

with outer enemies. Since the Italian states were

confronted with massive French and Spanish eﬀorts

towards expansion during the early sixteenth century,

which they had to tackle on the military front in order

to retain their political sovereignty, it was in

Machiavelli’s view imperative that they take Rome as

a model. The recent defeats of Venice, in its ﬁght for

the Terraferma were his proof that an oligarchic

republic was not a successful model for solving Italy’s

political problems under the conditions of the time.

The comparison process developed by Machiavelli

represents an early variant of the fourfold-point

scheme used in modern sociology. Here, Machiavelli

uses two contemporary cases, and two from classical

antiquity, each chosen according to the model of

antithetical contrast and in an attempt to ﬁnd as

paradigmatic a description of the case as possible.

Thus, Sparta and Venice are examples of oligarchic

republics, Rome and Florence on the other hand

represent republics in which the citizens are allowed a

broader participation ( go

el–

3. Machia

elli’s Republicanism

However, since Machiavelli rather doubted the

possibilities of fundamental political renewal through

religious reforms, he placed his hopes in political

regeneration of Florence and Italy through the reform

of the military, which explains why the subject of war

and military organization is present throughout the

whole of his writing. At ﬁrst he was naturally con-

cerned with the reform of Italian military organisation

erno

largo ). The contrast of the two contemporary and

historical examples serves, among other things, to

analyze contemporary situations, in which the political

process is not complete, against the background of the

historical cases which are completed and whose eﬀects

and side eﬀects, intended or unintentional, can be fully

overviewed. Should the historical cases only diﬀer

from the contemporary in the fact of complete and

erno stretto vs. go

9109

Macchia

elli, Niccolo

(1469–1527)

itself, in the course of which he was in favour of

replacing the mercenaries with a militia recruited

within the area of rule. He also intended to use the

increasing importance of drawn-up infantry on the

European battle ﬁelds to refer back to the Roman

model, in as far as the Romans also owed their military

successes more to the infantry than to the cavalry.

Aside from this he was interested in the political eﬀect

of military reform within the state; the duty of citizens

to defend their city and their willingness to involve

themselves existentially in political projects. He re-

served his harshest criticism for mercenary troops,

whom he described as cowards and traitors.

Machiavelli’s ideas on military reforms played a

particular role in Europe after the French Revolution

and in postcolonial Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.

Machiavelli’s preference for Rome over Sparta,

which was based on Rome’s greater capacity for

military expansion, also meant his taking sides in

Florence’s inner conﬂict around its type of consti-

tution and the level of political participation. In

principal there were two opposing parties, one of which

was in favor of limiting access to political power to the

rich and noble families, in other words the town

patricians, while the other favored a stronger in-

volvement of the middle classes, or the urban petty

bourgeoisie . Since the uprising of the Florentine wool

cloth workers in the late fourteenth century the

conﬂicts in Florence revolved increasingly around this

problem, which overshadowed the previous political

lines of conﬂict between single families and their

clientele groups. As sharply as Machiavelli rejected the

power struggle of the clientele groups and factions, he

defended the struggles between the social levels and

classes for power and inﬂuence as a fountain of youth,

which represented an irreplaceable form of revitaliza-

tion of republican energies. He wrote that those who

condemned the conﬂicts between nobility and the

common people and attempted to prevent them

through legislation not only limited the capacity for

expansion of the republic, but robbed it of its most

important source of life. We can see in this an early

form of party theory, or rather a theory of the

integration of political communities through conﬂict.

Machiavelli saw, however, less value in the possibility

of defending certain particular interests than in block-

ing degeneration and corruption by institutionalizing

the inner conﬂict. Thus, he admits to the middle-

classes that they have a greater interest in retaining

liberty than the town patricians. However, the liberty

to which he refers at this point is not the (liberal)

freedom to go about their own interests undisturbed,

providing these interests are not in conﬂict with those

of the republic, but the (republican) freedom of

political participation and civic engagement. With

Polybios and Cicero as his starting point, Machiavelli

developed a conception of a hybrid constitution, which

was not (as in Montesquieu) oriented at a varying

control of power to ensure individual freedom, but at

the institutionalization of political conﬂicts to prevent

moral degeneration and party spirit. Machiavelli

forms the beginning of the constitutional and party

theory of modern republicanism. This aspect of his

work, to which Spinoza and Rousseaualready re-

ferred, has only been rediscovered and examined in the

most recent Machiavelli research, particularly through

the work of Gilbert (1965) and Pocock (1975).

4. Reception

For a long time the Machiavelli reception was

dominated by a concentration on Chaps. 15–19 of Il

Principe , in which Machiavelli discussed breaking

one’s word and lying, pretence and treason, violence

and cruelty as means of ensuring political rule as to

their eciency, and recommended their purposeful

use in rejection of the theological moral-philosophical

political theory of the Scholastics and of Humanism.

The Machiavelli critique of the Antireformation (Car-

dinal Pole), the Monarchomachs (Gentillet), and in

particular of the Enlightenment (Friedrich II of

Prussia) concentrated above all on these passages and

thereby brought about the dominant perception of

Machiavelli, which is of a theorist of political scrupu-

lousness. The popular image of Machiavelli as ‘teacher

of evil’ and ‘spoiler of politics’ has been decidedly

inﬂuenced by this. Aside from this, Machiavelli’s

writing was received in Italy and Germany, where the

nation–states were formed at a later date than in other

western countries, as a theory of state-building;

Fichte’s and Hegel’s image of Machiavelli in particular

show clear signs of this. Under the inﬂuence of Fascism

and National Socialism there was further intensive

debate on Machiavelli in these countries. He was

exempliﬁed and celebrated as a forerunner of fascist

politics by several writers while others, for example,

nig (1941) criticized him as a utopian and romantic,

who understood little of real politics and, therefore,

chased illusions and so represented the prototype of a

fascist intellectual. Thus, the discussion of Machiavelli

has always served to survey the various contemporary

political problems. Like no other theorist in the history

of political thought, he provokes his interpreters to

deal with the questions of the present in the light of his

own ideas, and to project his ideas onto those of the

present. This has often led to a careless handling of the

material with regard to its interpretation and analysis,

but is on the other hand a precondition that a work

should provoke such lively and extreme controversies

in research literature as that of Machiavelli.

See also : Elites: Sociological Aspects; Leadership:

Political; Political Science: Overview

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9110

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measure the aggregate values of economic ﬂows or

stocks associated with economic activities such as

production, consumption, investment, and ﬁnancing.

At the level of the economy as a whole, obvious

examples are national income and product, or total

exports and imports. At a sector level, household

income and consumption, and government income

and consumption provide examples. Macroeconomic

data also include the aggregate values of stocks of

assets such as machinery, structures, and land.

Macroeconomic data are used by businesses, the

government, ﬁnancial markets, the press, and the

general public to monitor, and assess, changes taking

place within economy. They are also used for purposes

of economic analysis and econometric modeling and

forecasting. They provide the information needed for

purposes macroeconomic policy-making and decision

taking by governments and central banks. The col-

lection, processing, and publication of macroecon-

omic data are usually carried out by national statistical

o ces and other government agencies. In many

countries, the central bank is responsible for the

collection and publication of a wide range of macro-

economic data, especially ﬁnancial statistics and bal-

ance of payments statistics, and sometimes also the

national accounts.

Many ﬂows such as income and consumption can be

deﬁned in diﬀerent ways so that their values depend on

the particular deﬁnitions and conventions adopted by

those responsible for their collection and publication.

As the various economic activities taking place within

an economy are interdependent, the associated macro-

economic data are also interdependent. It is therefore

desirable that individual macroeconomic variables

should be deﬁned and measured consistently with each

other within an overall statistical framework that uses

the same economic concepts, deﬁnitions, and classiﬁ-

cations throughout.

Macroeconomic data are inevitably subject to error.

Complete information is seldom available on all the

units concerned. Most macroeconomic data are not

based on censuses or surveys speciﬁcally designed for

the purpose. Many are essentially estimates derived

from data collected for other reasons, such as ad-

ministrative or tax data. One of the arts of the

statisticians responsible is trying to reconcile inconsist-

encies between data drawn from diﬀerent sources. The

appearance of data from a new source may lead to

considerable revisions in previously published stat-

istics.

As one of the main uses of macroeconomic data is to

provide up-to-date information for economic fore-

casting and economic policy-making and decision

taking by governments and others, there is consider-

able pressure from users to obtain the data as quickly

as possible. There is a trade-oﬀ, however, between

timeliness and reliability when the underlying basic

data only become available gradually over a period of

time. First estimates based on incomplete data can

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Macroeconomic Data

Macroeconomic data are aggregate data relating

either to sectors of the economy, i.e., speciﬁed groups

of economic units such as households or ﬁnancial

institutions, or to the economy as a whole, i.e., the

entire set of economic units resident in a country. They

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