“He writes The Prince. He dedicates it to Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici and gives it to him in 1513. He says in the final chapter, "You're the only person who can bring Italy from its current”
Books mentioned in Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer
From Dwarkesh Podcast · 2026-06-16
All matched books in this episode
“In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli talks about how one of the reasons the Roman Empire's fall was instigated is that these generals were months away on the frontier fighting these wars because the”
“So much so that when Gibbon is writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in multiple volumes, in the late 18th century he says that there's”
“focuses of Dante's Commedia. Dante in it says, "Look, when you do these things, you will go to hell for them". He fills his hell with Florentines.”
“One of the chapters of Inferno that hits extra hard in his period and in ours is Canto V, where he's encountering the lustful, and we see Paolo and Francesca.”
“It's their cultural equivalent to Romeo and Juliet, a touchstone story. People sing songs about it. Everyone knows this exciting love tragedy.”
“arguments. His history of Florence joined other important histories of Florence circulating, influencing the way people thought about politics. Not The Prince. The Prince is”
“is Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, De rerum natura, which is our best capsule of ancient atomism and the atoms and vacuum theory of matter. It's written around the BC/AD turn, and drifts”
“the aftermath of the publication of Hobbes's Leviathan, because Hobbes's Leviathan hits European thought like a truck full of bricks. It has this incredibly persuasive,”
“The useful example here is Thomas Paine. We all know Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". Thomas Paine does a lot of thinking about the foundation of the institutions of the US.”
“della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man. (We have since proved it's not an oration and it's not about the dignity of man.) These things are the few lights in the darkness, and”
“villainous figure that Shakespeare's Richard III invokes as someone he's modeling himself on—is useful to people as a character, as an idea. It’s the idea of the scheming politician who is”
“It's not a manual for getting ahead. It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People, because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power.”