Machiavelli: military judgement & political thought

Please note – if you are coming to Queen Square, the speaker is not appearing in person but will be livestreamed onto the large screen.

Ready to take your next journey of Discovery? The Renaissance: Journeys of Discovery at BRLSI is a yearlong programme of talks and events exploring the many joys, discoveries and something of the broader cultural legacy of a movement still making waves in the 21st century.  Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Martin Luther, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Hieronymus Bosch, if you love culture then you’ll love our new talks series!

Many of us think we know what it is to be “Machiavellian” but do we really? A virtual consensus developed early in the 20th century that Machiavelli’s judgement in military matters was little better than deplorable. From Hans Delbruck and Martin Hobohm in Germany, to Piero Pieri in Italy, to Michael Mallet in England later in the century, historians of war and its relation to politics and society agreed that, although he may have been a kind of theoretical genius, Machiavelli couldn’t tell a freebooting mercenary from a professional soldier or a modern siege train from an ancient trebuchet!

This judgement was more or less accepted by political theorists and intellectual historians, who either acquiesced by leaving military matters to the side or jumped in by diagnosing how the master of power politics could get military power so very wrong.

By the beginning of the 21st century, however, scholars had begun to come back around to Clausewitz’s more probing insight that “Machiavelli was a very sound judge of military matters.”

Our upcoming talk helps to develop the growing recognition of the merits of Machiavelli’s military experience and acumen, and, more importantly, it will examine ways in which his military, political and philosophical thought were essentially one and the same.

Dr Christopher Lynch is a Professor of Political Science and the Department Head of The Political Science and Philosophy Department at Missouri State University. He has served as a senior adviser in the United States Department of State. Translator and editor of Machiavelli’s Art of War (University of Chicago, 2003) and co-editor of Principle and Prudence in Western Political Thought (SUNY, 2016), he recently completed Machiavelli on War (Cornell, 2023), a comprehensive treatment of the subject. He is now working on a translation of Machiavelli’s poems, stories, and comedic letters as well as a book on classical, biblical, and liberal alternatives to Machiavelli’s understanding of war and peace.

To learn more about the Renaissance and our exciting year long programme, don’t forget to follow our Renaissance: Journeys of Discovery webpage: https://www.brlsi.org/renaissance/