The (non)-legal thought of Niccolò Machiavelli
pp. 355-363
in: Enrico Pattaro, Damiano Canale, Hasso Hofmann, Patrick Riley (eds), A treatise of legal philosophy and general jurisprudence 9-10, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
Machiavelli is the most ardent Romanist (or Rome-lover) among all modern political philosophers: Indeed his greatest single work is a set of Discourses on Livy's history of Rome (cf. Meinecke 1884, chaps. 4 and 5). But while most of the great Rome-lovers—most notably Dante, Leibniz and Rousseau—give enormous weight to Roman law as the towering and permanent Roman achievement (outlasting the fall of Rome herself; cf. Barker 1923) Machiavelli by contrast gives absolute priority to the personal creative genius of Romulus, of Numa, of the Antonine "good" emperors (Machiavelli 1950a, Book 1, chap. 10).
