Abstract
Very little has been written presuming a connection between Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. The latter never once mentions the former by name; and, among historians, a certain prejudice prevails. The absence of evidence is often, without reflection, taken as evidence for absence. After all, historians tend to suppose, if Machiavelli was of any importance to Hobbes, the monster of Malmesbury would have mentioned the Florentine, who was thought to have given the devil his moniker “Old Nick.”1
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Notes
David Wootton, “Thomas Hobbes’s Machiavellian Moments,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 210–42.
Paul A. Rahe, “In the Shadow of Lucretius: The Epicurean Foundations of Machiavelli’s Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 28, No. 1 (Spring, 2007): 30–55.
Quentin Skinner, “Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality,” Proceedings of the British Academy 76 (1991): 1–61.
Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958).
Note Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), xii–xiii.
Paul A. Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 245–72.
Paul A. Rahe, “The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece,” The American Historical Review 89, No. 2 (April, 1984): 265–93.
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© 2012 Hugh Liebert, Gary L. McDowell, and Terry L. Price
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Rahe, P.A. (2012). Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, and the Executive Power. In: Liebert, H., McDowell, G.L., Price, T.L. (eds) Executive Power in Theory and Practice. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014450_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014450_5
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