Rethinking Plato’s Place in Machiavelli’s Thought: Philosophy and Civic Education in the Machiavellian Corpus

This dissertation re-examines the relationship between Machiavellian and Platonic political philosophies. Machiavelli scholars have argued for years that Machiavelli is so completely hostile and dismissive of Plato that it precludes the need for an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the two thinkers’ political philosophies, without taking into consideration whether or not we ought to factor in the unavoidable presence of Christian Neoplatonism around Machiavelli in our assessment of his situation vis-à-vis Platonism. In line with the very recent work of scholars such as Miguel Vatter and Giovanni Giorgini, I argue that what is considered to be Machiavelli’s hostility to Plato is in fact opposition to the Neoplatonist interpretations of Plato that circulated in Florence in the XV and XVI centuries. Comparing the two authors after filtering out Neoplatonism highlights not only unprecedented areas of agreement, but also deepens our understanding of the role of aesthetics and philosophy for Machiavellian political education