All of Machiavelli's Philosophy | A Sleep Documentary

The most famous thing Machiavelli ever said is something he never said. "The ends justify the means" appears nowhere in anything he wrote. What he actually put on the page is colder, stranger and a great deal more useful — and at the same desk, in the same few years, he was also writing a four-hundred-page argument that ordinary people are the safest guardians of their own liberty. This is the whole of him: the friar he watched burn at twenty-nine, the winter he spent at close quarters with Cesare Borgia, the militia that broke at Prato, the rope, the farm, the two books that have never been made to agree, and the four centuries that turned a Florentine clerk's surname into a word for evil. Slow, unhurried, and built for listening to in the dark. Fall asleep whenever you like — nothing here needs finishing tonight. CHAPTERS 0:00 — The Sentence He Never Wrote 6:28 — The Prophet Who Had No Weapons 19:05 — The Man Who Did Not Flinch 32:12 — The Morning They Found Him in Two Pieces 47:13 — The Farm Boys He Sent to Prato 1:00:23 — The Rope, and the Doorway 1:15:05 — What Men Actually Do 1:28:42 — Loved, or Feared, or Something Worse 1:43:46 — The Fox, the Lion, and the Face You Wear 2:00:43 — The Man Who Could Not Be Wicked Enough 2:16:15 — A Body in a Ditch Outside Viana 2:32:46 — The Noise That Made Rome Free 2:48:45 — Strip Us Naked and You Will See 3:04:18 — The Brother Who Had to Die 3:20:04 — The Religion That Made the World Weak 3:38:23 — How a Man Becomes a Devil 3:55:07 — Everything He Never Settled SOURCES Machiavelli's own work • The Prince (written 1513, published 1532) • Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy (published 1531) • The Art of War (1521) — the only major political work printed in his lifetime • Florentine Histories (1525), including the Ciompi speech • Mandragola (c. 1518) • The letters, above all to Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513 • The diplomatic dispatches from the legation to Cesare Borgia, 1502–03 • Bernardo Machiavelli's Libro di Ricordi, 1474–87 On the arguments about him • Isaiah Berlin, "The Question of Machiavelli," New York Review of Books, 4 November 1971 • Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) • Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought • J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975) • Hanna Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman (1984) • John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (2011) • Francesco Guicciardini, Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli • Alexander Lee, Machiavelli: His Life and Times (2020) • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Niccolò Machiavelli" On the manufacture of the reputation • Reginald Pole, Apologia ad Carolum Quintum (1539) • Innocent Gentillet, Discours contre Machiavel (1576) • Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, prologue (c. 1589–90) • Frederick the Great, Anti-Machiavel (1740), edited by Voltaire Where the record is uncertain — the deathbed dream, the origin of "Old Nick," why the governor of the Romagna really died — it is said so aloud in the narration rather than smoothed over.