Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time
June 16, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readMachiavelli’s father spent months indexing Livy by hand just to earn a copy of the book—a single text that would become the foundation of his son’s most ambitious political work. That scarcity, that intimacy with one ancient source, shaped Machiavelli’s intellectual life more than any modern reader can easily grasp. He was not writing abstract theory for a broad audience. He was a patriot writing a proprietary manual for the rulers of his own city, hoping to be recalled from exile after the regime that tortured him had cast him out.
The historical pressure behind The Prince
Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, and the final chapter is a desperate plea for someone to rescue Italy from ruin. Two forces had made the situation uniquely unstable. First, the city-state structure of Italy had suffered a cascade of regime changes. Machiavelli observed a political principle: when a government with long continuity is overthrown, the thread of legitimacy is cut, and rapid-fire overthrows follow. In his lifetime, most Italian cities had recently had their governments uprooted, making them ripe for yet another replacement.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:21) **Historical Context for The Prince** - City-state instability after repeated regime changes cuts the thread of legitimacy
- 2 (05:58) **Machiavelli's Diplomatic Career** - First-hand observation of rulers including King Louis, Maximilian, and especially Cesare Borgia
- 3 (13:22) **Fortune vs. Agency** - Half of outcomes lie outside human control; evaluate actions by probable results before fortune intervenes
- 4 (15:17) **Means and Stability** - Methods of acquiring power determine how stable and fruitful that power will be
- 5 (19:12) **Fear vs. Love** - It is better to be feared than loved because promises are unreliable once rule appears weak
- 6 (20:16) **Political Parties** - First European thinker to argue stable competing parties can vent tensions without one destroying the other
- 7 (24:15) **Papacy as Temporal Power** - Close proximity makes popes concrete political actors rather than abstract spiritual figures
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Had Ada Palmer back on – this time to talk about Machiavelli, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of all time.
Machiavelli cut his teeth as a high-level diplomat for Florence, a position from which he got to closely observe the most important rulers in Europe at the time, including the ones who were on the path to destroying his dearly beloved Florence.
In 1513 the Medici retook control of Florence and, wrongly suspecting Machiavelli of participating in a coup attempt, fired, tortured, and exiled him.
Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents.
Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career’s lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici.
But at least the Medici were in a position to use his insights to defend Florence. Machiavelli the patriot did not want any other hands to touch these books, because those hands, armed further with these lessons, might pose an existential danger to Florence.
The closest modern analogy, at least as Machiavelli would have seen it, would be Szilard’s letter warning FDR about the possibility of a nuclear fission bomb.
What were those insights? And how were they inspired by Machiavelli’s dangerous diplomatic missions all across Europe, and his extensive reading of antiquity? Watch this episode with Ada Palmer to find out!
By the way, Ada is launching a new podcast which I’m very excited about. The first season will be about Machiavelli - a perfect way to dive deeper into the topics we discussed in this episode. Subscribe at Beforecast’s website to be notified of the first episode, subscribe on YouTube, follow her on Patreon, and if you want even more Ada, check out her FixTheNews Podcast episode, and check out her books and more.
Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.
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