Discourses on Livy
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), 1531
Machiavelli reads Rome's history to ask how republics win, corrupt, and fall—and why the same appetites keep returning in every city. The prose is dense and aphoristic, offering a sharp, philosophical look at the mechanics of power and the fragility of society.
Feels like curiosity, defiance and unease. About power, freedom and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you are interested in the relationship between human nature and political structures. Be warned that the writing is highly analytical and relies on historical examples rather than narrative action.
Why read it
This work gives you a raw look at how political appetites inevitably shape the fate of cities and republics.
Pages from the book
The hardest thing is to change your method when it has already worked.
As to why such changes are impossible, two reasons may be given. One is that we cannot act in opposition to the bent of our nature. The other, that when a man has been very successful while following a particular method, he can never be convinced that it is for his advantage to try some other. And hence it results that a man’s fortunes vary, because times change and he does not change with them. So, too, with commonwealths, which, as we have already shown at length, are ruined from not altering their institutions to suit the times. And commonwealths are slower to change than princes are, changes costing them more effort; because occasions must be waited for which shall stir the whole community, and it is not enough that a single citizen alters his method of acting. What freedom feels like to someone who has never had to use it.
Should a people accustomed to live under a prince by any accident become free, as did the Romans on the expulsion of the Tarquins, we know from numberless instances recorded in ancient history, how hard it will be for it to maintain that freedom. And this is no more than we might expect. For a people in such circumstances may be likened to the wild animal which, though destined by nature to roam at large in the woods, has been reared in the cage and in constant confinement and which, should it chance to be set free in the open country, being unused to find its own food, and unfamiliar with the coverts where it might lie concealed, falls a prey to the first who seeks to recapture it. What remains of you when the office is taken away.
Among other high sayings which our historian ascribes to Camillus, as showing of what stuff a truly great man should be made, he puts in his mouth the words, “My courage came not with my dictatorship nor went with my exile;” for by these words we are taught that a great man is constantly the same through all vicissitudes of Fortune; so that although she change, now exalting, now depressing, he remains unchanged, and retains always a mind so unmoved, and in such complete accordance with his nature as declares to all that over him Fortune has no dominion. Niccolò Machiavelli.Machiavelli wrote the Discourses in forced retirement outside Florence after the Medici returned in 1512 and he lost his post as second chancellor.
Books that feel like this
More by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli, 1532
A short, cool manual on how power is won and kept, written by a man who watched it up close. Its blunt realism still unsettles, and it still explains how leaders behave.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Discourses on Livy for me?
- You may like it if you are interested in the relationship between human nature and political structures. Be warned that the writing is highly analytical and relies on historical examples rather than narrative action.
- What is Discourses on Livy like?
- The prose is dense and aphoristic, offering a sharp, philosophical look at the mechanics of power and the fragility of society. Feels like curiosity, defiance and unease. About power, freedom and society.
- What should I read after Discourses on Livy?
- If you liked Discourses on Livy, try The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (Francis Bacon), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) and Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche).
A taste of the feed
What is lost when nothing is allowed to stand between wanting and having.
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.
Brave New World · Aldous Huxley
The endearing details that make a monster seem human.
He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
The Handmaid's Tale · Margaret Atwood
What if a life were weighed the way gold is weighed?
Pray, let us see to it, my dear Lucilius, that our lives, like jewels of great price, be noteworthy not because of their width but because of their weight. Let us measure them by their performance, not by their duration. Would you know wherein lies the difference between this hardy man who, despising Fortune, has served through every campaign of life and has attained to life’s Supreme Good, and that other person over whose head many years have passed? The former exists even after his death; the latter has died even before he was dead.
Moral Letters to Lucilius · Seneca
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