Machiavelli

Power before piety — the foundations of political realism.

We open the year with the writer who broke the spell. In a Florence racked by foreign invasion, factional intrigue, and the collapse of medieval moral certainties, Niccolò Machiavelli asked the question this course will never stop asking: how does power actually work, before we ask how it ought to? Across seven lessons we trace the Italian Renaissance setting, the collision with Christian just war theory, and the long shadow Machiavelli casts across Hobbes, Morgenthau, and Mearsheimer — and we test, in the end, whether realism really sees the world whole.