The Trajectory of Machiavelli’s Concept of State in Early Modern Politics

This paper suggests that the trajectory that Machiavelli’s concept of the state took by later political thinkers, active in reshaping the character of the political order they were working with, fundamentally shaped and altered the direction of the political development of Early Modern Europe. Looking at how later thinkers used Machiavelli’s concept and reframed it in their given political traditions and contexts often leads to how the concept evolved over time. This paper argues that there was a clear arch of how Machiavelli’s concept of the state was reformulated and repackaged by key legal and political thinkers such as Gentili, Bodin, Grotius, and finally Hobbes. Their reformation of Machiavelli’s state fundamentally altered the concept radically from what Machiavelli coined as an outcome of the given prince’s new modes and orders to Hobbes’s depersonalized Leviathan.