Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Machiavelli and Antichrist: prophetic typology in Reginald Pole's De Unitate and Apologia ad Carolum Quintum
- 2 Bishop Gardiner, Machiavellian
- 3 John Wolfe, Machiavelli, and the republican arcana in sixteenth-century England
- 4 Machiavelli and the arcana imperii
- 5 Gabriel Naudé: magic and Machiavelli
- 6 Biblical Machiavellism: Louis Machon's Apologie pour Machiavel
- Index
4 - Machiavelli and the arcana imperii
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Machiavelli and Antichrist: prophetic typology in Reginald Pole's De Unitate and Apologia ad Carolum Quintum
- 2 Bishop Gardiner, Machiavellian
- 3 John Wolfe, Machiavelli, and the republican arcana in sixteenth-century England
- 4 Machiavelli and the arcana imperii
- 5 Gabriel Naudé: magic and Machiavelli
- 6 Biblical Machiavellism: Louis Machon's Apologie pour Machiavel
- Index
Summary
This study has shown that early interpreters of and borrowers from Machiavelli often had recourse to ideas of political mystery, or mystery of state. Cardinal Pole regarded the publication of Il Principe as the biblically predicted revelation of the “mystery of iniquity”; Gardiner, in a treatise itself intended as a breviarium, or secret manual of counsel, compared the political wisdom he had to offer to the secrets of the hermetic tradition; and Alberico Gentili thought that Machiavelli's intention was to lay bare the arcana of tyranny. This chapter examines a closely related but rather more complex shift in political vocabulary. The authors we have dealt with so far all make some kind of equation between Machiavelli and political arcana, and thus in some ways anticipate the French seventeenth-century synthesis, in which the mystery of kingship is asserted in bolder terms than ever before in the West, even as the sacred king takes upon himself the typically Machiavellian trait of being willing to employ immoral methods in the maintenance of his image and his power.
Reason of state and the arcana imperii before Clapmar
What comes between the attempts to associate Machiavelli and the arcana we have already dealt with, and the French absolutist use of Machiavellian insights in the service of a paradoxically revised ideology of sacred kingship, is a complex shift in political terminology that involves not only Machiavelli and ancient notions of political arcana, but a third, mediating set of ideas – ideas closely related to those this study has repeatedly touched upon, but described in the new vocabulary of reason of state.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Machiavelli and Mystery of State , pp. 111 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989