Why is he so popular when he wrote so very little?

We don't. We have quite a bit more, including essays and plays, some of which were only recently translated:

amazon.com/Essential-Writings-Machiavelli-Library-Classics/dp/0812974239/ref=mp_s_a_1_3_sspa?crid=3D505LGBJ9GCT&keywords=machiavelli plays&qid=1651888045&sprefix=machiavelli plays%

And there's more still here:

amazon.com/Complete-Works-Niccolò-Machiavelli-ebook/dp/B083ZL6CLY/

lemme guess, he gon pull out the DVO SVUNT or Marsilius of Padua to embarrass himself even further kek

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because le edgy machiavelli rawr xD

It's more that the "secularism" of Machiavelli is a function of several aspects of Renaissance discourse. Straussians flatten everything into dehistoricized great men whose great works toggle political discourse between two ahistorical and perennial modes (secular/open society, religious/closed society). I'm not against great man history either, Straussianism is just a particularly shallow version of it, and one with a cynical ulterior motive that explains its limited interest in actually understanding intellectual history (i.e. promoting liberal democracies at any cost, except for Israel which is allowed to remain a closed society).

The Straussians also do a lot of violence to the clandestine tradition when they try to turn it into a one-dimensional transmission of "DID THIS GUY READ HOBBES AND THUS REALIZE LEO STRAUSS IS RIGHT IN 1691."

Stay on twitter smartphone tranny.

WHAT A BLEEDINGLY STUPID TOPIC
>Why so popular? He didn’t write much!
FUCKING HELL

And yet you can't explain it...

>mercenaries are... le bad!
wow thank you for your groundbreaking insight

Contemporary Italians did not know this, they thought mercenaries were le good and needed to be convinced that permanent standing citizen armies were a viable alternative.

why are pastaniggers so fucking stupid?

Because he said the realest shit in a world where people were bullshitting each other

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He was the first political theorist who broke away from the "BUT THE RULER MUST BE A SAINTLY CLEAN PARAGON OF SHINNING JUSTICE WHO DOES NOTHING LESS THAN THE BEST AND WHO LOVES CHILDREN AND DOGS AND GIVES TO THE POOR AND SMITES HIS ENEMIES ONLY WITH RIGHTEOUS RETRIBUTION AND GOES TO CHURCH 9 TIMES A WEEK" shpeal. A breath of fresh air really. He thought the masses that being a power hungry cunt is much more lucrative than trying to uphold virtue all the time. He was also a great historian and one of the more fun to read philosophers.

So there are no secular political theorists before Machievelli because he wasn't even secular? Or are you saying that secular political theory doesn't even exist?

Joyce only wrote a couple novels.

/thread

because of 2pac

Machiavelli and Tupac both alive in Serbia.

I'm saying secular is an anachronistic category, if we're interested in actually understanding these thinkers as they thought and wrote and not just in categorizing them conveniently for some undergrad political theory class, and I'm saying that it's anachronistic to view Machiavelli as singular or unique. Hobbes isn't even secular, he has an a priori cosmology he uses to justify a certain kind of state that enforces its worldview through state control of education and discourse. It enforces a definite metaphysical worldview, or at least enforces conformity with it.

How do you capture the subtlety of the sense in which Hobbes is "secular" but a limited government Christian liberal isn't, or certain varieties of nonconformist theorizing the separation of church and state, or dissenters in the French wars of religion theorizing the right of conscience to reject authority? Hobbes would require all these people to be subdued and possibly reeducated.

How do you capture the subtlety of Hobbes' "secularism" in comparison to the ancient secularism of indifference, with Cicero the augur passing other augurs on the street and them smiling at each other because they know their ancient priesthood is bullshit, but Cicero also believing in a morally governed republic that respects the mos maiorum and the gods? Was Socrates secular in the Crito because he was willing to die for the laws of his republic even if they were contingently false or bad laws? Was he "Hobbesian?" Strauss is certainly wrong about Plato being a crypto-atheist, and the Republic being a metaphor. Was Plato who believed in mysticism and the divine Good "secular" because he denied the authority of exoteric pagan cults, while he tried to impose his own metaphysical and mystical cult-state in Syracuse? Aristotle was de facto an atheist too, and left Athens "lest it sin twice against philosophy," but he spent much of his life with tyrant philosopher-kings.

Strauss confuses atheism with secularism. If the two are separated, then secularism implodes into discourses of good governance that stretch both back into the 14th and 15th centuries prior to Machiavelli (including in Florence), and forward into the Reformation and the problems of dissenting conscience and nonconformity.

you dont know what anachronistic means

Try to reply to posts with commensurate effort and good faith. Nobody cares that while scrolling by on your phone you thought "heh, nope...." without any further elaboration. If we all posted our unformed, uninteresting, subjective "takes" like you do, the board would be like the streamer chats you love so much. It makes more sense to actually discuss things on a discussion board.

wordcel dribble think more effortpost less faggot

>downvoting with zoomerspeak on Yea Forums
Have fun only pretending to be retarded. Someone somewhere is keeping score of your face-saving efforts on an anonymous forum, I'm sure.

Do you expect people on Yea Forums to actually read beyond a plot summary?

Machiavelli isn't hard to read. "Start with the Greeks" is famously daunting because nobody knows where exactly to start with the Greeks, and it's initially hard to appreciate whatever thing like Homer or Plato you finally decide half-heartedly to jump into. The Renaissance by comparison is much closer to us historically and mentally, it's fairly self-contained as an epoch, it has enormous influence for understanding modernity and all subsequent philosophy (far more than people think), it's just as exciting as Greek history and weirdly similar to it (poleis/republics in a political no man's land, Greece/Italy), there are highly readable and exciting classic works on it (Burckhardt, Cassirer, Kristeller), and most of its writers wrote shorter and less daunting things, or they wrote histories and letters. If you just want to get lost for a year deep-diving into some era, the Renaissance is a lot of fun and you can cover a surprising % of the total ground within a year or two of casual study.

fpbp. he's an honest politician.

Because Yea Forums doesn't read and he fits.

Good post. Straussians are a plague on political philsophy.

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Because he was good

Cicero and Thucydides

Wait. Maybe you should define secular because I don't understand your argument. In my understanding, it's relating to earthly, worldly matters as opposed to theory and practice that relates to an afterlife. In that case, Machiavelli was a secular writer as he was concerned with how to govern effectively and not in the spiritual salvation of anyone.

Because people think if you read him you appear smart.

Any advice for starting with the renaissance?

Based
The part where he said "how femoids brought the downfall of states"

dude wrote a shitton

>dude this spanish dude is the saviour of Italy

He's a politician in the original sense of the word. And a damn good one at that.

He's popular?

Evidence?

Are you serious right now?

Renaissance Italian mercenaries were so fucking kino
>ywn lead your band of Northern Europeans to conquer the city of Pastavista that hired you in the first place

>When you piss off the city you contracted with so much that the nobles throw you out of a tower
>When dumb French savages invade your country and start killing mercenaries instead of holding them hostage
>When you are so fucking stupid that you bottle an easy victory against the French by drowning in a river
Man Italians are hilariously stupid.

It amazes me how many works are just not translated, even from such great and famous men.

You're retarded. The Art of War (the non-chink superior Italian version) has been in English for ages. I listened to it on audiobook in 2014. There's plenty of Macchiavelli for the English reader.

That's why you learn languages. People who don't learn languages and consider themselves literary highbrows are merely morons. I know several, and that was after being told I was too sped to do so, meaning you can learn languages too.

not even a renaissance phenomenon. How else do you think the Normans managed to take South Italy and Sicily

such as...?

why do you keep bumping this thread?

I don't

Present Germany

I meant in his writings.

discourses on livy, book 3, chapter 26 iirc

woops, didn't mean to reply to that post.