Sunday, Oct 26, 2014

MACHIAVEL, Nicolas
[Machiavelli] The Works of the Famous Nicholas Machiavell, Citizen and Secretary of Florence
London: Starkey, Harper, Amery (1680)
$13,500.

Written originally in Italian, and from thence newly & faithfully translated into English.

The highly sought-after, incredibly scarce literary collectible by the father of modern political thought. Folio. Eleven works in one. Complete with general title and separate title for each work. Woodcut chapter initials and headpieces. This is the rare 1680 First Edition in English of the works of the genius Machiavelli including his two most famous works, The Prince and The Art of War. His writings forever changed how we look at politics and governance. It has become a true injustice that his name now retains such a malevolent association.

Machiavelli (1469-1527) was a true Renaissance Man: a political philosopher, musician, playwright and poet. His most famous work, The Prince, espouses the earliest known realistic approach to maintaining rule (known today as realpolitik). Although he was maligned for proposing despotic rule, this interpretation of his work is inaccurate; what he stated is that evil actions are to be used only very sparingly, if at all. This stands in contrast to his other work, Discourses Upon the First Decade of Titus Livius, which strongly supported rule by a republic, including an entire system of checks & balances. Indeed, he felt that a republic was a far superior form of government than a principality.

Regarding The Prince, it states in Printing and the Mind of Man [63, Wing M129]: “Machiavelli founded the science of modern politics on the study of mankind — it should be remembered that a parallel work to The Prince was his historical essay on the first ten books of Livy. Politics was a science to be entirely divorced from ethics, and nothing must stand in the way of its machinery. Many of the remedies he proposed for the rescue of Italy were eventually applied. His concept of the qualities demanded from a ruler and the absolute need of a national militia came to fruition in the monarchies of the seventeenth century and their national armies. What Machiavelli forgot is that man is not only a political animal, and that any attempt to govern without reconciling the other sides of his nature is bound to fail. Nevertheless, he wrote as a patriot and a political scientist, and he better deserves to be remembered as such rather than as the Borgia-like figure which his name now connotes.”

This beautiful copy is bound to style in full dark oasis morocco leather, double rule with period leaf decoration to boards, raised bands to spine with date gilt and red leather title label: a stately, tasteful, and beautiful presentation.

This is a rare and highly important literary collectible.