Episode summary
Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer
Dwarkesh Podcast
· · Hosts: Dwarkesh Patel · Guests: Ada Palmer
Summary
Ada Palmer argues that Machiavelli’s The Prince is a response to an Italy where legitimacy had repeatedly shattered. City-states were being overthrown in rapid succession, and the papacy had become a destabilizing political machine: each new pope could rewrite alliances, redistribute offices, and overthrow governments with little predictability. From Machiavelli’s perspective, that made stability nearly impossible unless a power like the Medici could accumulate enough strength to force the papacy to negotiate rather than dictate.
The conversation emphasizes that Machiavelli was not a simplistic “ends justify the means” thinker. Palmer says he cared intensely about the means by which power was acquired, because those means determined whether rule would endure. Cesare Borgia matters so much because Machiavelli saw him up close: terrifying, effective, and often right in how he used fear, loyalty, and spectacle. But fortune still mattered, and Borgia’s collapse showed that even perfect political technique could be undone by illness and contingency.
Palmer also frames patronage as the glue of Renaissance life. Justice, church offices, diplomacy, and even travel all ran through networks of personal obligation. Machiavelli’s deeper concern, she says, is liberty: a people are unfree if one man can arbitrarily order killings. A domestic dynasty like the Medici could be gentler than an outside conqueror, but it still changed the terms of freedom.
Key takeaways
- Palmer says Machiavelli saw Italian politics as structurally unstable because legitimacy had been repeatedly broken and replaced.
- She argues the papacy amplified chaos by letting successive popes use office to reward allies and overturn prior regimes.
- Palmer says Machiavelli admired Cesare Borgia because he understood how fear, loyalty, and neutral justice could make rule popular and durable.
- She rejects the simplistic reading that Machiavelli ignored means; he cared which means created stable power and which ones backfired.
- Palmer says patronage was central to Renaissance society, shaping justice, church appointments, diplomacy, and even basic mobility.
- For Machiavelli, Palmer says, liberty meant not living under arbitrary power from a man who could have someone killed on a whim.
Notable quotes
“The papacy is part of it, and then the city-state structure of Italy is another part of it”
“He thinks the means are incredibly important, because the means by which you achieve power determine how stable and how fruitful that power will be”
“He basically thinks people will act as badly as they are allowed to, whether they're the tyrant or the people or the nobles”
“if you live in a state where there is an arbitrary power who can have you put to death, you are a slave”
How the episode opens
Okay, I'm back with Ada Palmer, who is a science fiction author, composer, and historian at the University of Chicago. Today, I want to talk to you about Machiavelli. He writes The Prince.
He dedicates it to Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici and gives it to him in 1513. He says in the final chapter, "You're the only person who can bring Italy from its current place of ruin and ravage. Why were things so bad?
What is the historical context in which he's writing The Prince? I'm going to give a two-part answer to that, although of course with any granular history there can be many parts. The papacy is part of it, and then the city-state structure of Italy is another part of it.
I'll start with the city-state structure. There's a principle in politics that when there's long continuity of a government, and the government has been in power a long time, that government has a lot of legitimacy. People believe in its institutions.
People are used to it. Even if you complain about it, it's the government. When you break that—when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing—it doesn't have that same staying power.
So it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes, rapid fire, over and over. We see this with how many iterations the French Republic goes through: the French Republic, and then restored monarchy, and then republic, and then monarchy. When a long thing cracks—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—you get chaos.
England's Wars of the Roses are similar. There was one stable dynasty for a long time. The moment that a king is overthrown, then you have overthrow, overthrow, overthrow, overthrow for a long time, because the thread of continuity was cut.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- machiavelli misunderstanding
- renaissance politics
- florence and medici power
- cesare borgia terror
- nuclear fission analogy
Watch the episode
Watch “Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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Dwarkesh Podcast, this episode and its artwork belong to Dwarkesh Patel. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
