Die Discorsi (Deutsche Ausgabe)

The Discorsi: Political Reflections on Ancient and Italian History (Essays on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius) is the literary masterpiece of Niccolò Machiavelli, in which he summarizes his thoughts on politics, war, and political leadership. In his extensive work, Machiavelli, a staunch republican, develops his vision of an ideal state, drawing on the Roman historian Titus Livius (59 BC to 17 AD) as his guiding thread, as Livius was the only one to address the founding of the Roman state. Machiavelli analyzes various forms of government (republic, monarchy, democracy, aristocracy, tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy) in three parts (Books I - III). Throughout his Discorsi, Machiavelli emphasizes that everything must be done for the benefit of the people, encapsulating it with the well-known phrase: Republics are states in which the people are sovereign! He criticizes that people have unfortunately not taken the effort to learn the technique of proper action in politics, instead acting based on feeling, instinct, habit, and whim, admiring the ancients but failing to systematically evaluate their actions. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) was a Florentine philosopher, politician, diplomat, historian, and poet.