Machiavelli and the problem of dictatorship

Machiavelli is the first modern political thinker who pays great attention to the magistracy of dictatorship. “Dictatorial authority,” as he puts it, is fundamental to the survival and prosperity of republics: It is the magistracy, the “ordinary mode,” to which they turn to deal with “extraordinary accidents,” political and military emergencies. Machiavelli’s gaze is cast both on the Ancient and the Modern world: Although he concentrates on the Roman magistracy, he also pays attention to magistracies of the modern world that were in some way similar, such as the Council of the Ten in the Republic of Venice. In my paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the essential points of Machiavelli’s discussion on dictatorship; in the concluding remarks, I will briefly tackle the more general question of the relation- ship between politics and law in his work as a whole.