Exploring Ideas of Humanism in Machiavelli’s The Prince

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to contrast Machiavelli’s The Prince and the ideas of
humanism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries together on one plane. At the face value, The
Prince may be condemned as diagonally opposed to the ‘purer’ qualities of humanism like
‘virtue’ or individual freedom. But this is not always the case. In this paper, I intend to prove
that whereas popularly condemned to be intrinsically opposed, Machiavelli’s text, in fact,
upholds the very philosophical ideas that thinkers of humanism prided upon as the backbone of a
renaissance.