Niccolo Machiavelli has been accused of being a teacher of evil, primarily for his views in The Prince. However one views his teachings in The Prince, there seems to be a certain tension between those views and what Machiavelli expresses regarding republican government in The Discourses. Actually, though, the two works are not in antagonism so much as they are complementary, and the two taken together explain Machiavelli's views on the two forms of government he perceived as legitimate in his time.
a) In The Prince, Machiavelli indicates at the outset the two types of government:
All the governments and forms of dominion that have had and now have rule over men have been and are either republican or princely (Machiavelli The Prince 95).
At the beginning of his second chapter, he states that he will omit a discussion of republics "because I have elsewhere dealt with them at length" (Machiavelli The Prince 96), meaning in The Discourses.
Machiavelli describes the nature of both types of government in his two books, but his intent is not to be descriptive but to be normative, to indicate how each type of government should rule. Leo Strauss points this out, noting that the writings of Machiavelli promote "value-judgments" (Strauss 181). This is especially clear in The Prince as he offers advice to the prince on a wide variety of topics related to governance and the maintenance of control. In The Discourses, the primary model used by Machiavelli is that or Rome, and he considers aspects of Roman history and development as he notes what works and what does not, what mistakes were made and how they could have been avoided, and how a republic could have developed from a more centralized state and what advantages it might offer.
Machiavelli shows in his discussion of the transition from servitude to freedom that a republican form of government is to be preferred if the human beings who make up that form of government are s...