ufficiently good, while a system given to corruption needs a stronger hand. For that matter, there are always those in society who are not sufficiently good to be trusted to perform rightly without coercive control over their actions. A shift in how the state was viewed had taken place in the Roman era and would be continued in Machiavelli's era. The republican form of government was developed during the era of the Roman Republic and then revived during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Niccolo Machiavelli celebrated this revival in his The Discourses when he argued with those who believed that the people acting collectively were less wise than a single king or prince. Machiavelli found them subject to the same pressures and the same errors, of which a leading one is the pressure to change the laws in order to produce a more effective system giving more protection to liberty:
Happy indeed should we call that state which produces a man so prudent that men can live securely under the laws which he prescribes without having to emend them . . . Unhappy, on the other hand, in some degree is that city to be deemed which, not having chanced to meet with a prudent organizer, has to reorganize itself (Machiavelli, The Discourses 105).
Since much of what machiavelli says about the republic involves a shift from despotic to republican government, the question of introducing change is vital.
In general, Machiavelli placed his emphasis on the strong king, or prince, as the individual charged with control of government and almost required to take whatever means he deemed necessary to accomplish his goals. As a humanist educator, Machiavelli details the nature, goals, and responsibilities of such a leader in The Prince and in The Discourses as well. Machiavelli in the latter work finds that the masses are more aware and more consistent than a prince. He begins with an idea he says will not be popular...