SOURCE: Palmer, Michael, and James F. Pontuso. “The Master Fool: the Conspiracy of Machiavelli's Mandragola.” Perspectives on Political Science 25, no. 3 (summer 1996): 124–32.

In the following essay, Palmer discusses Machiavelli as the architect of the political thought that characterized the Renaissance and as exemplified in Mandragola.

Machiavelli is the master of conspiracy. He is both master theoretician and master practitioner of conspiracy. He may have been the most ambitious conspirator in the history of political philosophy; if, that is, one assumes that modern political thought emerged around the turn of the sixteenth century as a revolutionary reaction against ancient thought in both its pagan and Christianized forms, and that Machiavelli was the architect of that revolution. Machiavelli announces the revolutionary nature of his teaching in both The Prince (ch. 15) and Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (bk. 1, intro.), the two books that contain or comprise, by his...