Summary Of Miles Unger's Machiavelli: A Biography

Miles Unger offers an interesting take on Machiavelli in, Machiavelli: A Biography, written in 2011. Right off the bat, Unger’s Machiavelli regards priests as “charlatans and swindlers” Upon his death, a prominent church man described Machiavelli as “an enemy of the human race” with the Pope following suit several years in the future-a move that the anticlerical Machiavelli “might have taken as a backhanded compliment”. Unger argues that because Machiavelli’s works were placed in the Index of Prohibited Books, this give credence to the argument of Machiavellian atheism. Machiavelli’s goal in his writings encourages the hearkening back to the ancient writers such as Aristotle in an effort to bypass Christianity with paganism. Christianity proved too weak in the mind of Machiavelli, therefore something older and more violent needed to be used in order to stave off the corruption and attack on liberty that the Papacy brought. Although an excellent read, Unger offers little
Similar to Machiavelli in Hell, this work, Black describes, as an intellectual biography. Throughout his work, Machiavelli, published in 2013, he constantly attacks the notion that Machiavelli respected his Judeo-Christian upbringing and states in numerous lines of his adherence to what defines atheism, even though Viroli and others do not subscribe to the possibility in the period. His major argument can be summarized in his introduction, noting, “Machiavelli regarded morality and religion as a cloak to be exploited to promote or vindicate the ruler or state; morality and religion were key tools that regularly had to be subverted for selfish ends.” His argument reads deeply into the cynical and ironic trend of reading history regarding Machiavelli’s works rather than offering a literal translation of the texts, making works like Viroli and De Grazia seem a bit white-washed, despite the