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Machiavelli's The Prince: A Lexical Enigma, Jeane Luere

Quidditas

Italians today, especially Florentines, unreservedly venerate their native son, Niccolo Machiavelli, 16th century Italian political figure, along with Francesca Petrarcha, Dante Alighieri, and Michelangelo Buonarroti; they attach no stigma, no unfavorable connotation, to the adjective "Machiavellian," coined from the name so famous in literature and legend. An American abroad encounters this total veneration of Machiavelli with some bewilderment, for we are prone to attitudes like that of Thomas Babington Macaulay, who wrote, "We doubt whether any names in literary history be so generally odious as that of Machiavelli."