The Language of Democracy between Aristotle and Machiavelli

What was it like to speak of and think about democracy in Machiavelli’s time? This paper first reconstructs the pre-modern language of democracy in late Medieval and humanist political thought (from the translation of Aristotle’s Politics in the thirteenth century to Machiavelli’s context) discussing its conceptual implications. Second, it analyses Machiavelli’s ideas on pre-modern democracy vis-à-vis books 3 and 4 of Aristotle’s Politics and book 6 of Polybius’ Histories. Situating Machiavelli into earlier reflections on democracy shows that while Machiavelli’s thought provides crucial conceptual innovations, his debt to the classical sources on democracy is much deeper than a simple and unqualified rejection of the latter’s languages.