Despite it's worldwide fame over the last 450 years, The Prince has been somewhat sidelined in recent decades within the study of Machiavelli's political thought. The attention of scholars rather began to turn to Machiavelli's longest and in many aspects the most original work, titled Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius. In the form of three longer books and 142 chapters, Machiavelli, drawing on the first decade of Livy's monumental work, coined an early version of liberal republicanism on the basis of his insightful and innovative, but at the same time traditional, political thought. Machiavelli's republican thought was dealt with, among others, in two essays by Skinner, one of the founding fathers of the famous Cambridge school, who saw Machiavelli above all as a traditional thinker. In this thesis, I will selectively present Machiavelli's life and the reality of the city-state of Florence at the turn of the 15th to the 16th century. In doing so, I will establish the political, intellectual and ideological context in which I will then situate The Discourses. In what follows, I will focus on Skinner's understanding of the traditional (as well as innovative) elements of Machiavellian republicanism. At the end I will present my final conclusions.
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