Political Leadership: Contractual Authority

In the fifteenth century, people in what we know as Italy were living in an era dominated by competing schools of thought — Christian Humanism, Christian Stoicism, even Christian Scepticism. Into this cauldron of incompatible ideas, the ideas of pagan writers were mixed. The mood of the times was empirical and sceptical and scientists and philosophers like Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli were impatient with abstract rules of method: they were interested in the collection of facts and inductive generalisations from them. They were concerned with what is the case rather than what should be the case and it is for this reason that Francis Bacon acknowledged Machiavelli as a political scientist. Rather than compare and contrast political theories, Machiavelli formulated generalisations about political power from his reading of the pagan classics and his experience of current political affairs.