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Ada Palmer - Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

2026-06-16 - 125 min - source - Read full transcript

Dwarkesh Patel (host)Ada Palmer

Key insights

Machiavelli cared intensely about the means by which power was acquired, not just the outcome, because the means determine whether power can be held stably.

Palmer argues the common 'ends justify the means' reading of Machiavelli is wrong: he distinguishes breaking oaths that a ruler's power base can absorb (Cesare Borgia, whose power rested on fear) from breaking oaths that destroy a ruler's legitimacy (Savonarola, whose power rested on being seen as divinely infallible). The same act of lying is survivable or fatal depending on what kind of power you've built.

machiavelli-realpolitik

Machiavelli argued deeds should be judged by their most probable expected outcome before fortune intervened, not by how things actually turned out.

He defends Cesare Borgia's fall as caused entirely by bad luck (Borgia and his father both falling gravely ill at the same moment) rather than by flawed strategy, and insists Borgia 'did everything right' and should be imitated, since roughly half of any outcome is outside a ruler's control.

machiavelli-realpolitik

Machiavelli treated religion as a tool for producing civic virtue, evaluated for its political utility rather than its truth, which is why the Discourses praises Roman religion over Christianity for statecraft purposes.

He argues Roman religion, which tied the afterlife to being remembered and honored on earth, gave citizens a strong incentive to die for their country, while Christianity's focus on personal piety gives no comparable incentive to sacrifice for the state. Palmer parallels this to Thomas Paine's later, explicitly irreligious argument that mandatory religious education is necessary for good citizenship regardless of which religion is taught.

machiavelli-realpolitik

Cesare Borgia's brutal conquests made him popular with ordinary people because he replaced generations of biased, faction-based justice with genuinely neutral justice.

After massacring a city's ruling family, Borgia's outside administrators had no local factional stake, so cases were judged on the facts rather than on which family's patron controlled the court. People who had lived through decades of one-sided 'justice for some and injustice for others' experienced fair rulings for the first time and rallied to defend his conquests.

patronage-and-justice

Patronage, not law, was the fundamental glue holding Renaissance Italian society together, down to the level of criminal trials and hotel stays.

Harsh punishments written into law (death for theft, adultery, homosexuality) were rarely applied; roughly 99 of 100 convictions ended in a fine because a patron intervened with the judge, mirroring a religious ideal in which the trial process itself was meant to preview divine judgment and mercy. Falling outside a patronage network, as happened to Giordano Bruno in his second Inquisition trial, is what actually produced an execution.

patronage-and-justice

Pre-Reformation Christianity assumed constant, universal sinning and centered on repentance rather than personal purity, which explains behavior later eras found shockingly hypocritical.

Palmer contrasts this with the purity-focused Christianity introduced by Calvinism and Puritanism. Renaissance Florence had dozens of icons of St. Julian the Hospitaller, patron saint of murderers, commissioned by people who had killed and needed a model for repenting; society expected everyone to sin constantly and then seek forgiveness rather than trying to stay unstained.

patronage-and-justice

Chronic instability in Machiavelli's Italy came from two compounding sources: broken continuity of city-state governments and the structurally unpredictable, elective papacy.

Once a government's line of succession is broken once, Palmer argues it tends to be overthrown repeatedly rather than stabilizing; by the time Machiavelli wrote The Prince, most Italian city-states had recently had their governments uprooted. Popes, elected roughly every decade often by a coalition of the prior pope's enemies, added a second layer of unpredictable regime change, since each new pope tended to reverse his predecessor's alliances and appointments.

papal-instability

Renaissance publishing convention required original ideas to be presented as commentary on ancient texts, because purely original work was seen as less credible and less fashionable.

This is why Machiavelli's prestige project was Discourses on Livy rather than The Prince, and why scholars like Ficino sincerely believed their radical original cosmology was secretly coded in Plato. Palmer argues 19th-century historians of philosophy wrongly dismissed most Renaissance thought as 'people being wrong about Plato' because they didn't recognize commentary as a vehicle for genuinely original ideas.

renaissance-intellectual-culture

Copyright originated from the Catholic Inquisition's pre-publication censorship licensing, not from any early concept of authors' rights.

After 1515 the Church required every book to be approved by an inquisitor or bishop before printing; the approval record doubled as proof that only the licensed printer could legally print that text, creating the first monopoly printing licenses. England's earliest print licensing law directly imitated this system, and modern copyright emerged a century later when the censorship function was stripped away while the printer's exclusive-rights function was kept.

renaissance-intellectual-culture

'Machiavellian' split off from Machiavelli himself into a separate cultural character, the same way Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza's reputations detached from what they actually wrote.

Shakespeare's Richard III invokes 'the murderous Machiavel,' and the nickname 'Old Nick' for the devil derives from Niccolo Machiavelli, even though the actual text of The Prince is a manual for keeping power stable and protecting citizens' lives, not a manual for self-advancement. Palmer draws the same pattern with Spinoza, whose warm, pious writing bears little resemblance to his reputation as an arch-heretic after being formally expelled from his Jewish community.

machiavellis-legacy

Machiavelli's popularity has surged at specific historical moments when his ideas answered that era's live questions, not steadily over time.

He was a minor, occasionally banned figure for over a century until Hobbes's Leviathan made readers hunt through Machiavelli for ammunition against Hobbes's more terrifying arguments. A second surge came in the 19th century, when Enlightenment-era interest in separation of church and state made Machiavelli's areligious analysis of politics newly useful, and Italian nationalists championed him as a rival to England's Francis Bacon and France's Descartes for the title of 'first modern man.'

machiavellis-legacy

Machiavelli was one of the first authors to personally experience the absence of copyright protection, and his panicked letters about typo-ridden pirated editions of his own work show the problem copyright would later solve.

Unlike in the manuscript era, when any copy of a book reduced the risk of its total loss, Machiavelli discovered a local printer publishing his work full of compositor errors with no way to correct it, prevent it, or clear his name; he and his friends could only write letters to acquaintances explaining that the mistakes weren't his.

renaissance-intellectual-culture

Books referenced

The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli - The episode's central text; Palmer frames it as Machiavelli's secret 'job application' to the Medici regime that had tortured and exiled him, dedicated to Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici in 1513.
Discourses on Livy - Niccolo Machiavelli - Machiavelli's other major political work, framed by Palmer as his real bid for scholarly prestige because it takes the Renaissance-approved form of a commentary on an ancient author (Livy), unlike the unusually 'original' Prince.
Inferno (The Divine Comedy) - Dante Alighieri - Discussed for its portrayal of Florentines in hell (including the Paolo and Francesca episode) as evidence that the period took its own hypocrisy about sin, usury, and adultery seriously even while constantly practicing it.
On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) - Lucretius - Cited as a parallel case to The Prince: a text that sat dormant for centuries before suddenly becoming urgently relevant, in this case when 1600s Europe developed germ theory and revived interest in ancient atomism.
Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes - Its shocking reception is described as the trigger for the first major surge in Machiavelli's popularity, as readers went looking for holes in Machiavelli's realist logic (the 'daddy monster') to help them refute Hobbes (the 'baby monster').
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon - Referenced for Gibbon's claim that humanity was never better off than under the Five Good Emperors, illustrating the era's idealization of stable, competent (rather than dramatic) Roman rule.
Common Sense - Thomas Paine - Used as a parallel to Machiavelli's utilitarian view of religion: Paine argued mandatory religious education was necessary for good citizenship regardless of which religion was taught, separating religion's civic utility from its truth claims.
Oration on the Dignity of Man - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Named alongside The Prince as one of the only Renaissance works later historians treated as 'original'; Palmer notes in passing that scholarship has since shown it is neither an oration nor really about the dignity of man.

Media referenced

Beforecast - podcast - Ada Palmer's new podcast, with its first season devoted to Machiavelli; Dwarkesh plugs it as a deeper follow-on to this conversation.
Dwarkesh Podcast episode with Ada Palmer (first appearance) - podcast - Referenced repeatedly as 'last time' or 'last episode,' covering Renaissance Florence, Gutenberg, and Leonardo da Vinci; this conversation is an explicit sequel focused specifically on Machiavelli.
FixTheNews podcast episode with Ada Palmer - podcast - Mentioned in the show notes as another place to hear more from Palmer.
Tony Grafton's book on Annius of Viterbo - other - Cited as further reading on Annius of Viterbo, the Renaissance forger who faked ancient texts and archaeological digs to make his own historical theories seem authoritative.

Companies

Cursor - Sponsor; Dwarkesh describes it recovering a corrupted podcast video file and says his team now uses it for everyday tasks beyond coding.
Jane Street - Sponsor; segment walks through a retired interview puzzle (recovering a corrupted image dataset) to illustrate what its interview process is actually like.
Crusoe - Sponsor; described as industrializing AI datacenter buildout at a Colorado factory, including running compute on solar and used EV batteries.

Techniques and frameworks

Evaluating deeds by probable outcome, not just final result - Palmer's reading of Machiavelli's utilitarianism: he judges actions not by what actually happened but by what the most probable outcome was before fortune intervened, which is why he defends the fallen Cesare Borgia as having 'done everything right.'
Couching original ideas as commentary on antiquity - The dominant Renaissance publishing convention: scholars presented radical original thought as commentary on Livy, Plato, or Aristotle because 'original' ideas were considered unfashionable and less credible than anything traceable to the ancients.
Patronage-mediated justice - The period's normal trial outcome: a patron intervenes on a defendant's behalf and the harsh sentence on the books (often death) is commuted to a fine; falling outside a patronage network, as happened to Giordano Bruno's second trial, is what actually produces a capital sentence.
Neutral justice as a conquest strategy - Cesare Borgia's playbook: massacre the ruling family of a conquered city, then implement genuinely impartial justice as an outsider with no local factional stake, which made him popular despite the massacre because ordinary people had never experienced unbiased courts before.
Inquisition pre-publication licensing as proto-copyright - The Church's post-1515 requirement that all books be approved before printing, which incidentally created the first monopoly printing licenses; England's early copyright law was a direct imitation of this Inquisition licensing system, later stripped of its censorship function.

Summary

Dwarkesh Patel's second conversation with Ada Palmer (science fiction author, composer, and historian at the University of Chicago) narrows from their earlier Renaissance-wide discussion to a single, deceptively simple question: who was Machiavelli actually writing for, and why does his reputation bear so little resemblance to his own life? Palmer's answer starts with the exile: after the Medici retook Florence in 1513 and wrongly suspected Machiavelli of plotting against them, they tortured and banished him to a backwater with no political contacts and nothing to do. Rather than take one of the many lucrative jobs available to a skilled diplomat elsewhere in Europe, Machiavelli chose to write The Prince as a kind of job application, dedicated to the very Medici who had tortured him, and shared it with almost no one else. Palmer reads this as evidence that Machiavelli, far from the self-serving schemer his name evokes, was one of history's most extreme patriots, willing to sacrifice fame, income, and family life rather than let his political insights benefit any country but Florence.

Much of the middle of the episode sets the historical stage: Italy's chronic instability came from two compounding sources, city-states whose governments had lost the "thread of continuity" needed for legitimacy, and an elective papacy whose roughly decade-long turnover meant each new pope was often chosen by a coalition of his predecessor's enemies. Against that backdrop, Palmer walks through Machiavelli's firsthand, dangerous diplomatic proximity to Cesare Borgia, including the massacre at Senigallia and the months his family spent not knowing whether he had survived it. She uses Borgia to make Palmer's central correction to the "ends justify the means" reading of Machiavelli: he cared enormously about which means were used, because the same act (breaking an oath, betraying an ally) can be politically survivable or fatal depending on what kind of power base absorbs it. Borgia's brutal conquests, paradoxically, made him popular because his outside administrators delivered the region's first genuinely neutral justice, unmediated by the patronage networks that had run everything from criminal trials to hotel stays for generations.

The conversation turns to why so much surplus flowed into Renaissance art and scholarship despite constant warfare: patronage of culture functioned as cheaper diplomacy than standing armies, and books, like art, doubled as prestige objects. This sets up a broader point about intellectual culture: original ideas were unfashionable in this period, so scholars packaged genuinely novel thought as commentary on Livy, Plato, or Aristotle, which is why Machiavelli's real prestige project was Discourses on Livy rather than the unusually "original" Prince. Palmer traces how this convention, combined with the Church's post-1515 requirement that every book be pre-approved before printing, accidentally produced the first version of copyright: the Inquisition's licensing records became the proof a printer needed to claim a monopoly, a system England later imitated and eventually stripped of its censorship function.

The episode closes on reception history and myth-making. The Prince circulated only within Machiavelli's inner circle during his life, was published for family prestige after his death, banned in a general wave of Counter-Reformation censorship, and then surged in relevance twice: first after Hobbes's Leviathan sent readers hunting through Machiavelli for arguments to refute Hobbes, and again in the 19th century when Enlightenment-era interest in separating church from state, and competing nationalist bids for a "first modern man," made his areligious analysis of politics newly valuable. Palmer connects this to a recurring pattern where an author splits into two separate cultural entities: the real person and a villainous archetype (Machiavelli into "Old Nick," Hobbes into the "Beast of Malmesbury," Spinoza into the arch-heretic), each living on independently of what the person actually wrote or did.

Throughout, Palmer grounds abstract claims in vivid primary-source detail: Lorenzo de' Medici's passive-aggressive letter of oath to a hostile new pope, Ficino's sincere but mistaken belief that his own radical cosmology was secretly coded in Plato, and Machiavelli's own panicked letters about a pirated, typo-ridden edition of his work with no legal recourse available. The throughline is that Machiavelli's modern reputation as a self-serving cynic is close to the opposite of the historical record: a man who gave up wealth, safety, and the ability to see his own wife in order to keep serving a country that had tortured him.

Notable Quotes

"That's the republic's only hope. That's Machiavelli's job: to stand next to the scariest man who has lived in Europe since Frederick Barbarossa and whisper constantly in his ear, 'The Florentine Republic will support you and will give your grace anything you ask. Just eat us last.'" - Ada Palmer

"You look at actual Roman history, and it's incredibly fucked up." - Dwarkesh Patel

"He would rather serve nothing and no one than give an hour of his time to advancing anything that is not Florence." - Ada Palmer

"If you have The Prince on your shelf, read it and remember it was written by somebody who was willing to give up anything to serve his country, and you'll see a very different Machiavelli come through." - Ada Palmer