19 The contradictions were noted very early. Bodin's Republic appeared in 1576, and there he says: 'Machiavel s'est bien fort méconté, de dire que l'estat populaire est le meilleur; et néanmoins ayant oublié sa première opinion, il a tenu en un autre lieu, que pour restituer l'Italie en sa liberté, il faut qu'il n'y ait qu'un prince; et de fait, il s'est efforcé de former un estat le plus tyrannique du monde; et en autre lieu il confesse que l'estat de Venise est le plus beau de tous, lequel est une pure aristocratie, s'il en fut oncques: tellement qu'il ne scait à quoi se tenir (vi. ch. 4).
The argument that the Prince and Discourses are really one work is best stated by Nourrisson, ch. viii. 137-144.
'The modern study of politics, however, begins with Machiavelli. Not that he made any definite or permanent contribution to political theory which can be laid hold of as a principle fertile of new consequence. His works are more concerned with the details of statecraft than with the analysis of the state. But we find in him, for the first time since Aristotle, the pure, passionless curiosity of the man of science.—Sir Frederick Pollock in the History of the Science of Politics, ch. ii.
Tocqueville says: 'I have been reading Machiavelli's History of Florence very attentively. The Machiavel of the history is to me the Machiavel of the Prince. I do not conceive how the reading of the first can leave the least doubt as to the author of the second. In his history he sometimes praises great and fine actions, but we see that it is with him only an affair of imagination. The bottom of his thought is that all actions are indifferent in themselves, and must be judged by the skill and the success that they exhibit. For him the world is a great arena from which God is absent, where conscience has nothing to do with it, and where everybody gets on with things as best he can.'—Tocqueville, Correspond. i. 326-7.
As for Tocqueville, when he came to handle public business in difficult times, some notions with a slightly Machiavellian flavour began to lodge in his mind. For instance: 'As if you could ever satisfy men, by only busying yourself with their general good, without taking account of their vanity and of their private and personal interests.'—Souvenirs, p. 343.
'The versatility of men, and the vanity of these great words of patriotism and right with which the small passions cover themselves.'—Ib. 347.
