Machiavelli invented multiparty democracy, and almost nobody noticed for a century

Ada Palmer points to something easy to miss about Machiavelli: his most radical contribution was not cynicism but pluralism. He was, Palmer argues, the first thinker in the European tradition to propose that multiple competing political parties could coexist productively inside a single state, channeling social tension through electoral competition rather than violence. That idea now reads as obvious. In his own moment it was not.

Machiavelli is the first person that we have ever in the European tradition to suggest that it could be viable for there to be more than one political party in a state at the same time, and that they would compete against each other and vent the society's tension through competition and vie to try to dominate an election and then the next one. Ada Palmer

The reception history adds another layer. “The Prince” did not become widely read during or shortly after Machiavelli’s lifetime. Palmer places his rise to cultural prominence only in the aftermath of the publication of Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” which is to say the ideas arrived in the popular imagination well after their author was gone.

What traveled in his place was a caricature. The word “Machiavellian” came to mean self-serving calculation, which Palmer calls “weirdly ironic,” given that she reads him as one of the most selfless figures in the historical record. His framework for evaluating leaders compounds the point: he judged rulers not by outcomes but by what the most probable result was before luck intervened, a distinction meant to hold power accountable rather than excuse it. The slander, it turns out, is almost perfectly backward.