hiavelli, who wanted to appear a worthy advisor for established princes, conquerors, as well as Republican city polities. It must be mentioned, however, like Quentin Skinner does, that Machiavelli’s sympathies were clearly on the Republican side, growing from the intellectual grounds of the Renaissance humanist Florentine Republic, which tried to preserve its liberty against the Emperor, the Pope, the little empire of the Duchy of Milan, as well as the internal aspirations of the Medici to usurp power in Florence. Actually they finally did it, time after time, throwing Machiavelli out of his position, even though he wrote "Il Principe" in order to attract the interest of the new regime to hire him as an advisor.One-sided admirers of Machiavelli’s ideas tend to emphasise those ideas that seem to suggest that the ends always justify the means, and that a statesman’s virt is important only to appear as possessing all the classical and cardinal virtues of the Antiquity and the Christianity, whereas true loyalty to these virtues would only harm the interests of a ruler or a state. However fervently Machiavelli attacks against the ancient and Christian virtues and appears cynical, he still is a thoroughly romantic political thinker. So, as a critical admirer of Machiavelli’s ideas, I want to draw your attention to some important and often ignored features of Machiavelli’s thinking, best implied in his "Discorsi".First, Machiavelli does not hide his basic favour for the Republican liberty that was the main concern of his predecessors, the Florentine humanists. Secondly, he did not suggest that virtues should be forgotten – quite the contrary, he always recommended ‘good’, whenever it was not absolutely necessary to use means like violence and atrocity. Third, Machiavelli very well realised the importance of legitimacy by consent to be the key to virtuous policy and to the preservation of a polity...
