Machiavelli, the New World and the Republic - I

And in Florence, the previous virtues of the earlier Florentine republic are being extinguished by the growing power of the aristocracy under the rule of the Medici Family. [...] Whence America? I sing of the Republic! Perhaps of all of the inventions to spring forth from the genius of man’s mind – the art, the music, the scientific achievements – it is the republic that is mankind’s greatest creation. [...] Its genesis came earlier, in the idea of a "commonwealth," grounded in a commitment to the Public Good, defined in the works of Nicholas of Cusa at the time of the Council of Florence. [...] One of the most powerful passages from that work is the in- depth discussion of the Roman citizen- soldier Cincinnatus, and Machiavelli forcefully makes the point that one of the leading causes for the destruction of the Roman Republic was the gradual replacement of citizen-soldiers with hired mercenaries. [...] Two of the primary themes of the Discourses, which are woven throughout the work, are the danger to freedom emanating from the oligarchy, and the fatal problem arising from a moral corruption of the population.