There is an older way, though, in which history and theory have worked together. Machiavelli hints at it in the dedicatory letter to The Prince, where he values nothing so much “as the knowledge of the actions of great men, learned by me from long experience with modern things and a continuous reading of ancient ones.” This he has distilled into “one small volume,” meant to give “you [his patron Lorenzo de’ Medici] the capacity to be able to understand in a very short time all that I [Machiavelli] have learned and understood in so many years and with so many hardships and dangers for
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