caa a22 4500 388079401 CHVBK 20180307125209.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199903 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/2585765 doi S0003055400216663 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/2585765 Macfarland Joseph C. St. John's College Machiavelli's Imagination of Excellent Men: An Appraisal of the Lives of Cosimo de' Medici and Castruccio Castracani [Elektronische Daten] [Joseph C. Macfarland] For the education of princes Machiavelli recommends the true lives of "excellent men” rather than the "imagination” of how one should live, yet, the lives Machiavelli wrote tell a different story. While his relatively accurate life of Cosimo de' Medici offers lessons in deceit and faithlessness, it is a life to be admired rather than imitated. By contrast, the Life of Castruccio Castracani is worthy of imitation, as it teaches the use of force as well as fraud, but it is mostly the product of an imagination enriched by ancient histories. Machiavelli taught the "effectual truth” by sketching the imaginary life of a modern prince because contemporaries would not imitate an ancient one. Moreover, the failure of even the imaginary Castruccio to master fortune indicates that the man of deeds needs the author's ability to imagine a particular life as an education for others. Copyright © American Political Science Association 1999 American Political Science Review Cambridge University Press 93/1(1999-03), 133-146 0003-0554 93:1<133 1999 93 PSR https://doi.org/10.2307/2585765 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/2585765 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Macfarland Joseph C. St. John's College NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- American Political Science Review Cambridge University Press 93/1(1999-03), 133-146 0003-0554 93:1<133 1999 93 PSR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge