The paper focuses on the reception of Machiavelli’s virtue of the prince in Hegel’s early political thought. The first part of the essay reconstructs the significance of Machiavelli’s conception of the virtue of the prince as absolute power for the foundation of a new kind of political philosophy. The second part contextualizes the reception of Machiavelli’s ideas in the Enlightenment, while the third part examines the centrality of Machiavelli in Hegel’s German Constitution. The last part of the paper shows how Machiavelli’s thought was instrumental in the Hegelian perspective for the criticism against the liberal concept of “State” and against Rousseau’s individualistic standpoint. Finally the paper examines how Hegel uses Machiavelli’s notion of virtue of the prince to solve the problem of the relation between the ethical and the political sphere.
