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Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) has always had an ambiguous place in the western canon. The political philosopher Leo Strauss memorably described him as a “teacher of evil”, an assessment in harmony with the popular view that has made his name a shorthand for unscrupulous calculation. And yet Machiavelli has also been seen by scholars in the tradition of JGA Pocock as a crucial theoretician of classical republicanism – one who, particularly in his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, greatly influenced the “mixed regime” of separated powers that underlies the American constitution