There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don’t know where they came from.

Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception.

I don’t know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word “Machiavellian” means. It’s someone who’s cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, “the teacher of evil.”

But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work?

Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like The Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli’s most famous work, The Prince.

For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it’s actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts.

In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government).

I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he’s very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What’s incomplete or wrong about that view?

What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgements into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn’t think is something we can access as humans.

If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we’ve got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that........

© Vox