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This book challenges public perceptions of Niccolo Machiavelli and the author, contrary to popular opinion, positions Machiavelli as a good man and a good citizen within the Republic of Florence who served society with honesty and devotion. The author offers insight into this controversial figure and suggests that Machiavelli's work offers current society a powerful vision of republican liberty and citizenship that might inspire us again, as it has in the past, in the struggle for emancipation from political domination and corruption.

For it is the duty of a good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times and of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven may be able to work it." This description of his own intellectual and political endeavor, which Machiavelli puts in the preface to Book II of his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, serves as the basis for the author's interpretation of him as a good teacher of republican liberty. Machiavelli's works challenge the very foundations of anti-Machiavellianism, whose proponents claim that he was an evil man, cynical, misogynistic, irreligious, anti-Christian, lacking moral principles, ready to serve any master to gain power and prestige. Such proponents have written that he was also a teacher of evil, a conservative, a reactionary, a nationalist, a champion of tyranny, a proponent of imperial domination, and an advocate of the idea that political action is completely independent of moral principles, a radical democrat, and a populist. The author, contrary to popular opinion, positions Machiavelli as a good man and a good citizen who served the Republic of Florence with honesty and devotion, and claims that his works offer a powerful vision of republican liberty and citizenship that might inspire us again, as it has in the past, in the struggle for emancipation from political domination and corruption.