Born around 1532 in Vienne, France, Innocent Gentillet was a Huguenot lawyer who fled to Geneva after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. In 1576, he published Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner & maintenir en paix un Royaume, ou autre Principauté, Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin, popularly known as Anti-Machiavel. Despite a papal ban in 1605, Anti-Machiavel went through twenty-four editions in French, Latin, English, German, and Dutch; it was read and used by Montaigne and Shakespeare. This edition presents Simon Patericke’s 1602 English translation, revised for modern spelling and grammar, and explores Anti-Machiavel’s connections with other works of the period.

Machiavelli's name came to evoke unscrupulous acts of the sort he advised most famously in his work, The Prince. He claimed that his experience and reading of history showed him that politics have always been played with deception, treachery, and crime.

Born around 1532 in Vienne, France, Innocent Gentillet was a Huguenot lawyer who fled to Geneva after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. In 1576, he published Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner & maintenir en paix un Royaume, ou autre Principauté, Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin, popularly known as Anti-Machiavel. Despite a papal ban in 1605, Anti-Machiavel went through twenty-four editions in French, Latin, English, German, and Dutch; it was read and used by Montaigne and Shakespeare. This edition presents Simon Patericke’s 1602 English translation, revised for modern spelling and grammar, and explores Anti-Machiavel’s connections with other works of the period.

Anti-Machiavel is an 18th-century essay by Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, consisting of a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal of The Prince, the 16th-century book by Niccolo Machiavelli, and Machiavellianism in general. It was first published in September 1740, a few months after Frederick became king.

The first modern English edition of diverse Enlightenment-era writings by Prussian monarch Frederick the Great Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786), best known as Frederick the Great, was a prolific writer of philosophical discourses, poems, epics, satires, and more, while maintaining extensive correspondence with prominent intellectuals, Voltaire among them. This edition of selected writings, the first to make a wide range of Frederick’s most important ideas available to a modern English readership, moves beyond traditional attempts to see his work only in light of his political aims. In these pages, we can finally appreciate Frederick’s influential contributions to the European Enlightenment—and his unusual role as a monarch who was also a published author. In addition to Frederick’s major opus, the Anti-Machiavel, the works presented here include essays, prefaces, reviews, and dialogues. The subjects discussed run the gamut from ethics to religion to political theory. Accompanied by critical annotations, the texts show that we can understand Frederick’s views of kingship and the state only if we engage with a broad spectrum of his thought, including his attitudes toward morality and self-love. By contextualizing his arguments and impact on Enlightenment beliefs, this volume considers how we can reconcile Frederick’s innovative public musings with his absolutist rule. Avi Lifschitz provides a robust and detailed introduction that discusses Frederick’s life and work against the backdrop of eighteenth-century history and politics. With its unparalleled scope and cross-disciplinary appeal, Frederick the Great’s Philosophical Writings firmly establishes one monarch’s multifaceted relevance for generations of readers and scholars to come.