Why was Machiavelli defamed ?

Machiavelli was, essentially, a follower of the great Leonardo da Vinci who had been driven out of Italy, into a place of relative safety, Amboise, in France. Machiavelli had been a middle-ranking, but important official of the Republic of Florence, who was virtually imprisoned and crippled in his freedom by those victorious forces which had crushed the Republic of Florence. He remained such a republican throughout the remainder of his life, and earned the respect, as by all the best professional officer cadres of the modern world, until the period of the Vietnam war, a Machiavelli who has been one of the founders of modern strategy, always emphasizing the republican cause in seeking arts for dealing with the pestilence of oligarchy and oligarchism polluting all of Europe during his own part of the 1492-1648 religious warfare.

Simply said, the oligarchical parties of Europe feared the infectious power of competence expressed by Machiavelli’s mind, and hated him on that account. Chiefly, the oligarchically inclined powers of the modern world, then as now, especially the financial oligarchy, still fear nothing as much as the existence of the leaders in any nation who admire a constitution which converges on the intention of our own republican form of Federal Constitution.

The standpoint of our President Franklin Roosevelt, or Abraham Lincoln before him, is what the oligarchs of the world, including our Wall Street brigands and vaulted Bostonians, hate and fear with a brutishly mouth-frothing rage.

Such types as those still today, would also hate Machiavelli to the extent that they actually sensed the specific efficiency of his work.