Niccolò Machiavelli is compared to Galileo for his vision of politics

Niccolò Machiavelli is a political thinker whose work inspired the term Machiavellianism. Erected as the Galileo of politics by Ernst Cassirer in 1946, he separates the study of political facts from moral judgments. This pragmatic approach had already been highlighted as early as 1605 by Francis Bacon, who considered that he described the real actions of leaders rather than their duties.