Just a few quick pointers as to why Machiavelli is ENTP (and not INTJ):

It appears that a common argument for Machiavelli for INTJ would be that he despised the public in the wanton manner that some of the INTJs listed on our site tend to (Heraclitus, Bobby Fischer, H.L. Mencken etc.). A viewpoint that is again based on a popular reading (or misreading) of Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, whereby people come away with an impression like the following:

What he was saying was that people are so short-sighted and stupid that to the general public, the ends will justify the means.

This is not at all correct. You can’t really use ‘The Prince’ as a source for Machiavelli’s actual opinions (and even if you could, actual opinions are not as indicative of type as the way those opinions are presented, which is far more indicative of the subject’s cognitive functions).

Rather, Machiavelli was a republican and regarded monarchies as an inferior form of government. ‘The Prince’ was written as a job application after the Medicis returned to Florence. To type Machiavelli, therefore, you should not read ‘The Prince’, but his ‘Discourses’ wherein he gives much more of his personality and his true opinions away. Opinions such as:

* Elite rule is bad (most INTJs of the time would have it the other way around)
* Disorder and conflict is a political good as it creates dynamism in the state (more Ne-Ti than Ni-Te)
* History reveals universal patterns which should steer our political decisions (more Ne-Ti than Ni-Te)
* No one man can be a genius in every role, so the state should change generals and politicians rapidly so as to also change strategies and policies. (A thought that in the a priori is wholly foreign to a dominant introverted perciever [I--J] and much more at home with a dominant extroverted perciever [E--P].)

But even so, we said that the manner is more indicative of type than the matter. So:

* Nietzsche: “But how could the German language [ever] imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his ‘The Prince’ makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he presents – long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts, and a tempo of the gallop, and of the best, wantonest humor.”

* Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and ‘gives the whole show away.’”

* The man himself was known to change faces and personalities according to whom he was with.

* He was an energetic infantry captain before being tortured by the Medicis at which point he became more morose and scholarly.