Maurizio Viroli (Forlì, Italy,1952) Professor of Politics at  Princeton University. He is the author of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the 'Well-Ordered Society,' Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, (1988); From Politics to Reason of State. The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics (1250-1600 ) (1992), Cambridge University Press; For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Clarendon Press (1995); Machiavelli, Oxford, Oxford University (1998); Niccolò’s Smile, New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux; Republicanism, New York,  Farrar Straus and Giroux, and, with Norberto Bobbio, The Idea of the Republic, Cambridge, Polity Press (2003); Il Dio di Machiavelli e il problema morale dell’Italia, Bari-Rome, Laterza (2005). He has edited and written the Introduction of  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Transl. by Peter Bondanella (2005).With Gisela Bock and  Quentin Skinner he is the editor of Machiavelli and Republicanism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. He writes for ‘La Stampa’, Turin.