Based on the analysis of Machiavelli’s political writings such as “Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius”, “The Prince” and “The History of Florence”, the article shows that attempts made repeatedly over the past few decades by such scholars as Tony Negri, John McCormick, Agnes Heller, Claude Lefort and Pierre Manent to declare Machiavelli an admirer of radical democracy, or the prophet of modern democratic politics and even of the “plebeian principle” in politics find neither conceptual, nor terminological confirmation in the works of the Florentine thinker. It is noted that one of the central places in Machiavelli’s political thinking is occupied by the idea of a mixed rule, borrowed from the classical political tradition and, therefore, predominantly of pre-modern origin. In their turn, attempts to make Machiavelli a supporter of radical democracy of the modern style are considered in the article as presenting the political legacy of the great Florentine in a strongly distorted form and dictated primarily by the desire of a number of modern authors to isolate his political ideas and concepts from the historical context of their formation and development, placing them in an intellectual and cultural environment alien to them in order to give them topical political and polemical connotations.