All too often, the modern political sciences attribute the development of a purely pragmatic, non-idealistic state theory to Machiavelli, perhaps with some fl eeting allusions to the importance of Plato, Aristotle or Polybius. However, a closer examination of our sources shows that many other civilisations have developed similar approaches, generally in periods experiencing political and social transformations not dissimilar to the complex evolutions of the European 16th century. In this paper, we will try to critically compare a series of authors in order to demonstrate the interest of a cross-cultural approach to the subject of state-theory, namely Sūn Zǐ, Kauṭilya, Aineias Taktikos and Machiavelli.