The Prince

"A prince must have no other object or thought in mind than war, and how to make it" [for it is by war that the fortunes of the city are attained, maintained, or lost].
Machiavelli is often misapprehended as advocating amorality. In fact he's the first to have recognized and written that to secure a greater good certain evils are inevitable, and that these evils rather than obstacles can be turned to the advantage of a cunning leader. Many will read Machiavelli and conclude he is nothing but force and fraud, which is not at all the case. He sought to provide the arms and ideas needed for pacifying Italy and ending it of constant internecine strife. He failed but is still worth reading. Much of his thinking is entirely correct, notably show more his understanding of war.
"Is it better to be loved or feared?" "Men love as they please but fear as the prince wills". But the best is to be loved by one's allies, and feared by one's enemies. A great leader must know whom to inspire and whom to terrify, and when to do of those theatrical acts.
Definitely worth reading and rereading since so many misunderstand his work. show less

Given Machiavelli's seemingly genuine Republican beliefs, The Prince is a highly ambiguous read. I tend to side with those who proffer that this is irony or a parody. To pepper a text about holding power with suggestions said in the very same tone, designed to provide openings for an authoritarian to be haplessly overthrown, makes the book richer. Especially, as it was written in the vernacular. As I stated earlier, it's fascinating and ambiguous. Glad I finally got to it.

Does Machiavelli deserve his sinister reputation? Is he advocating evil in this book? Or only describing it? His focus is not on defending, but on acquiring and governing; that is, on imperial conquest and dominance over others. This book is about aggression. He claims that human conditions do not permit princes to be good, and he is right about that. They never will. But do human conditions compel people to become princes? In seizing a state, he says, cruelty is necessary. No doubt this is true, but is seizing a state necessary? Is it moral?

Machiavelli's model prince was Cesare Borgia, a ruthless imperialist, mass murderer, and rapist. Machiavelli admired him for his power, then criticized him when he lost his power. He praises King show more Ferdinand of Spain for his "pious cruelty," calling it an "admirable example."

Yes, Machiavelli deserves his sinister reputation. He worshipped power, believing it to be beyond good and evil. This book is a portrayal of statecraft as it is practiced in the real world, but it is also a how-to book on gaining and maintaining dominance over others. It raises interesting issues, without necessarily resolving them. It can be useful as food for thought, but don't try this at home! show less

I know how this book is often taken, but there is a degree to which the moral ambiguity of Machiavelli’s advice does manage to align with a sustainable ethic in which the people ruled by a Prince are allowed to pursue their ends. To be sure, this ethic is not always keyed to a moral categorical but insofar as the interests of citizenry and the Prince are in accord, a stable ethic can emerge. It is a political ethic, if I am using the term correctly, that is prudent and expedient and that relies on a variety of means (some virtuous and some not) to achieve its goals without disturbing social and political equilibrium.

Among those means, the most interesting one is fear. It is frequently noted in the book that a ruled populace may be show more easily persuaded to accept a form of rule but that populace is not easily fixed to a regime of rule. And trying to achieve that fixity through love is not nearly as effective or as reliable as fear. Fear creates a space of uncertainty for shady and subtle maneuvering because fear can be decentralized and still be an effective means of control. There can be fear of a person’s specific wrath but also a more ambiguous “fear of …” which includes the things one can be protected from. In desiring to be protected from those fears people may be willing to submit a governed existence that is less equal but at least seems fair in the trade off.

Today we see a constant deployment of the “fear of …” strategy of securing and holding power. Sometimes and in some places this may be a tangible fear of a person or of a particular regime of control, but sometimes fear is mobilized as fear of economic loss, fear of disadvantage, fear of losing out, or the more diffuse fear of “other,” which is easily attached to beliefs, ways of life, and whole groups of people. The distributed presence and mobilization of fear seems to be a lesson captured in this book that has strongly persisted. show less

Highly inductive, applying a relatively narrow reading of classical (well, Roman) history to a narrower aspect of Italian history, written to persuade Lorenzo de Medici to hire its out-of-work courtier author, who was previously allied to the Borgias . A job application that has survived as a work of literature because, I suspect, it is so illuminating as to the politics of Italy during the Renaissance, and because of its cynical views on human nature - which are surely the author's own. And of course it was valued by several prominent authors who came after. Not a book that is wrong so much as it is highly specific: for those not attempting to run a small Italian republic in the sixteenth century, it is of lesser utility.

I read Clausewitz’s “On War” last year. Now that I’ve absorbed Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” I should be set to launch my campaign of conquest. I’ll be distributing favors to my friends (but not too many favors or too grand), exterminating my enemies (but surgically and briefly), cultivating the favor of the populace (but not antagonizing the nobles), and stacking the College of Cardinals with my men (but not blindly assuming they’ll elect a friendly pope).

The way I’ve phrased that makes it sound quaint, but Machiavelli feels startlingly relevant. He worked hard to understand why rulers succeed or fail, rather than waving his hands in the air and saying “great man” or “divine favor” or “fate.” Because he show more sought to comprehend the psychology of ruling when you don’t have the luxury of absolute power, and to distill that psychology into brief and workable guidelines, his work remains relevant half a millennium after publication.

One reason for this is surely that Machiavelli lived in what might have been an unparalleled historical nexus. I don’t know of any comparable clash of forces as existed in the Italian boot during Machiavelli’s lifetime. Within this narrow peninsula, every conceivable form of government existed, from republics to princedoms to theocratic states to imperial possessions. The kings of Spain and France contended with each other and with the German emperor and with the Pope-of-the-Year to control bits of Italy (always with a wary eye on the Turks) in a swirl of forged and broken and reforged alliances.

This cauldron of statecraft boiled over for decades in an atmosphere of rising science and literature, and Machiavelli took full advantage of his unique position in its center to examine and document the causes of both triumph and disaster for the aspiring prince. His roadmap to victory is readable, riveting, and timeless. You’ll have leisure to repent your neglect of it in the coming Pax Nathanica. show less

A fascinating piece of literature that's telling of both its time and its place but also conceivably of all times and all places as it discusses one of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition, that being of the need for leaders of the people and the need for said leaders to rely on certain precepts and truths to maintain their leadership.

What Machiavelli does is strip away the romanticism and the idealism behind those men and women who lead and gets down to the basest and most inelegant brass tacks of gaining and holding control over an empire in its nascent stages, its turbulent middle years, or even in its decline, and though this treatise predates the beginnings of realpolitik by 340 some odd years I couldn't help but show more see, at the very least, the germs and the basic genesis of those ideas being discussed here.

I've read that The Prince is similar to Dante's Divine Commedia in its use of the, at the time, vernacular Italian, not to mention its use of then contemporary Italian politicians and religious figures (the roles oftentimes bleeding into one another as was characteristic of the era and the various city states) to illustrate its various points and to give it a much more poignant sense of immediacy. But what got me most of all regarding how this work was stylized was the tone, at least in my translation, which read at times almost like a pre-unified Italy gossip rag. Don't get me wrong this oddly enough doesn't detract from the text at all. Far from it, it actually humanizes Machiavelli and grounds his points as coming from a very human mind and makes his overall discussion much more telling and insightful. Basically, Machiavelli, to me, isn't making this stuff up. He's come to some divisive but very well grounded conclusions about what leadership is versus how it's depicted. Is he always right? He himself admits that exceptions exist and that even with the lockstep of his ideas there exists the potential for flexibility, so, even when he's wrong it doesn't tear his argument(s) down.

Though I definitely wasn't knowledgeable of the lion's share of the Italian history I was never bored and Machiavelli's knowledge of several different nations histories(Italian, Roman, Greek, Persian, the list is very long) was especially gripping and handled like a real writer with not only an agenda based ax to grind but a definite flair for the theatrical. Speaking of theater, there is also an idea long discussed that The Prince is at heart a satire. Maybe I'm picking up a few loose threads here and there of the comedy but I definitely do see some funny scenes played out here. I don't think it's a satire so much as a treatise on human failings and the comedy of trying to control the uncontrollable, that no matter how hard you try, what method you use, and who you choose to emulate, you can still get screwed over...the comedy is no better exemplified then when Machiavelli compares fortune to woman that needs to be 'rode roughly' and controlled tightly. Whether intended or not, that's just damn funny.

All in all it's a great read and definitely worth the little time to get through it. It's not only an incredible historical piece but the points laid down are, if not applicable depending on your mindset and where you stand on the idealism vs. cynicism scale, incredible samples of food for thought and debate. show less