Key Ideas
The “effectual truth” of politics over imagined ideals.
Better feared than loved, but never hated.
The lion and the fox.
Virtù can master half of fortune.
Rely on your own arms, not mercenaries.
Cesare Borgia as the model of a new prince.
Written in 1513 and circulated in manuscript, The Prince was published in 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death. Its first chapters classify principalities (hereditary, new, mixed, ecclesiastical) and how they are acquired — by one’s own arms and virtù, by others’ arms and fortune, by crime, by the favour of fellow citizens. The central chapters (15–23) are the notorious advice on conduct; the last (26) is an impassioned exhortation to free Italy from the “barbarians” — French and Spanish — quoting Petrarch.
See Niccolò Machiavelli.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Is The Prince a manual for tyrants or a warning to the people?
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsKauṭilya (Cāṇakya)
The Brahmin strategist who, by tradition, made Candragupta Maurya emperor and wrote the Arthaśāstra — the ancient world’s most comprehensive treatise on statecraft, economics, law, diplomacy, espionage and war. India’s Machiavelli, two thousand years before Machiavelli.
The Pañcatantra
The ancient Indian book of animal fables written to teach princes the art of practical wisdom (nīti) — the jackals Karaṭaka and Damanaka, the monkey and the crocodile, the lion and the hare — translated into more languages than almost any book except the Bible.
Edmund
Gloucester’s illegitimate son — the brilliant, charming, self-made villain of King Lear, who worships Nature as amoral force and scorns “the plague of custom”.
The Kāmasūtra
Vātsyāyana’s treatise on kāma — pleasure, love and desire — as one of the three legitimate aims of life. Far more than a sex manual, it is a handbook of urban culture, courtship, marriage, friendship and the arts of living well.
The Tirukkuṟaḷ
Tiruvaḷḷuvar’s 1,330 couplets in 133 chapters on virtue (aṟam), wealth and statecraft (poruḷ), and love (inbam) — a secular, universal ethic, compact and witty, the “Tamil Veda” and one of the most translated books of India.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Genevan philosopher of nature, freedom and feeling — “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” — whose Social Contract inspired revolutionaries and whose Confessions invented modern autobiography.