The Prince

Overview

The Prince is twenty-six chapters long and several of them run barely a page. Machiavelli wrote it fast, in 1513, on a farm outside Florence, after the Medici came back to power, had him arrested and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy, and then let him go into unemployment. He wanted work. The dedication offers Lorenzo de’ Medici the only asset a dismissed diplomat has, which is knowledge of how states are really taken and kept, gathered from fifteen years of watching rulers at close range and from reading Livy at night.

The structure is that of a manual. The first eleven chapters classify states and the routes by which men come to govern them: inheritance, conquest, crime, the favour of fellow citizens, the Church. Chapters 12 through 14 handle armies, and insist that a ruler who hires his fighting out has already lost his state. Chapters 15 through 23 are the notorious ones, on the prince’s own conduct. The last three turn to Italy, to luck, and to a call for someone to drive the foreign armies out.

The tone is what unsettles readers. Machiavelli nowhere claims that cruelty is admirable or that promises do not matter. He claims that a ruler who keeps faith among men who break it will be destroyed by men who break it, and then he refuses to apologise for the observation.

The argument

Start with the premise buried in chapter 15. Other writers, Machiavelli says, have imagined princes and republics that never existed. He will describe things as they are. Since most men are not good, a ruler who insists on being good in every case will be ruined by those who are not. Therefore the prince needs a second competence alongside the ordinary virtues: knowing when to set them aside, and doing it without sentiment or self-deception.

From that premise the middle chapters follow like arithmetic. Generosity, practised openly, exhausts the treasury and ends in the taxes that make a ruler hated, so a reputation for meanness is cheaper. Cruelty used once, thoroughly, at the start, settles a state; cruelty dribbled out over years keeps the wound open. Cesare Borgia is the recurring example, praised not for succeeding, because he failed, but for playing a strong hand well and losing only to an accident nobody could plan for, his father’s death at the wrong moment.

Chapter 18 is the sharpest. A prince should appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious and upright, and should actually be all of these when he can afford to be. But he must be ready to become the opposite, because the world judges by results and by appearances, and both can be managed. This is not a licence for random wickedness. Machiavelli thinks gratuitous cruelty is stupid, since it produces hatred without producing security, and hatred is the thing most likely to kill a prince.

Underneath sits a theory of history. Circumstances change, and men do not change with them; the ruler who prospered in quiet times is destroyed when the times turn violent. Fortune rules about half of human affairs. The other half belongs to preparation, boldness and the willingness to act before you are forced to. Chapter 26 then drops the analytic voice entirely and shouts. Italy lies leaderless and overrun, and Machiavelli wants a prince, any prince, to pick up the argument of the previous twenty-five chapters and use it.

How to read it

Read chapters 15 to 19 first if you only have an hour, then go back to the beginning. Do not skip chapters 12 to 14 on the military question, even though they look technical; Machiavelli’s whole position rests on the claim that a state armed by its own citizens behaves differently from one defended by contractors.

Watch the examples. He moves constantly between ancient Rome and the Italian politics of his own lifetime, and the modern cases are the ones he saw himself. Notice how often a story that seems to prove his rule also records a failure.

Two misreadings to avoid. The first is that Machiavelli is teaching evil. He is teaching what he takes to be necessity, and he is candid that necessity sometimes requires acts he does not call good. The second, opposite misreading is that the book is satire, a trap set for tyrants. That reading has a long history, and it gets support from the Discourses on Livy, where the same author writes as a committed republican. Hold both books in view rather than choosing one.

On translation: Mansfield keeps Machiavelli’s key words consistent, so that virtù, stato and fortuna stay visible as terms of art instead of dissolving into ordinary English. Bondanella reads more smoothly if you want speed.

Questions it raises

• Is Machiavelli describing how politics works, or recommending how it should be conducted? Does the distinction hold up across the whole book?
• Can a ruler acquire the habit of doing wrong when necessary without losing the judgement that tells him when it is necessary?
• If the same author wrote The Prince and the republican Discourses, what does he actually believe about who should govern?
• Machiavelli says a prince should be feared but not hated. Is that line stable in practice, or does it collapse under pressure?
• What does chapter 26 want? Is the patriotic appeal the point of the book or an advertisement attached to it?
• If Machiavelli is right about human nature, what is left of the claim that a state can be just?