The Prince

Machiavelli had served the Florentine republic for fourteen years, was dismissed when the Medici returned, was imprisoned and tortured, and wrote this in exile while attempting to regain employment.

He wrote it in 1513 and it was printed in 1532, five years after his death. The gap matters: it was composed as a private document seeking patronage and published into a very different situation.

Composed in 1513 as a bid for employment, printed in 1532 after his death, into a different world entirely.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Books advising rulers were a well-established genre, and they instructed princes to be just, merciful, honest and pious.

Machiavelli's opening move is to announce that he will describe how things are rather than how they ought to be, and that a ruler who acts well among those who are not will be destroyed. The break is not cynicism for its own sake; it is a claim about what political advice is for.

His two central terms. Fortuna is circumstance, chance, the situation a ruler is handed. Virtù is not virtue but capacity — skill, energy, decisiveness, the ability to act well in the moment available.

His image of fortune as a river that can be channelled by embankments built in advance is the practical version: preparation converts chance from a disaster into a condition. His subsequent image of fortune as a woman to be mastered is notorious and is quoted far more often than the river.

His most famous proposition, and the most frequently truncated. His actual claim is that it is best to be both, that this is difficult, and that if one must be chosen, fear is more reliable because it depends on the ruler rather than on the subject's disposition.

The condition attached is always omitted: the ruler must avoid being hated, which he says comes chiefly from seizing property and from interfering with people's women. Fear without hatred is a much narrower prescription than the quotation suggests.

His analysis in chapter eight: cruelty is well used when it is done all at once, from necessity, and not persisted in; badly used when it grows over time.

This is the passage most resistant to any redemptive reading. He is offering technical advice about the administration of violence, and the efficiency of the analysis is what makes it disturbing rather than the brutality of the conclusion.

His argument that a ruler need not have the qualities commonly praised but must appear to have them, and that keeping faith is unwise when the reasons for it have disappeared.

His image of the prince as both lion and fox — force and cunning, since the lion cannot detect traps and the fox cannot fight wolves — is the compressed statement of the whole method.

The lion cannot see traps and the fox cannot fight wolves. A ruler is advised to be both.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The book ends with an impassioned call for a prince to unify Italy and expel the foreign powers occupying it, in a register entirely different from the preceding chapters.

Whether this is sincere patriotism, rhetorical flourish, or a bid for Medici favour is disputed. Readers who take it as sincere read the whole book differently from those who do not.

The strongest complication in reading him: Machiavelli's longer and more considered work, the *Discourses on Livy*, is a sustained argument for republican government, popular participation and the value of political conflict.

That the same author wrote both is the central puzzle of Machiavelli scholarship. Rousseau's reading — that *The Prince* is a book for republicans disguised as a book for princes, exposing the methods of tyranny — is one influential answer among several.

Beyond its specific advice, it opened a permanent question: whether political action is governed by the same moral rules as private conduct, and what follows if it is not.

Every subsequent treatment of dirty hands in politics, of realism in international relations, and of the ethics of office descends from the problem this book put on the table.

Short enough to read in an evening, and worth reading whole rather than in quotation, since almost every famous line has a condition attached that the quotation removes.

It is best read alongside the *Discourses*, which is the only way to see what the author thought when he was not writing a job application to a Medici.