- Length
- 128 pagesSkinner and Price, The Prince, Cambridge, rev. ed. 2019
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Prince
Twenty-six short chapters that separated the question of how to hold power from the question of how to deserve it, and made their author's name a synonym for the separation. Machiavelli wrote it in a farmhouse outside Florence after being tortured and dismissed by the regime he was addressing it to.
- Date
- 1532
- Author
- Niccolò Machiavelli
- Region
- Florence
- Language
- Italian
- 1640 English, Edward Dacres First English version Attested
- 1908 English, W. K. Marriott Public domain Attested
- 2019 English, Skinner and Price Revised Cambridge edition; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Suppressed — Held back, banned or circulated privately before print
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Placed on the Index in 1559, denounced for four centuries as a manual for tyrants, and never out of print in any of them.
What the book says
A short book of advice to a ruler, written by an unemployed civil servant hoping to be given his job back. It classifies principalities by how they were acquired, examines what holds each kind together, and then turns to conduct. Here it breaks with everything written before it. The mirror-of-princes tradition told rulers to be generous, merciful, honest and pious; Machiavelli asks what actually happens to a ruler who is. Generosity practised openly exhausts the treasury and ends in taxes that make him hated. Mercy that lets disorder spread kills more people than a few exemplary severities. Being loved is desirable and being feared is reliable, because love is held by a bond men break when it suits them and fear by a dread of punishment that never fails. A ruler must know how to be good and must be prepared not to be, because he lives among people who are not, and a man who acts well in every respect among those who do not will come to ruin. The last chapters turn to fortune, which governs half of what happens, and to a call for someone to unite Italy and drive out the foreigners.
What it argues
That political advice must start from how people behave rather than from how they ought to, and that a ruler who does otherwise will lose everything including the ability to do good. This is not a recommendation of cruelty; Machiavelli is explicit that injuries should be done all at once and benefits distributed slowly, and that a ruler who is hated is finished. What he removes is the assumption that the virtues taught to private men transfer intact to a ruler. Keeping faith is admirable and a prince who keeps it when it destroys him has destroyed the state with himself. The book's word for the quality a ruler needs is not virtue in the moral sense but something closer to capacity - the skill to read a situation and act as it requires, including acting against one's own habits when fortune changes.
What it answered
The mirror-of-princes literature, an entire genre of advice books urging rulers to model themselves on ideals, and behind it the assumption that politics is a branch of ethics. He does not argue against that assumption; he simply proceeds without it, chapter by chapter, testing each conventional recommendation against what he had watched happen in twenty years of diplomacy. The effect of not arguing was to make the break look like cynicism rather than method.
What answered it
How to Make Our Ideas Clear 1878Frederick of Prussia, edited by Voltaire
Hundreds of refutations across four centuries, of which Frederick's is only the best known. But the more interesting responses accept the analysis: Hobbes builds on the same view of what people are like, Rousseau claimed the book was a satire whose real lesson is republican, and modern political science treats the separation of the descriptive from the normative as its founding move. The Discourses complicate every reading, since the same author there argues at length for republics, for popular participation and for the rule of law.
How it argues
By example, relentlessly. Almost every claim is supported by a case - Cesare Borgia's handling of the Romagna, Agathocles of Syracuse, Ferdinand of Aragon, the failures of Italian mercenary captains - and the examples do the arguing because the conclusions are ones no reader would accept if stated flat. The prose is fast, unornamented and cold, and the coldness is deliberate: the book is short precisely because it declines to make the customary noises. It is also, unmistakably, an application for a job.
The moment
Florence in 1513. The republic Machiavelli had served for fourteen years as second chancellor and diplomat had fallen, the Medici were back, and he had been dismissed, arrested on suspicion of conspiracy, tortured with the strappado and released into rural exile. He wrote The Prince within months, dedicated it to a Medici, and never got the post he wanted. The last chapter's appeal for a liberator of Italy is written by a man watching French and Spanish armies move across a peninsula of small states that could not resist them.
How it travelled
As a scandal that everyone read. Printed in 1532 with papal privilege, on the Index by 1559, translated across Europe, and denounced from pulpits and stages - the Elizabethan theatre made a stock villain out of the name. The denunciations spread the book. By the eighteenth century it was standard equipment for anyone thinking about statecraft, and by the twentieth its author had been claimed as the founder of political science, a republican theorist, a patriot and an ironist, sometimes by the same scholars.
The strongest objection
That the advice does not work, judged by its own standard. Machiavelli's method is to test recommendations against outcomes, and his central example, Cesare Borgia, lost everything within a year of his father's death - which Machiavelli attributes to bad luck, exactly the move he refuses to allow the moralists. The deeper charge is that a ruler who is known to be willing to break faith cannot be relied on by anyone, so the flexibility the book recommends destroys the political capital it is meant to preserve. Machiavelli half sees this, which is why he insists so hard on the appearance of virtue; but appearances are not sustainable in the conditions he describes.
Why read it
Because it takes two hours, and because reading it is nothing like reading about it. The book is more careful, more anxious and less confident than its reputation, and the last chapter is a piece of patriotic longing that sits oddly with everything before it. Read the Discourses afterwards if you want to know what Machiavelli actually thought about government, as opposed to about princes.
- First printed
- 1532
- First in English
- 1640
- Digitised
- Yes
Circulated in manuscript from 1513 and printed in 1532 with papal privilege, which was withdrawn when the work was placed on the Index. The Discourses on Livy, longer and republican in argument, were written in the same period and are essential to reading it.
Marriott's 1908 English is public domain. Skinner-Price, Mansfield and Bull are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live and contested. It is a standard text in political theory, its analysis of the gap between private and public morality is a live problem under the name of dirty hands, and the Cambridge school's reading of Machiavelli as a republican has substantially changed what the book is taken to mean.
On quoting this book
The Italian is public domain and Marriott's English is too, but the famous formulations circulate in modern in-copyright renderings that differ from his at the points that matter. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether it is a serious manual, a job application, a satire or a republican's warning has been argued since the sixteenth century, and Rousseau's satire reading is still defended. Its relation to the Discourses, written at the same time and arguing for republics, is the central puzzle. Whether the closing appeal for Italian unification is sincere or rhetorical is disputed. And how far Machiavelli intends a general theory rather than advice for one moment in one peninsula is a question the text does not settle.