The Prince

Summary

The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones. The book opens with a taxonomy. States are republics or principalities; principalities are hereditary or new; new ones are won by one's own arms or another's, by ability (virtù) or by fortune. Chapters I to XI work through these cases: the ease of holding an inherited state, the troubles of annexing a province with a different language and customs, the reason Alexander's successors kept Darius's empire, the danger of conquering cities used to liberty. The heroes of self-made founding are Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus, who succeeded because they were armed, while the unarmed prophet Savonarola failed. Cesare Borgia is the model of a man raised by his father's fortune who used ability to keep what he was given, until illness and the election of Julius II undid him. Agathocles of Syracuse shows that power can be won by crime, though not glory. Chapters XII to XIV turn to arms. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; a prince must have his own troops and think of nothing but war. Chapters XV to XXIII form the notorious core. Machiavelli announces that he will follow the effectual truth of things rather than imagined republics, because a man who professes goodness in every respect will be ruined among so many who are not good. He weighs liberality against meanness, cruelty against clemency, and concludes that it is safer to be feared than loved, provided the prince avoids hatred by keeping his hands off his subjects' property and women. Faith should be kept only while it serves; the prince must be both fox and lion, and must appear merciful, faithful, humane, upright and religious even when he is not. He must avoid being despised, distrust fortresses, choose capable ministers and shun flatterers. The last three chapters explain why the Italian princes lost their states, assess fortune, which governs perhaps half of human affairs and can be dammed like a flooding river, and close with an exhortation to the Medici to free Italy from the barbarians, ending with lines from Petrarch. The book circulated in manuscript and was printed only in 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death.

Top Lessons

• The gap between how we live and how we ought to live

  Chapter XV announces a method: describe politics as it actually works, not as moralists imagine it. Machiavelli argues that a ruler who acts on private virtue in a world of bad actors destroys himself and the people who depend on him. The lesson is severe because it does not deny morality; it insists that good intentions are not a policy.

• Severity concentrated, kindness spread out

  Machiavelli distinguishes cruelty 'well used', done at one stroke and then stopped, from cruelty that grows over time. Injuries should be done all at once and benefits given little by little. Whatever one thinks of the ethics, it is a sharp piece of behavioural observation about how people experience loss and gain.

• Fortune can be channelled but not abolished

  Chapter XXV pictures fortune as a river in flood that cannot be stopped once it rises but can be contained by dykes built in calm weather. Human ability governs perhaps half of events. The practical counsel is preparation and adaptability, together with the bleak admission that temperament rarely changes as fast as the times.

• Appearance is a political resource

  Because most people judge by the eye and few by the hand, the prince must seem merciful, faithful and religious. Machiavelli treats reputation as something to be managed like an army. The book anticipates modern ideas about image, public relations and the distance between public persona and private conduct.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Prince is not a medical text, but it thinks in medical metaphors drawn from Renaissance practice. The state is a body that sickens; the ruler is a physician who must diagnose early, as with hectic (consumptive) fever, which is hard to detect at first and hard to cure later. Italy at the end is a wounded body with festering sores. For psychiatry readers the book is a sharp phenomenology of fear, hatred, contempt and trust in groups, and a classic case study in how threat shapes leadership behaviour. Machiavelli wrote it months after being tortured with the strappado, a biographical fact sometimes read into its unsentimental view of cruelty, though that remains interpretation. Cesare Borgia's collapse is attributed to a near-fatal illness in August 1503, when he and Alexander VI fell sick at the same moment, traditionally ascribed to malaria or to poison.

• Chapter III

  The extended analogy between foreseeing political trouble and the physicians' maxim about hectic fever: easy to cure but hard to detect early, easy to detect but hard to cure late.

• Chapter VII

  Borgia explains that he had planned for everything at his father's death except being himself at the point of death at the same time; illness, not lack of ability, ruins him.

• Chapter XIII

  Machiavelli recalls the hectic-fever analogy: the scanty wisdom of man cannot discern the poison hidden in a policy that looks good at first.

• Chapters XVII and XIX

  Analysis of fear, love, hatred and contempt as the emotional forces that hold or dissolve a state; a ruler should be feared without being hated.

• Chapter XXVI

  Italy pictured as beaten, despoiled and lacerated, waiting for someone to heal her wounds and cleanse her long-festering sores.