The Prince

In 1512 the Medici returned to power in Florence, and Niccolò Machiavelli, who had spent fourteen years serving the republic they replaced, lost his job. Early the next year he was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy and tortured. Released in an amnesty, he retired to his farm outside the city and wrote The Prince, a short book on how to win power and keep it, which he dedicated to a Medici. He was, among other things, looking for work.

It did not get him any. It did get him a reputation. The Prince is twenty-six brisk chapters on principalities: how they are acquired, by arms, by fortune or by crime, and how they are held. Its scandal is not that princes are cruel; everyone knew that. It is that Machiavelli describes politics as it is done rather than as it ought to be, and treats virtue as a tool. A prince should wish to be both loved and feared, he writes, but if he must choose, it is much safer to be feared. He need not keep his word when keeping it would ruin him. He should be a fox to spot the traps and a lion to frighten the wolves.

Read straight through, the book is less monstrous than its reputation and more interesting. Machiavelli was a republican who spent his career on diplomatic missions, and his longer Discourses on Livy praise free states. Whether The Prince is a manual, a warning or a job application in questionable taste has been argued for five hundred years. He does not settle it.

It was published in 1532, five years after his death, and placed on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1559, which is not how a book stays obscure. W. K. Marriott’s translation dates from 1908 and is plain and quick, like the original.

This edition is 164 pages, about the length of a long memo to a new boss.