Niccolò Machiavelli
He separated what princes do from what moralists say they should do, and called the gap by its right name.
Machiavelli spent fourteen years as a senior diplomat of the Florentine Republic, negotiating with popes, emperors, and condottieri, watching how power actually worked. When the Medici returned and the Republic fell in 1512, he was arrested, tortured, and exiled to his small farm outside Florence. There he wrote The Prince: a short, unsentimental guide to acquiring and keeping power that has shocked and fascinated readers ever since. Its central claim is that the political world is governed by different rules than private morality: a prince who insists on being good in all things will come to ruin among so many who are not. Force and fraud, used with intelligence and restraint, are the instruments of effective governance. The Discourses on Livy, written at the same time, presents his republican ideals: a stable state requires citizen virtue, institutional conflict, and the rule of law. The two books are not contradictory but bracketing: The Prince is for founders who must act in emergency; the Discourses are for the republic that follows.
Read in the Library
Places
Ideas
Words
“It is far safer to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
“Everyone sees what you appear to be; few touch what you are.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born in Florence
Born to a modest branch of an old Florentine family; his father, a lawyer of small means, kept a prized library in which the boy read the Roman historians who never left him.
Secretary of the republic
Appointed head of the Second Chancery at twenty-nine, weeks after Savonarola's execution. For fourteen years he rode on embassies to kings, popes, and Cesare Borgia, the apprenticeship in power behind everything he later wrote.
Prison, torture, and the farm
When the Medici returned, he was dismissed, wrongly implicated in a conspiracy, imprisoned, and tortured on the rope. Released into rural exile, he wrote to a friend that in the evenings he put on courtly garments and entered the courts of the ancients, and there composed The Prince.
Dies weeks after the republic returns
Died in June 1527, a month after the sack of Rome had toppled the Medici and restored the republic he had served: which, remembering him as the Medici's man, had passed him over one final time.
Influence
Influenced
- Francis Bacon
Bacon wrote that we are much beholden to Machiavelli for describing what men do rather than what they ought to do. It was one of the few open endorsements Machiavelli received in the century after his death.
- Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes shares Machiavelli's refusal to build politics on how people ought to behave, though he replaces the prince's cunning with a sovereign authorized by contract.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau insisted in the Social Contract that The Prince is a book for republicans, and that in appearing to instruct tyrants Machiavelli was exposing them. That reading shaped how the Enlightenment received him.
- Giambattista Vico
Vico took from Machiavelli the study of states as they actually behave, and set it inside a theory of how nations pass through recurring ages.
