The Prince

About this book

The Prince is a short treatise on how to acquire and hold political power, written by the Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli around 1513. Machiavelli had spent fourteen years as a senior official of the Florentine republic, including diplomatic missions to France, the papal court, and Cesare Borgia. When the Medici family returned to power in 1512 he lost his position, was imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy, and then retired to his farm outside the city, where he wrote this book and dedicated it to Lorenzo de’ Medici, apparently in the hope of regaining employment.

The book circulated in manuscript during Machiavelli’s lifetime and was printed in 1532. It was placed on the Catholic Church’s index of prohibited books in 1559, and its author’s name became a byword for cunning and bad faith across Europe within a few decades. It remains the most read work of Renaissance political thought and the usual starting point for the modern study of politics as the pursuit of power rather than the pursuit of virtue.

The story

The Prince is not a narrative, but it has a clear structure. Machiavelli first sorts states into types, hereditary and new, and concentrates on the hardest case: a new principality acquired by force, fortune, or the help of others. He draws examples from ancient history and from events of his own time, especially the career of Cesare Borgia, whom he treats as a model of what a new ruler must do, and whose eventual fall he blames on bad luck rather than bad judgment.

Later chapters deal with armies, arguing that a ruler must rely on his own troops rather than mercenaries, and then turn to the ruler’s personal conduct: whether it is better to be loved or feared, when to keep promises, and how to manage reputation. The book closes with an appeal for a leader to unite Italy and drive out the foreign armies that had been fighting across it since 1494.

Themes and historical context

Machiavelli wrote during the Italian Wars, when French, Spanish, and Imperial armies repeatedly invaded a peninsula divided among small states. His argument that rulers must sometimes act against conventional morality to preserve the state grew out of watching what had happened to states that did not. He is frank that cruelty, deception, and broken promises can be necessary, and equally frank that they should be used sparingly and with judgment.

The book’s central pair of ideas are fortuna, the unpredictable force of circumstance, and virtù, which in Machiavelli’s usage means something closer to skill, boldness, and adaptability than to moral goodness. A ruler cannot control fortune but can prepare for it.

Readers have long disagreed about Machiavelli’s intentions. Some take the book as straightforward advice; others, noting that he wrote a much longer work in praise of republics, the Discourses on Livy, read it as a description of tyranny meant to be understood by republicans. The debate has not been settled.

Who should read it

The Prince is short, around 30,000 words in Marriott’s translation, in twenty-six brief chapters, and it can be read in an afternoon. The argument is direct and the examples concrete, though the many Italian and classical names will send most readers to the notes or to a map of Renaissance Italy. It suits anyone interested in politics, history, or ethics, and it is a good first text in political philosophy because it is so plain about its own position.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #1232 is the English translation by W. K. Marriott, prepared for Gutenberg by John Bickers, David Widger, and others. Marriott’s version, first published in 1908, is the most widely circulated public-domain English translation and includes his introduction on Machiavelli’s life.