Chapter 15 — Things for Which Princes Are Praised or Blamed

The chapter opens with self-awareness that borders on provocation. Machiavelli acknowledges that many have written on how princes should conduct themselves toward their subjects and allies, but announces that he will depart from their methods. The departure is not stylistic but foundational. Previous writers — he has in mind the humanist mirrors-of-princes tradition, the Christian political theorists, and ultimately Plato and Aristotle — have imagined republics and principalities that have never existed and never could exist. Machiavelli will go, instead, to the effective truth of the matter and report what he finds there.

The practical consequence of the methodological shift follows immediately. A man who holds to everything that is considered good by received opinion, in a world where most men do not do so, will be destroyed by those who are not good. Therefore a prince wishing to maintain himself must know how to not be good, and use that knowledge or not according to necessity. This is not an endorsement of vice; it is an argument that the question of virtue is the wrong question for someone who must actually govern. The right question is: given the conditions — given that men are generally what they are — what does holding power actually require?

Machiavelli then produces a list of paired qualities for which princes are praised or blamed: generous/miserly, charitable/rapacious, faithful/unscrupulous, courageous/cowardly, humane/cruel, serious/frivolous, religious/unbelieving, and others. He promises to analyse each pair, but the framework is already established. No prince can be all the praised qualities all the time; the attempt to be so will destroy him. What he must be able to do is calibrate — appear the praised quality when appearance serves him, and act contrary to it when reality requires. The following chapters work through the list.