Chapter 19 — Avoiding Being Despised and Hated
A prince who avoids being hated and despised has removed the only conditions under which conspiracy against him becomes likely to succeed.
Summary
Machiavelli opens by connecting the preceding ethical analysis — on cruelty and clemency, love and fear, faith-keeping — to the practical question of security. A prince becomes hated primarily by taking the property and violating the honour of his subjects. These he must avoid absolutely. He becomes despised by appearing fickle, frivolous, effeminate, mean-spirited, or irresolute — qualities that make him seem incapable of holding power. Against both dangers he must guard as against a rock: his actions should convey greatness, courage, gravity, and fortitude, and his private dealings with his subjects should confirm the public image.
The analysis of conspiracy is the chapter's structural core. The conspirator faces a simple calculation: enormous risk (death, if discovered before success; death, if unsuccessful; dependence on the loyalty of co-conspirators, who have the same incentive to betray him as they had to join him) against potential gain. When a prince is not hated, the conspirator cannot expect popular support for his act; without popular support, the aftermath of a successful assassination is ungovernable. The prince who has popular goodwill is therefore almost impossible to overthrow from within, because the conspiracy calculation never works out in the conspirator's favour.
The Roman imperial history is deployed as the most dramatic available case study. Machiavelli works through the sequence from Commodus to Maximinus, tracking which emperors were killed and which survived. His analysis identifies two variables: whether the emperor satisfied the military or the people, and whether he was considered magnificent or base. Marcus Aurelius maintained both without hereditary right to begin with; his son Commodus was magnificent but cruel and came to be despised. Septimius Severus was a new prince of great virtù — ferocious like the lion and very shrewd like the fox — who maintained himself by keeping the military satisfied while appearing to respect the people. Caracalla had great qualities but was ferocious, cruel, and committed individual injuries so extreme that he became universally hated and was killed by a centurion. The lesson: the hatred that makes conspiracy viable comes from personal injuries, not from general severity.
- Chapter 1Machiavelli opens not with a chapter but with a letter — one of the most celebrated dedications in European literature.
- Chapter 2The book's first chapter is a taxonomy so compressed it reads like a table of contents for the entire argument.
- Chapter 3Machiavelli's analysis of hereditary principalities is deliberately brief because the argument is simple: long-settled states are easier to hold than new ones.
- Chapter 4This is the book's first major analysis, and Machiavelli uses France's disastrous Italian campaigns as his case study.
- Chapter 5Machiavelli uses Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia versus the repeated French failures in Italy to introduce one of his sharpest analytical distinctions: the difference between states governed through a single lord with servile administrators and states governed through a lord with independent barons.
- Chapter 6Machiavelli confronts one of the hardest problems in The Prince: what to do with a conquered city that has historically governed itself.
- Chapter 7Machiavelli turns to the most admirable category: the prince who rises from nothing by his own ability.
- Chapter 8This is the chapter that establishes Cesare Borgia as The Prince's central case study — the man who came closest to the political ideal, whose eventual failure was attributable entirely to fortune rather than to any deficiency in his method.
- Chapter 9Machiavelli refuses to praise Agathocles's murders as virtù, but he cannot deny that they worked.
- Chapter 10Chapter 9 introduces Machiavelli's social analysis: every city contains two humours, the people who wish not to be oppressed and the great who wish to oppress.
- Chapter 11This short chapter introduces a practical test for evaluating a principality's stability: can the prince, if attacked, maintain himself with his own resources, or must he always rely on others? Machiavelli uses the fortified German free cities as his model — towns with strong walls, substantial reserves, and organised citizens who can defend themselves for at least a year without outside help.
- Chapter 12Machiavelli's treatment of the Church is one of the book's most revealing moments — not because it is disrespectful, but because it applies the same analytical framework to the papacy that it applies to every other state.
- Chapter 13Machiavelli's hatred of mercenary armies is the most consistent passion in The Prince, and this chapter is its fullest expression.
- Chapter 14Auxiliaries — troops borrowed from a foreign power — are worse than mercenaries, Machiavelli argues, because at least mercenaries are divided among themselves.
- Chapter 15The chapter is short and absolute.
- Chapter 16Chapter 15 is the hinge on which the entire book turns.
- Chapter 17The argument of Chapter 16 runs against the ordinary wisdom of every medieval mirror-of-princes tradition: a reputation for liberality, sincerely maintained, is ruinous.
- Chapter 18Chapter 17 contains the most famous argument in the book, and it is more careful than its reputation suggests.
- Chapter 19Chapter 18 is the most disputed in the book and the one that earned Machiavelli his reputation as the theorist of bad faith.
- Chapter 20The longest chapter in the book synthesises the ethical analysis of the preceding chapters into a comprehensive theory of internal security.
- Chapter 21Machiavelli surveys the range of defensive strategies princes have used — disarming subjects, fostering internal factions, building fortresses, cultivating those they mistrusted — and delivers a nuanced verdict.
- Chapter 22Chapter 21 turns from the negative task of avoiding hatred and contempt to the positive task of building a reputation that sustains power.
- Chapter 23This short chapter on the choice of ministers is a compressed theory of institutional trust.
- Chapter 24The problem of flattery is, for Machiavelli, an epistemic problem before it is a moral one.
- Chapter 25Chapter 24 applies the book's principles to the immediate Italian political situation and delivers a harsh verdict.
- Chapter 26Chapter 25 contains the book's most sustained philosophical argument and its most famous image.
- Chapter 27The book's final chapter drops the cool analytical register of everything that preceded it and becomes a plea.