The Prince — themes & analysis

The most important sentence in the book sits halfway through. It comes at the start of chapter 15, where Machiavelli announces what he will not do. He will not, he says, write yet another treatise about how princes ought to live. Many have done so already, and their imagined republics and principalities exist nowhere. He will go directly, instead, to the effective truth of the matter — la verità effettuale della cosa — and report what actually preserves a prince and what actually destroys him.

With that one phrase he separates himself from the entire previous tradition of Christian and humanist political advice and founds something new. Politics, on Machiavelli's account, is not a branch of ethics. It is an empirical science of what works under given conditions, drawn from the historical record and tested against what living princes have actually done. He is not arguing that goodness is bad. He is arguing that the question of goodness is the wrong question for the man who must keep a state. The right question is harder and colder: given that men are as they are — ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, cowardly, greedy — what must a ruler do to survive among them?

The answer, he insists, will sometimes look like virtue and sometimes like vice, and the distinction matters less than the outcome. A prince who clings to received goodness in a world that does not return it will be destroyed by men who do not. A prince who knows how not to be good, and who uses or withholds that knowledge according to necessity, has the only reliable foundation politics offers.

The effective-truth move is the move every realist political thinker after him has had to make in his own way — Hobbes, Madison, Bismarck, the twentieth-century strategists. It is the move that earned Machiavelli his reputation and the move every reader has to decide whether to accept.

Where to follow it: Dedication (the method announced), Chapter 15 (the refusal of received morality), Chapter 16 (generosity reconsidered), Chapter 17 (cruelty and clemency).

The two words that organise the book are virtù and fortuna, and neither translates cleanly. Virtù is not virtue in the moral sense; it is the active force of a man — his capacity to act decisively in the world, his courage, intelligence, energy, foresight, and a certain ruthless flexibility that lets him meet whatever circumstance throws at him. Fortuna is not fate but accident — the turn of events no human agency can fully control: the arrival of foreign armies, the death of a pope, the river that bursts its banks.

Machiavelli's most famous image, in chapter 25, is of fortune as one of those rivers. When she is calm, men can build dykes and canals and live without fear. When she rages, she sweeps everything before her — but only where no preparation has been made. The prudent man in tranquil times prepares for the floods he cannot predict. Fortune, Machiavelli says, is the arbiter of about half of what we do; the other half, more or less, she leaves to us. Virtù is what we bring to that other half.

The two are in constant negotiation. A man of great virtù in a calm age has nothing to do; a man of small virtù in a stormy age is destroyed; the rare match between a great man and a great occasion is what produces a Romulus, a Theseus, a Cyrus. Cesare Borgia had enormous virtù and was undone only by an extraordinary malignity of fortune — the wrong pope elected at the moment of maximum vulnerability.

The closing image of chapter 25 — that fortune is a woman, and so favours the bold, the young, the forceful who command rather than petition her — is one of the lines that has aged worst, and Machiavelli leaves it on the page without softening. The deeper point survives the metaphor: nothing in politics is fixed, and the man who waits to be sure will be too late.

Where to follow it: Chapter 6 (Moses, Cyrus, armed prophets), Chapter 7 (Cesare Borgia and fortune), Chapter 25 (fortune as a river), Chapter 26 (the exhortation).

Chapter 18, on how princes should keep their word, is the chapter that put Machiavelli on the Index of Forbidden Books and into the language as an adjective. He argues, with no apology, that there are two ways of fighting — by law, which is proper to men, and by force, which is proper to beasts. Because the first is often insufficient, a prince must learn to use the second, and to use it well he must imitate two animals, the fox and the lion. The lion cannot defend himself against snares; the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. A prince must therefore be both — fox enough to recognise traps, lion enough to frighten the wolves who set them.

From this comes the famous and chilling rule: a prince should not keep faith when keeping faith goes against his interest, and when the reasons that made him give his word no longer obtain. Machiavelli does not present this as an exception. He presents it as the operating principle of every successful prince he can identify in history, and he names them — Alexander VI, who never did anything but deceive and never failed at it; Ferdinand of Aragon, whose pious wars were always fought for territory; the popes generally, whose oaths weighed less than their nephews.

The cynicism is unsparing. But Machiavelli insists on one practical limit. The fox must dissemble; he must also seem the opposite of what he is. Men judge by appearances, and a prince who can appear merciful, faithful, honest, religious, while being prepared at need to be the contrary, will keep his state. A prince who is openly all of those things and only those things will lose it.

The doctrine, taken seriously, is harder than it looks; not every man can be a fox without becoming visibly one. The restraint Machiavelli requires — seeming good while being capable of the contrary — is itself a kind of self-mastery that places the argument far from simple cynicism, even if the destination looks the same from a distance.

Where to follow it: Chapter 18 (keeping faith), Chapter 19 (avoiding contempt and hatred), Chapter 21 (how a prince should act to win honour).

The chapter on whether it is better to be loved or feared is the most quoted in the book and the most carefully balanced. Machiavelli's answer is that it is best to be both, but that since this is difficult, fear is the safer ground for a prince who must choose. His reasoning is psychological rather than moral. Love is a chain men forge themselves, and they break it whenever they find it useful, because men, he says with a flatness that has not pleased anyone in five hundred years, are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, and covetous. Fear is held by a dread of punishment that does not let go.

But the chapter pivots in the second half, and the pivot is what most casual readers miss. A prince must avoid being hated above all. He may be feared without being loved, but he cannot be safe if he is hated, and he becomes hated by taking the property of his subjects or violating the honour of their wives. He may be feared without doing either.

The earlier chapter on cruelty makes the same point from the other side: cruelty can be well used or badly used. It is well used when it is done all at once, out of necessity to secure oneself, and not persisted in; it is badly used when it grows, beginning small and increasing rather than diminishing. Cesare Borgia's handling of Remirro de Orco in the Romagna is the paradigm: the man did the cruel work, then was displayed cut in half in the piazza at Cesena to deflect the hatred onto him. Clean, efficient, and not repeated.

Machiavelli's prince, then, is not a sadist. He is a calculator who understands that human attachments are unreliable, that punishment is more reliable, that excessive injury creates the only emotion he must avoid — hatred — and that the discipline of the throne is to do hard things quickly and rare things rarely.

Where to follow it: Chapter 8 (cruelty well used), Chapter 16 (generosity and parsimony), Chapter 17 (cruelty and clemency, fear and love), Chapter 19 (avoiding contempt and hatred).

Behind the cold technique of the central chapters lies a hot political grievance. Machiavelli is writing in a peninsula that has been overrun for twenty years — by the French in 1494, by the Spanish, by the Swiss, by the imperial armies of Charles V soon to come — and he believes the cause of Italy's humiliation is identifiable. Italian princes, he argues across chapters 12, 13, and 14, have outsourced their armies to mercenary captains, condottieri, who have neither the loyalty of citizens nor the discipline of professional soldiers, and who have made an industry out of avoiding battle.

A prince who cannot fight his own wars cannot keep his state. The remedy is the citizen militia, the institution Machiavelli himself had tried to build in Florentine service before the Republic fell. The argument against mercenaries is the most consistent passion in the book — it appears in the taxonomy chapters, in the case studies, and explodes in chapters 12–14 into its own extended treatment.

The closing chapter of the book, chapter 26, gathers the grievance and the remedy into a plea. He addresses Lorenzo de' Medici directly. The occasion is more favourable than any in centuries. Italy lies more enslaved than the Hebrews, more scattered than the Athenians, leaderless, beaten, overrun, waiting for someone to redeem her. Machiavelli quotes Petrarch on the ancient valour still alive in Italian hearts.

The exhortation has been read as opportunism, as patriotism, as the most sincere passage in the book; it is probably all three. Whatever it is, it shows that the apparent amorality of the technique chapters is in service of an end Machiavelli does feel, and feels strongly: an Italy free of foreign armies, ruled by Italians, with a citizen army that can defend it. The cold counsel is the means; the hot ending names what it was for.

Where to follow it: Chapter 11 (ecclesiastical principalities), Chapter 12 (mercenary arms), Chapter 13 (auxiliary arms), Chapter 26 (the exhortation).