The Prince — Commentary

In brief

Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince about 1513, months after the returning Medici had ended his fourteen years of service to the Florentine republic and had him tortured on suspicion of conspiracy. It is a short handbook, in twenty-six chapters, on how new rulers take power and keep it, and he offered it to the family that had just ruined him. He never printed it. It appeared in 1532, five years after his death, with the permission of a Medici pope, and within a generation his name had become a word for wickedness.

The scandal rests on one move. Earlier advice books told a ruler to be good and promised that goodness would pay. Machiavelli says that “how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live” that a ruler who attends only to the second “sooner effects his ruin than his preservation” (ch. 15). The less famous fact is how anxious the book is. Its hero fails, its author is out of work, and its last pages concede that much of what happens is beyond anyone’s control.

The argument

Machiavelli’s question is narrow: how does a new ruler, with no inherited loyalty to live on, avoid destruction? First, own your force. “The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms”, he says, and promptly announces “I shall leave the laws out of the discussion” (ch. 12). Hired soldiers betray you and borrowed ones capture you: “losing, one is undone, and winning, one is their captive” (ch. 13). With Savonarola in view, “all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed” (ch. 6).

Second, keep the people, who are easier to satisfy than the great. “The people do not wish to be ruled nor oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles wish to rule and oppress the people” (ch. 9). This is the book’s least advertised and most republican idea, and it returns in a phrase that defeats a whole military science: “the best possible fortress is—not to be hated by the people” (ch. 20). Third, manage how you look. Morality becomes a set of reputations with costs attached, and a sensible ruler sorts them (ch. 15).

The shape of the book

A dedication comes first, and then four blocks. Chapters 1 to 11 sort principalities by how they were acquired: inherited, annexed, or won by one’s own arms, by others’ arms, by crime or by popular favour. They include the five errors of Louis XII in Italy (ch. 3) and a straight-faced chapter on church states, which it “would be the act of a presumptuous and rash man to discuss” (ch. 11), before he discusses them. Chapters 12 to 14 are on arms. Chapters 15 to 23 are on conduct, with a long detour on Roman emperors (ch. 19). Chapters 24 to 26 turn to Italy’s present disaster.

The letter and the gift

The best account of the book’s making is a letter of December 1513 to his friend Francesco Vettori, Florentine ambassador in Rome, partly translated in Marriott’s introduction. After the day’s dull business on his small farm comes the evening: “I pull off my peasant-clothes, covered with dust and dirt, and put on my noble court dress”, and he enters “the ancient courts of the men of old”, who answer his questions. From those talks he has “composed a small work on ‘Principalities’”. The tone is the most moving thing he wrote, and the purpose is entirely practical: “men ought ever to desire to be served by one who has reaped experience at the expense of others”.

So the book is a job application. The intended prince was then Giuliano de’ Medici, who died in 1516, and the dedication we have is to his nephew Lorenzo. It sets the book against the usual gifts of “horses, arms, cloth of gold”, claims that “to understand that of princes it needs to be of the people”, a neat way of making disgrace a qualification, and ends on “a great and continued malignity of fortune”. It is not certain that any Medici read the book before it was printed.

Virtù and fortuna

The two words that carry the book do not go into English. Virtù comes from the Latin for a man, and in Machiavelli it means the capacity to act decisively: nerve, skill and force of character, which may include moral virtue and may have nothing to do with it. Marriott picks a different word each time, and so hides the argument. On Agathocles (ch. 8) the Italian has le azioni e virtù di costui, and Marriott gives “the actions and the genius of this man”. Then non si può chiamare ancora virtù to kill one’s fellow citizens: “it cannot be called talent”. Then la virtù di Agatocle: “the courage of Agathocles”. In the last chapter the same word becomes “the ability of Moses”, “the virtue of an Italian spirit” and “great valour in the limbs”. His reader cannot see Machiavelli wondering whether a mass murderer has the quality he admires.

Fortuna is the old goddess, thinned to whatever the world does to your plans. “Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions”, he allows, “or perhaps a little less” (ch. 25). She is a river in flood that can be prepared for in fair weather, and then, notoriously, “fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her”.

The real trouble comes earlier and quietly. Success depends on suiting your methods to the times, yet a man “cannot deviate from what nature inclines him to do”. Chapter 18 has demanded “a mind ready to turn itself accordingly as the winds and variations of fortune force it”. Chapter 25 says nobody has such a mind. That is the book’s deepest admission: the prince the whole manual is preparing cannot exist.

Feared, and faithless

Chapters 15 to 18 are what people mean by Machiavellian, and they are usually misreported. Chapter 15 gives the method, the verità effettuale, the truth of things in their effects, which Marriott flattens to “the real truth of the matter”. Chapter 17 does not recommend terror. “One should wish to be both” loved and feared, and only if one must go is it “much safer to be feared than loved”, because men are “ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous”. Hatred is what to avoid, so keep off people’s property, “because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony”. That is the coldest sentence in the book, and I suspect the truest.

Chapter 18 gave most offence, as a note in Marriott’s text reports. A ruler must be “a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves”, and need not keep his word when keeping it hurts him. Another note traces the opening to Cicero’s De Officiis, where force is the mark of beasts; Machiavelli takes the contrast and reverses the moral. The virtues need only be displayed, since “every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are”.

The slogan about ends and means is not here. The nearest thing is that for a successful prince “the means will always be considered honest”, a report on public opinion and not a moral rule. He even says a ruler should not “diverge from the good if he can avoid doing so”, and Quentin Skinner takes such passages to make evil a last resort. I think that is too kind. The limit given is prudence alone, and nothing in these chapters counts what is done to the victim.

Cesare Borgia

The one sustained portrait is in chapter 7, and Machiavelli had seen the man at work, as Florence’s envoy during the events that led to Sinigalia on the last day of 1502. Borgia, son of Alexander VI, rose by “the arms and fortunes of others”. To stop depending on them he reconciled the Orsini with gifts and killed their leaders once they were in his power. In the Romagna he installed Ramiro d’Orco, “a swift and cruel man”, to restore order, then had him “left on the piazza at Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side”. The people were “at once satisfied and dismayed”. Machiavelli reports this with obvious pleasure in the workmanship.

Alexander died in 1503 while Cesare lay “sick unto death”, and it all came apart, the failure charged to “the extraordinary and extreme malignity of fortune”. That is the phrase Machiavelli uses of himself in the dedication, and the echo says something about why a fallen duke is his hero. “I do not know how to blame him”, he writes. Yet Borgia is the model for those raised by others’ arms, and he shows that they fall. And the next chapter denies Agathocles glory because “it cannot be called talent to slay fellow-citizens, to deceive friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion” (ch. 8), which is near enough what chapter 7 has just admired. Machiavelli never reconciles the two.

Chapter 26

The last chapter (ch. 26) changes key. After twenty-five chapters of calculation comes an appeal to the Medici to free Italy, “more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians”. Miracles are recited, Spanish and Swiss infantry are technically analysed in the middle of the prayer, and it closes on four lines of Petrarch. “To all of us this barbarous dominion stinks.”

Does it belong? Allan Gilbert showed in 1938 that such exhortations were common in the genre, which weakens the idea of an afterthought. Maurizio Viroli reads it as the book’s heart, a call for a redeemer. Leo Strauss treats it as a patriotic cover for something colder. I keep it. The chapter picks up the terms of chapter 6, that Moses needed Israel enslaved, so Italy’s ruin becomes the opportunity a founder requires. What it does not do is add up: “this will not be difficult” sits badly after chapters showing how hard everything is. The hope is sincere and the logic is weak, which is how Machiavelli sounds when he stops being clever about his own country.

Satire or sincerity

A long tradition says the book cannot mean what it says. Rousseau, in The Social Contract (1762), called Machiavelli a good citizen veiling his love of liberty, and pointed to “his detestable hero, Cesare Borgia” and the contradiction with the republican Discourses on Livy. In 1958 Garrett Mattingly called it “a diabolical burlesque” of advice manuals. Mary Dietz in 1986 made the sharper claim that it is a trap: advice such as arming the people was crafted to undo a Medici who followed it.

Against this, Isaiah Berlin could hardly find a work that reads less like satire, and Viroli says Rousseau was rescuing a reputation. Hans Baron explained the gap with the Discourses by a change of mind; Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov deny there is a gap. Strauss, who called him a “teacher of evil”, thought him too thoughtful not to know what he was doing.

The letter to Vettori seems to me to decide the main point. A man writing privately to a friend wants this book to get him work, and says so. The trap theory also has the difficulty that arming the people was Machiavelli’s lifelong conviction: he had built Florence’s militia, which failed at Prato in 1512. Yet the satirists have noticed something. Once printed, a manual that tells the prince to fake piety tells every subject that his prince is faking. Antonio Gramsci’s reading, that its real audience is those not yet in power, describes what the book does better than what its author meant.

The people

Alexander VI and Julius II

Alexander VI is the master liar, who “did nothing else but deceive men” (ch. 18), and Borgia’s means of rising. Julius II, his enemy, is the lucky man of impulse (ch. 25), and had helped the Medici back into Florence, which ended Machiavelli’s career.

Ferdinand of Aragon

Ferdinand is the working model, with his “pious cruelty” against the Moors (ch. 21), and the prince “whom it is not well to name” who preaches peace and good faith (ch. 18).

How it was made

The material came from fourteen years as secretary to the Florentine Ten, on missions to Louis XII, Borgia and Julius II, and from ancient history. The form came from the mirror-for-princes tradition, and he cites Xenophon’s life of Cyrus (ch. 14). The letter proves a version under the title De Principatibus existed in December 1513, and William Connell argues for revision up to 1515. It was printed as Il Principe in 1532.

Readers and enemies

Reginald Pole, reading it in Italy in the 1530s, found it written by “an enemy of the human race”, and reported that Thomas Cromwell spoke highly of it. It went on the Index in 1559. Innocent Gentillet’s attack of 1576 called it the “Koran of the courtiers”, and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta has “Machevil” speak the prologue. Frederick of Prussia published his Anti-Machiavel in 1740 and invaded Silesia the same year. Francis Bacon, more usefully, thanked him for writing what men do and not what they ought to do.

How to read it

Know what the free text is. W. K. Marriott’s version (1908, Everyman’s Library) is complete, with all twenty-six chapters and the dedication. It reads smoothly, but it scatters virtù across “ability”, “genius”, “talent”, “valour” and “virtue”, and softens: crudeltà becomes “severities” in chapter 8, with a note defending it. Its history slips too. A note to chapter 26 and the introduction both make Giuliano de’ Medici into Clement VII, who was in fact Giulio, and it gives 22 June for a death usually dated 21 June 1527.
Buy a modern version. Harvey Mansfield’s (Chicago, 1985; second edition 1998) is the most literal and keeps “virtue” throughout, which makes the argument visible at some cost to ease. Russell Price’s, with Skinner’s introduction (Cambridge, 1988; revised 2019), is the sound starting point. Peter Bondanella’s (Oxford World’s Classics, 2005, introduction by Viroli) is based on Giorgio Inglese’s Italian edition of 1996.