The Open Curriculum

The State · Level 2

The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli · 1532

Thesis

A ruler who wants to hold power must act according to how people actually behave, not how they ought to behave: he must rely on his own forces, use cruelty and deception when necessary while appearing virtuous, avoid being hated, and meet fortune with bold action, because a prince who follows conventional morality in a world that does not will be ruined.

The main ideas

Effectual truth

Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, after the Medici family returned to power in Florence, ended the republic he had served as a diplomat and official, and had him arrested and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy. Released in an amnesty, he wrote from his farm outside the city that he spent his evenings in conversation with the ancients, and had composed from it a little work on principalities. He meant it first for Giuliano de' Medici and, after Giuliano's death, dedicated it to Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, hoping for employment. It was printed in 1532, five years after his death.

His method is announced in chapter 15. Many writers, he says, have imagined republics and principalities that never existed. He intends to follow the effectual truth of the matter, what actually happens, rather than the imagination of it. The gap between how people live and how they ought to live is so wide that a ruler who abandons what is done for what ought to be done brings about his own ruin.

The mechanism is that a ruler surrounded by people who are not good, and who acts as if they were, will be defeated by them.

Implication: judge political and organizational strategies by their actual results, not by how they would work if everyone behaved well.

Virtù and fortune

The book begins by classifying states. All are republics or principalities; principalities are hereditary or new. Hereditary ones are easy to hold, because people are used to the ruling family. New ones are hard, and how they were acquired decides how hard.

Machiavelli's central distinction is between virtù, the ruler's own ability, energy and skill, and fortuna, chance and circumstance. Those who rise by their own virtù, and their own arms, find power hard to win and easy to keep. His models are founders such as Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus, whom fortune gave only an opportunity. Introducing new orders is the hardest of all tasks, because the innovator has as enemies everyone who did well under the old ones.

From this follows his observation that all armed prophets have conquered and all unarmed ones have been destroyed. His unarmed prophet is the friar Girolamo Savonarola, who dominated Florence in the 1490s and fell when the people stopped believing in him, because he had no means of compelling them.

Implication: anyone introducing major change should expect the resistance of those who benefit from the existing arrangement, and should have the means to sustain the change when enthusiasm fades.

Cesare Borgia

Machiavelli's model of a new prince is Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, who won his state through his father's fortune and then worked to lay foundations of his own. In chapter 7, Machiavelli recounts how Cesare pacified the lawless Romagna. He put in charge Remirro de Orco, a cruel and decisive man, who restored order within a short time. Then, knowing that the harshness had made him hated, Cesare had Remirro displayed one morning in the square at Cesena, cut in two, with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside him. The spectacle, Machiavelli writes, left the people at once satisfied and stunned.

The mechanism is that the ruler obtained the benefit of the cruelty, order, while transferring the hatred it caused to the agent.

Cesare's power collapsed after his father died in 1503, at a moment when he himself was gravely ill. Machiavelli attributes the fall to an extraordinary malignity of fortune, and names one error of Cesare's own: allowing Julius II, an enemy, to become pope.

Implication: a leader who must do something harsh should consider how its costs and its benefits will be attributed, and must not depend on a single patron who can disappear.

Cruelty well used

In chapter 8, Machiavelli examines rulers who rose through crime. Agathocles of Syracuse, from the lowest origins, had his soldiers kill the senators and the richest citizens and ruled securely afterward. Oliverotto of Fermo murdered his uncle and the city's leading men at a banquet and seized power, until Cesare Borgia had him strangled a year later.

Machiavelli refuses to call such methods virtù: killing fellow citizens and betraying friends may win power, but not glory. Yet he explains why Agathocles survived. Cruelty can be well used or badly used. It is well used when it is done all at once, out of necessity for one's security, and not continued, and is then turned as far as possible to the subjects' benefit. It is badly used when it begins small and grows over time.

The mechanism is that injuries done all at once are tasted less and so offend less, while benefits should be given little by little so that they are savored. A ruler who keeps inflicting harm keeps his subjects in fear and can never rely on them.

Implication: if harsh measures are unavoidable, take them at once and completely, then stop. Spread benefits out over time.

One's own arms

Machiavelli argues that the foundations of every state are good laws and good arms, and that there cannot be good laws without good arms. Mercenaries, he argues in chapter 12, are disunited, ambitious, undisciplined and unfaithful: brave among friends and cowardly before enemies, because they have no reason to die for a wage. Italy's reliance on them, he writes, had brought it to ruin.

Auxiliaries, the armies of another power lent to help, are worse still: if they lose, you are undone; if they win, you are their prisoner. His image, in chapter 13, is David, who refused the armor Saul offered him and went against Goliath with his own sling and knife, because another's arms either fall off, weigh you down or bind you.

From this he concludes in chapter 14 that a prince should have no other object or thought than war and its discipline, even in peace, by hunting to learn terrain and by studying the actions of great commanders.

Implication: do not depend for your security on forces whose loyalty you have not earned and cannot command. Build capabilities of your own.

Feared rather than loved

Chapter 17 poses the question whether it is better to be loved than feared. Machiavelli answers that one should wish to be both, but since that is difficult, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two must be lacking.

His reasoning is about human nature. Men are, in general, ungrateful, fickle, false and greedy for gain; they offer everything while the ruler is useful and turn away when danger comes. Love is a bond of obligation that people break when it suits them; fear is held in place by a dread of punishment that never fails.

But a ruler must avoid being hated. That requires keeping his hands off his subjects' property and their women. Men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of an inheritance. The same reasoning appears in chapter 9: the people want only not to be oppressed, while the great want to oppress, so a prince should found his power on the people. And in chapter 20: the best fortress is not to be hated by the people.

Implication: a leader can afford to be strict, but not to be hated. Take nothing that people regard as theirs.

The lion and the fox

Chapter 18 argues that a prince need not keep his word when keeping it works against him and the reasons for giving it no longer exist. There are two ways of fighting, by law and by force; the first is human, the second bestial, and since the first often fails, a prince must know how to use the beast. He must be both lion and fox, because the lion cannot defend itself against snares and the fox cannot defend itself against wolves.

A prince need not have the conventional virtues of mercy, faith, integrity, humanity and religion, but must seem to have them. Most people judge by appearances and by results, and the few who see what a ruler really is will not dare oppose the many. His example is Alexander VI, who never did anything but deceive and always found people to deceive.

In chapter 19 the Roman emperor Septimius Severus illustrates the combination: a fierce lion and a cunning fox, feared and respected by all and not hated by the army.

Implication: in competitive settings, expect others to break agreements that no longer serve them, and do not let a reputation for virtue depend on refusing to act.

Fortune

Chapter 25 asks how far fortune governs human affairs. Machiavelli judges that fortune is the arbiter of perhaps half of our actions, but leaves the other half, or a little less, to us. He compares it to a violent river that floods the plain, destroying everything in its path. When the weather is calm, people can build dikes and channels, so that when the river rises it flows safely or does less damage. Fortune shows her power where no defenses have been prepared.

A ruler who succeeds in one set of conditions fails when conditions change, because people rarely change their methods. Machiavelli concludes that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, in a passage comparing fortune to a woman who favors the bold; modern readers find the image repellent, but the point is about adapting to circumstance.

The book ends, in chapter 26, with an exhortation to the Medici to free Italy from foreign armies.

Implication: prepare defenses before a crisis, when it is cheap to do so, and change methods when conditions change.

Limits

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