The 48 Laws of Power

What It Is

Robert Greene's first book, published by Viking in 1998, and an anthology as much as an argument. Each of the forty-eight laws is stated flatly, illustrated with historical episodes — courtiers, con men, generals, cardinals, gamblers, art dealers — and then reversed, because Greene closes most chapters by explaining when the law does not hold.

The design is part of the book. Joost Elffers, who packaged it, filled the wide margins with quotations from Machiavelli, Gracian, Sun Tzu, Bismarck and various sixteenth-century courtiers, so the page argues with itself while you read. It was built to look like a Renaissance emblem book, and that is not an affectation.

It runs to roughly 450 pages, and there is no reason to read them in order.

Why It Matters

Greene is not an original thinker and does not claim to be. He is an anthologist working an old European seam: the literature of the court, running from Castiglione and Gracian through La Rochefoucauld, which took as its subject the fact that powerful people behave in describable ways. What Greene did was lift that tradition out of the seminar room and hand it to people who actually need it. Hence the million-plus copies, hence its life in prisons, boardrooms and hip-hop, and hence its treatment as contraband in at least two of those places.

The value is diagnostic before it is prescriptive. Most people are astonished by power. They are surprised when a colleague takes the credit, when a friendly rival turns, when being good at the job fails to protect them. Greene's argument is that none of this should be a surprise, and the book's real service is to name moves you have already been on the receiving end of.

Its weaknesses are structural and worth stating plainly. The anecdotes are selected because they fit the law, and a story chosen to prove a rule cannot also test it; nothing here can be falsified. The laws contradict each other, and Greene is untroubled by that. And the moral vacancy that gives the book its charge is also its ceiling: this is a long study of how to be effective among people that never once asks what you are being effective for.

Before You Read

Easy, and long. Twelve to fifteen hours cover to cover, which is not how to do it.

Treat it as a reference book. Read the contents page, find the law that describes what is currently happening to you, read that chapter, stop. Read it straight through and it flattens out; by law thirty the anecdotes blur and every historical figure starts to sound like the same manipulative genius.

Read the reversals. Most people skip them. They are where Greene admits the limits of his own system, and they are the most honest pages in the book.

Which Edition to Read

• The Viking hardcover (1998) — recommended. The book as it was designed: heavy paper, two-colour printing, the marginal quotations set to be read against the main text rather than after it. Every other format degrades that layout, and the layout is doing real work. It is still in print. The cost: it is a brick, and it costs three times what the paperback does. View on Amazon →
• The Penguin paperback. The same complete text, portable, cheap, and the one most people own. The cost: the margins are cramped and the type is small, so the sidebars become something you skim rather than something you read.
• The Concise 48 Laws of Power (Profile Books, 2002). Half the length: the laws, with most of the historical material stripped out. The cost: the historical material is the book. Take it away and you have a list of assertions, which is precisely the version that gets quoted badly.

Buy the hardcover to own, the paperback to carry, and the concise edition only if you would rather be told what to think than shown why.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it against yourself, not against your enemies. It is at its most useful as a description of how you have been handled, and at its least useful as a script.

Check Greene wherever he tells a story you know something about. He compresses hard, and the episodes are shaped to make the point rather than to be true in every particular. Reading this as history is the common mistake. Reading it as scripture is the expensive one.

Then read his sources. Greene is honest about where all this comes from, and the honest response is to go to Machiavelli and Gracian, who got there first and wrote better.