The Prince

What It Is

About a hundred pages of Italian, written in 1513 and published in 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death.

The circumstances matter. Machiavelli had spent fourteen years as a senior official of the Florentine republic, running its diplomacy and building its citizen militia. In 1512 the republic fell, the Medici returned, and he was dismissed, imprisoned, tortured on the rope and sent to a small farm outside the city. He wrote The Prince there, quickly, and dedicated it to the family that had destroyed him, hoping for work. He never got any.

The form is the mirror for princes: a well-worn medieval genre of advice on how a ruler should conduct himself virtuously. Machiavelli keeps the form and reverses the contents. The prose is cold and exact; he writes like a man who has stopped expecting to be liked.

Why It Matters

This is the moment politics stops being a branch of ethics. Machiavelli announces that he will describe how men actually behave rather than how they ought to, and that he will draw his conclusions from that. Everything since called realism descends from that sentence.

The reaction was immediate. His name became an English adjective within decades; Shakespeare's audiences knew the murderous Machiavel as a stock figure, and the church put the book on the Index. Yet Rousseau insisted it was a satire, a republican's warning dressed as a courtier's counsel, and he was not being perverse: Machiavelli spent his life serving a republic and wrote a long defence of republican government in the same years.

Which is the point most readers miss. The Prince is the book he wrote to get a job. The Discourses on Livy is the book he wrote because he meant it. Read the first without the second and you will get him wrong, as most of the last five hundred years has.

Before You Read

Two or three hours. The chapters run two to four pages. Read it in one or two sittings — it was written fast and it moves fast, and drawing it out over weeks flattens it.

The difficulty is not the language but the cast: Cesare Borgia, the Sforzas, Julius II, Ferdinand of Aragon, a parade of Italian mercenaries and popes. Use the notes. It helps to know what Italy looked like in 1500 — five squabbling states, French and Spanish armies marching through at will, nobody able to defend themselves. He is writing about a catastrophe he watched happen.

Chapters 12 to 14, on armies and mercenaries, are the ones first-time readers skim. Do not. He created Florence's militia himself, and these chapters are where his coldness has a purpose.

Which Translation to Read

• Harvey C. Mansfield (University of Chicago Press, second edition, 1998) — recommended. Deliberately literal, and the literalism is the point: Mansfield holds Machiavelli's key words steady — virtù, stato, ordini — instead of translating them differently each time to suit the sentence. You can therefore follow the argument as a system of terms rather than a string of aphorisms, which is how the book is usually misread. The introduction and glossary are worth the price. The cost: the English is ungainly in places, and Mansfield reads Machiavelli through a Straussian lens many scholars reject. You are buying an interpretation along with the translation. View on Amazon →
• Peter Bondanella (Oxford World's Classics, 2005). The best balance of accuracy and readability in print, with a fine introduction by Maurizio Viroli. The one to give someone. The cost: it smooths the strangeness that Mansfield keeps, and the strangeness is data.
• Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1988). The historian's edition. The notes place every claim in its Florentine context and the glossary of key terms is the most useful thing written on Machiavelli's vocabulary. The cost: built for study, and the English is plainer than the Italian.

Take Mansfield to know exactly what he said, Skinner and Price to know why he said it, Bondanella if you want one book that reads well. Tim Parks (Penguin, 2009) is the fastest and most colloquial.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read chapters 15 to 18 twice. That is where the arguments everyone thinks they know actually live, and they are stranger and more qualified than their reputation.

Watch the word virtù. It does not mean virtue. Tracking what he does with it is the most useful thing a first-time reader can do, and it is why the translation matters more here than in almost any other short book.

Read his letter to Francesco Vettori of December 1513, printed in most good editions, in which he describes changing into court dress each evening to read the ancient historians. It is the best short account of what reading does to a person, and he wrote it while working on this book.

The common mistake is to read it for the shock. It is not a wicked book. It is a book about what politics looks like once you stop being pious about it, and the discomfort it produces is a fact about us rather than about him.