The Prince

Introduction

The Prince was written in 1513 by Niccolò Machiavelli, a Florentine who for fourteen years had served his republic as secretary of its Second Chancery, sent on missions to the king of France, to the emperor, to the pope and to Cesare Borgia. When the Medici returned to power in 1512, the republic fell, Machiavelli lost his office, was imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy, and then retired to his small farm outside the city. There, as he wrote to a friend, he spent his evenings in the company of the ancients, "asking them the reasons for their actions", and from those conversations came a little book on principalities, what they are, how they are acquired, how they are kept and why they are lost.

The book is short — a dedication and twenty-six chapters — and moves with deliberate economy. The first chapters classify states: hereditary and new, acquired by one's own arms or by those of others, by virtue or by fortune, by crime or by the favour of fellow citizens. The middle chapters turn to arms, insisting that no state is secure without soldiers of its own. Then come the chapters that made the book famous: on whether a prince should be loved or feared, on how far he must keep faith, on the fox and the lion, on avoiding contempt and hatred. The last chapters weigh the power of fortune against human virtue and close with a passionate appeal to free Italy from foreign domination.

What sets The Prince apart from the many earlier "mirrors for princes" is its method. Machiavelli declares that he will follow "the effectual truth of the thing" rather than the imagination of it, and that a ruler who wishes to preserve himself must learn to be able not to be good, and to use this or not according to necessity. His examples come from Rome and Greece, but above all from the Italy he had seen with his own eyes: the rise and fall of Cesare Borgia, the wars of the French and the Spanish, the shifting alliances of popes and republics. Two of his words carry much of the book's weight: virtù, the energy, skill and resolve by which a man shapes events, and fortuna, the changing force of circumstance that virtù must meet.

The book circulated in manuscript and was printed only in 1532, five years after its author's death. It was soon condemned and soon imitated; "Machiavellian" became a byword, while readers from Bacon to Spinoza, Rousseau and Hegel saw in it a clear-eyed anatomy of political power. Few books have been argued over so long, and few remain so directly readable.

This translation follows the Italian text of the edition published in Italy in 1814, with the dedication to Lorenzo de' Medici and all twenty-six chapters. Machiavelli's key terms are rendered consistently throughout, and brief notes identify persons and events that a reader today would otherwise need to look up.