Publisher edition artwork
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli · First published 1532
Ninety pages of unsentimental advice from an unemployed Florentine diplomat.
Highly Recommended
Easy · Very short — around 130 pages
Why Read It?
The founding text of realism about power, and it takes an evening.
What It's About
A practical handbook on acquiring and holding political power in Renaissance Italy.
Why It Matters
It separated politics from morality as fields of study and has been argued with continuously for five hundred years.
The Review
It is far shorter and far stranger than its reputation. Machiavelli, tortured and exiled, wrote it as a job application to the Medici, and the notoriety comes from a single move: he described how rulers actually behave rather than how they ought to. The result reads as cynical only if you had illusions.
Read it with the Discourses in mind — he was a republican, and this is the tactical book, not the political philosophy.
Best Read
One evening, then again a year later.
Three Things You'll Take From It
- 01
Being feared and being hated are not the same and the distinction is everything.
- 02
Cruelty, if unavoidable, should be brief and complete.
- 03
Fortune favours the man who has prepared before he needed to.
Better Read or Heard?
Short enough to listen to in one journey.
If You Like This…
Discourses on Livy — Niccolò Machiavelli
The republican Machiavelli.
Find it on AmazonThe Book of the Courtier — Baldassare Castiglione
Manners rather than power.
Find it on Amazon
The Edition to Own
The Penguin Classics translation by Tim Parks is the most readable; the Oxford World's Classics has better notes.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Links cost you nothing and never influence what we recommend.