I once worked for a large organization, a company with over 10,000 employees. When new managers, people from outside the organization, were hired, they would come in and clean house. A reorganization and layoffs were inevitable.

I always saw this as a way of establishing that the new person, though they hadn’t come up through the ranks, was in charge. What I didn’t realize is that this practice is centuries old.

"a new prince must always harm his new subjects, both with his soldiers as well as with countless other injuries involved in his new conquest"

An important piece of understanding how the world works is understanding how people work. If you want to change the world you need to understand human psychology. One of the earliest books of psychology is The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli.

The Prince has had many critics over the years. In fact, Machiavelli’s name has been transformed into an adjective meant to describe a person who is self-serving, deceitful, and ruthless. And certainly parts of the book are all of those things

Some people will read The Prince as a sort of operating manual for how to live. Because of this, its real use comes from learning why people sometimes act in ways that seem immoral.

The Prince, however, is amoral, in that it is unconcerned with morality. Its only concern is how to get and maintain power. As Machiavelli writes,

"A man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge or not to use it according to necessity."

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, recommends it as one of the 8 books every intelligent person should read. Read it, he says,

"to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it."

But read it for yourself. Don’t take anyone else’s interpretation as the definitive one. As you read it, look for analogies to modern life. We don’t wage war in the same way as Machiavelli’s princes did, but we can certainly find bloodless examples of these maxims in business and politics.

Read it for yourself, and suspend judgment, though you may find parts of it downright repugnant. You might not act in the ways described, but other people do. If you want to understand why, read The Prince. ( )

This is the Norton Critical Edition. Robert M. Adams's translation has his invaluable notes. No other edition has these notes which are concise and explain all the personalities and military exploits which inform Machiavelli's narrative. So one is able to see what clarity Machiavelli brought to his task. He lays out his rules for a prince and then marshalls pertinent examples. Augmenting the classic text is a section called "Backgrounds" which are selections of other Machiavelli writings. There is some correspondence from the time he served as Florentine diplomat to the court of the rapacious Cesare Borgia, illegitimate son of Pope Julius II.

“This is why armed prophets always win and unarmed prophets lose”

“A prince therefore should have no other object, no other thought, no other subject of study, than war; its rules and disciplines”

“It is good to appear merciful, truthful, humane, sincere and religious, it is good to be so in reality, But you must keep your mind so disposed that in case of need you can turn to the exact contrary”

“If you have to make a choice; to be feared is much safer than to be loved. For it is a good general rule about men; that they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers, fearful of danger and greedy for gain.”

These quotes from Machiavelli’s The Prince are one of the reasons he has received such a bad press, however most successful politicians and all ruling tyrants would wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments. This is a clue I think to why when we read Machiavelli today we still find him disturbing, it is as though he has lifted a stone to let us peer beneath and our only concern is to replace the stone as quickly as possible.

Machiavelli was concerned to give technical advice to a Prince (and for Prince we can substitute any ruler including republicans) on how he should retain power and rule his subjects. Some of this advice has become notorious, for instance; one must employ terrorism or kindness according to the situation faced, it is best to keep people poor and always prepared for war, competition between classes in society is desirable because it promotes energy and enterprise, religion must be promoted even though it may be false as it preserves social solidarity, if your actions must be drastic get it over with quickly so that it is soon forgotten and do not advertise it beforehand or your enemies might destroy you, ensure that you extinguish the line of any previous rulers. There are plenty more gems like this but Machiavelli was not out to promote wickedness, he was concerned with writing a treatise that would appear real, practical and useful to its recipient. He says:in a note to the magnificent Lorenzo de Medici:

“I wanted my book to be absolutely plain, or at least distinguished only by the variety of the examples and the importance of the subject”

To understand Machiavelli it is useful to know more about the circumstances of his composition of “The Prince”

Machiavelli served for 15 years in public service to the republican rulers (committee of ten) in Florence. He carried out many diplomatic duties, some of which involved negotiations with the infamous Cesare Borgia. (whom he admired). The Florentine state had no regular army and had to rely on mercenaries and at that time both France and Spain were pushing to annexe territory in Italy. The Florentines survived by diplomacy and skills as merchants, but Machiavelli realised this was not enough and put together his own army. His worst fears were confirmed when the Florentine army was easily routed by Spanish regulars who restored the Medici as the ruling faction in Florence. Machiavelli was imprisoned and tortured but finally allowed to retire to the countryside with the proviso that he should take no further part in politics. He therefore had a wealth of experience as a politician in renaissance Italy, which was a time when force prevailed and murder and war were common place. Machiavelli lived for his public life and almost in desperation penned The Prince in 1513, which he planned to give to Lorenzo Duke of Urbino, as a way back into public life. He was therefore intent on writing a guide for rulers, ones who were steeped in the practicalities of surviving in turbulent times and who were not interested in idealism or dogma. As far as we know he never got his treatise presented to Lorenzo and manuscript copies leaked out, with a bowdlerised copy printed just four years before Machiavelli’s death in 1523.

The Prince takes just 68 pages to say what it has to say, but ever since its publication it has proved to hold a fascination for political thinkers and philosophers, much has been written about it and |I am sure that Machiavelli would be flattered by the attention it has received, but what makes it so worthy of our attention apart from the obvious fact that it is an important social document. Isaiah Berlin thinks he has the answer in his essay “The Question of Machiavelli” included here in The Norton Critical Edition. Machiavelli’s huge step forward was to deny that morality (Christian Morality) had a place in politics. He did not deny the validity of Christian morality but said that if you wanted to bring morality into politics you would be destroyed. In politics crimes might have to be committed it did not make them right, but all the same they were necessary for the greater good (of the ruler certainly). If you wanted to follow a moral code then stay out of politics and take the consequences.

Also I think there were other reasons why Machiavelli’s treatise seemed so radical. He thought that the idea of fortune’s wheel was an anachronism. Man could to a certain extent control his own destiny. Sure fortune could be good or bad but the wise ruler could use both to his own advantage. Machiavelli’s ideas on the creation of an army of local volunteers loyal to the state were also extremely relevant to the times in which he lived and if he had been successful in getting such an army up to speed, he would have been as great an expansionist as Cesare Borgia. Machiavelli was also concerned to use plenty of examples of ‘good practice’ from antiquity and so the book has a feeling of paganism about it, there are also examples used from recent Florentine history, but these are more often than not negative.

The Prince is not a difficult read especially in The Norton Critical edition translated by Robert M Adams. It is well annotated and the edition also contains excerpts from Machiavelli’s discourses, letters from his time as a working diplomat and some poetry. There is also an excellent selection of essays by critics and historians that add considerably to the reading experience and certainly to the size of the book, which including appendices and an index clocks in at over 300 pages. I thoroughly enjoyed it and as an example of putting a text in context then the Norton edition works superbly. It is “The Princes” 500th birthday next year and I wholeheartedly recommend it. A five star read.

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I better read on this.