Machiavelli's The Prince

A recent acquisition of a collection of classics afforded me the opportunity to read The Prince. I had thought this would be interesting, having been impacting enough to have spawned a word to our language. The only impact the book had on me was a glazing over of the eyes and dulling of the brain.

Written in the first part of the sixteenth century by an unemployed petty officer of various royal courts in order to increase his own standing with the Medici family, this book is a long letter, a discourse on the manner in which a prince should act in order to best preserve his kingdom, social standing and power.

In twenty-six chapters Machiavelli covers many aspects of royal concerns for a prince of his time…matters of territory, domestic and foreign relations, military organization and hierarchy, and issues relating to the princes personal behavior, both public and private.

The substance of each chapter is essentially the same. Machiavelli gives his best advice as to what manner of behavior is best suited to every occasion for the prince; he then cites examples from his own time and as far back as the Greek and Roman empires to back up his arguments.

Herein lays the first of the reasons why this book was of little interest to me. Machiavelli had, as the introduction to this Penguin edition would have it, no particular authority on any of these subjects. For me then to lend any veracity to what he is saying in each case I would need to be able to confirm whether or not the historical examples he is using are valid or not. I am no expert on medieval or classical history, and so none of the names, occasions or locations was known to me. If one does not have a good background in these areas of history, one stands unable to lend credence to Machiavelli’s writing and it floats over the reader without substantial impact.

The second reason that I found little in this book to excite me is the very fact that it is aimed at the ears of a member of the medieval aristocracy. What care I for the manner in which the armed forces of a small city state in medieval Italy is organized? This for me is a book which has lost almost all of its relevance in every regard. My understanding from the glowing introduction to this piece by the translator is that The Prince remains as relevant today as it did in the Middle Ages because politics has not changed. Alas, I find politics today to be as irrelevant to my life as I probably would have politics in the past. I am not a political animal, and as such a book which covers such political manners of living is of no use to me.

This book is of course most widely known (though it would seem little actually read) for the fact that it so shamelessly states that a political personage needs to be two-faced, backstabbing and altogether, well, Machiavellian! I had looked forward to reading the exact manner in which this was portrayed in the original writing as part of the heritage of our language. In actually reading the book I discovered that there is only a relatively brief section in which the double-sided morals of realpolitik are discussed, and it’s nothing one doesn’t see obviously displayed by the jerks in your life every day. No big deal, and nothing you would really need to read this book to learn if it was something you were unsavory enough to read this book to want to learn about specifically in the first place.

What can I say for positives on this book? As ever with a book of this antiquity I enjoyed reading it for its own sake. I love reading first hand accounts of this age since it is about as close to time travel as I can get. As accounts from this period go, even here this is one which is relatively devoid of material which gives insight to the way people lived in this time, being as I stated earlier a book dealing with the lives of nobility, which in no time period represent what it is like to be a normal person.

Sigh. Oh well, I’ve read it now, I guess we can’t love them all can we?