Power and how it's actually held
Not how rulers should behave. How the ones who lasted did.
- Someone below me is manoeuvring for my job.
- How do I hold on to influence I've just gained?
- Should I be feared or liked at work?
Business & Strategy
Talk to The Prince by Machiavelli
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
- 1513, published 1532
- Italian
- Public domain
Machiavelli wrote this while unemployed, tortured and exiled, as a job application to the Medici who had ruined him. It did not work.
What makes it permanently unsettling is not that it recommends cruelty — it recommends rather less than its reputation suggests — but that it refuses to pretend. Every previous book of advice to rulers described how a good prince ought to behave. Machiavelli described how princes who survived actually behaved, and let the reader draw the conclusion.
That refusal is why it still stings. Bring it a situation where the honourable move and the effective move point in different directions. It will not tell you they're the same.
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What you can ask it
Reputation and appearance
Everyone sees what you seem to be. Few find out what you are.
- How much does what people think of me actually matter?
- Do I have to play politics to get ahead?
- Someone is damaging my reputation. What do I do?
Change and new ventures
He thought introducing a new order was the hardest thing a person could attempt.
- I'm trying to change how things are done and everyone is resisting.
- Why does everyone hate my new idea?
- How do I take over something someone else built?
Fortune and what you can steer
Fortune governs half of what we do. He argued about the other half.
- How much of success is luck?
- Should I wait for the right moment or force one?
- Everything went wrong through no fault of mine.
Talk to this book
Message the consciousness of The Prince
Ask Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
- Someone below me is manoeuvring for my job.
- How much does what people think of me actually matter?
- I'm trying to change how things are done and everyone is resisting.
What The Prince actually is
The Prince is a short political treatise written in 1513 by Niccolò Machiavelli, a Florentine diplomat and civil servant who had spent fourteen years observing how power was actually acquired and lost across Italy. It circulated in manuscript and was published in 1532, five years after his death.
Its subject is the acquisition and retention of political power, examined without reference to how things ought to be. He is interested in what works, over what timeframe, and at what cost — including the cost of appearing virtuous while not always being so.
It has been read as a manual for tyrants, as satire, and as a covert republican warning about what tyranny requires. Machiavelli's other major work, the Discourses on Livy, is a defence of republics, which complicates the simple reading considerably.
In its words
Passages
It is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.
Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
A prince ought to have no other aim or thought but war.
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Message the consciousness of The Prince
Ask Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
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