Machiavelli's work 'The Prince'

Machiavelli's work 'The Prince'

Introduction

Niccolo Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469 in Florence, Italy. Machiavelli was a political philosopher and diplomat during the Renaissance, and is most famous for his political treatise, The Prince (1513), that has become a cornerstone of modern political philosophy. In The Prince, Machiavelli offered a monarchical ruler advice designed to keep that ruler in power. He recommended policies that would discourage mass political activism, and channel subjects' energies into private pursuits. Machiavelli wanted to persuade the monarch that he could best preserve his power by the judicious use of violence, by respecting private property and the traditions of his subjects, and by promoting material prosperity. (Rachum, 1979)

Machiavelli held that political life cannot be governed by a single set of moral or religious absolutes, and that the monarch may sometimes be excused for performing acts of violence and deception that would be ethically indefensible in private life. During the Renaissance Italy was a scene of intense political conflict involving the dominant city-states of Florence, Milan, Venice, and Naples, plus the Papacy, France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire? Each city attempted to protect itself by playing the larger powers off against each other. The result was massive political intrigue, blackmail, and violence. The Prince was written against this backdrop, and in its conclusion Machiavelli issued an impassioned call for Italian unity, and an end to foreign intervention (Wood, 1993).

Summary

Machiavelli's other major work, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (1513-21), was mainly concerned with republics, defined as states controlled by a politically active citizenry. In "Discourses" he emphasized that for a republic to survive, it needed to foster a spirit of patriotism and civic virtue among its citizens. Machiavelli argued that a republic would be strengthened by the conflicts generated through open political participation and debate. Partly because Machiavelli's pragmatic view of the relationship between ethics and politics, he has been widely misinterpreted. The adjective "Machiavellian" has become a pejorative used to describe a politician who manipulates others in an opportunistic and deceptive way“(Wood, 1993).

Niccolo Machiavelli's often-slandered volume "The Prince", written in 1513, remains one of the single most important works in Western political thought, and represents one of the fundamental readings in Western political science. "The Prince" was written in response to the decay of the Italian states-system. (Wood, 1993) For over a century, Venice, Milan, Florence, the Papacy, and the Kingdom of Naples had vied for supremacy in the Italian peninsula, changing alliances and policies in order to ensure that no one state became supreme. Late in the 15th century, in an effort to change the regional balance of power, Italian states invited first France and later the Hapsburg Empire (Spain and Austria, at the time) to participate in inter-Italian warfare. The outside powers proved overwhelmingly powerful: even coalitions of all five Italian states failed to successfully resist French and Hapsburg armies. By the middle of the 16th century, Italy had become a battleground for the ambitions of France and ...