My Weekly Book

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

It is just possible (Dan Brown notwithstanding – that was a joke, by the way) that Machiavelli is the single most slandered author in any language, ever. Did you know, for example that his supposedly famous phrase ‘the end justifies the means’ is described by the editor of the edition I am reading as “a gross mistranslation” and is in fact something far more subtle and considered? All this just goes to prove how this slim little volume, just 88 pages in my edition, which was knocked out by its author as a quick response to current circumstances in 16th-century Italy and was never supposed to cause all this fuss and bother, has had an impact far above and beyond its slim size and limited scope. But it’s impossible to approach it without encountering a very large amount of baggage.

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And it’s personal baggage too. I’ve done at least two courses of academic study that required me to read this. Like a few other things I’ve read recently I discover that, on trying to sit down and plough through the whole thing, that there are familiar passages and sections but that I must have only dipped into it before. Perhaps I employed that much-favoured student maxim that paying out good cash for a book and displaying it prominently on a shelf is *exactly the same* as reading it. Who knows. Whatever happened, past sins are now being atoned for.

As to the book itself. It’s deceptively easy to read, anecdotal and interesting, and the edition I’ve got (The World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, introduction by Peter Bondanella) attempts to capture the metaphor and dense, poetic language of the original in its translation. In many respects it is strikingly modern, in many others wholly of its time. For example, the issue of putting political opponents to death which was certainly going on overtly in England more or less up until the time of the Civil War, is something we have trouble coming to terms with as post-Enlightenment readers. But I found myself reading this as a metaphor for current political practice where it is perfectly acceptable to sack, discredit and cast opponents into the outer darkness - and suddenly I was asking myself, doesn’t Machiavelli’s advice suddenly seem very, very familiar?

Similarly, the extent to which he is preoccupied with good governance is striking for a man of his times. One of his recommendations to the prince (who can be elected as well as a hereditary ruler or a conqueror, incidentally) is to keep the love of the common people if he intends to hang on to his throne. It’s important to judge this book against the political background at the time, when Italy was a collection of city-states and not a unified nation. In many ways similar to the Holy Roman Empire (Germany, Austria-Hungary) and Spain, which was a series of provinces with names like Castille, Aragon and Navarre. When Machiavelli was writing The Prince they had only recently been unified and were still far from being anything close to a nation state. I find it particularly interesting that it was these three ‘young’ nations that were the ones that developed a taste for fascism in the 20th century and wonder how far back the seeds of those problems were sown. When would a plea for good governance, heeded, have actually made a difference?

Some links:

• Highly detailed Wikipedia entry
• Project Gutenberg
• The Prince as a satire
• Of love and fear: Machiavelli’s The Prince

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 2:38 pm and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.