The Prince

The Prince, written sometime in the early 16th century by Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), is widely considered to be the first book written explicitly as an examination of political science. Among the most original thinkers of the Renaissance, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries his name would be synonymous with cruelty, deviousness, and purposefully destructive rationality. No political thinker was ever more demonized or misunderstood than Machiavelli. The main source of this misunderstanding, as well as …

…Bill Clinton, as well as other modern events. You can easily identify Machiavellian aspects in every nook and cranny of our modern system of government, so much so that one has to wonder if the ideal of Machiavelli’s prince has manifested itself as the aggregate of our government as it stands today. Good laws and good arms do, indeed, continue to be the foundation of a strong principality in the year of our Lord, 2002.