Machiavellian Maxims

Machiavellian Maxims: Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 after losing his job in Florence's government, being tortured and exiled to his farm, and its blunt advice that a ruler must learn 'how not to be good' turned his surname into a synonym for cunning, amoral statecraft.

The Prince: The book circulated only in manuscript during Machiavelli's life and was first printed in 1532, five years after his death, then landed on the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1559.

Strappado: Arrested in 1513 on suspicion of plotting against the Medici, Machiavelli was hoisted by his bound wrists and dropped six times on this torture device, and he never confessed to anything.

Cesare Borgia: Machiavelli's model prince had his own harsh governor Remirro de Orco cut in two and displayed in the square at Cesena in 1502, a spectacle Machiavelli said left the people 'satisfied and stupefied.'

Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici: The Prince was dedicated to him as a job application, and an old Florentine story claims he paid more attention to a pair of hunting dogs presented to him the same day.

Chapter XVII of The Prince: Home of the famous line that it is safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both, but Machiavelli adds a warning people forget: a prince must never be hated, and the surest way to be hated is to seize his subjects' property.

Fortuna: Machiavelli compared fortune to a violent flooding river and argued it controls only half of human affairs, so a wise ruler builds dikes and embankments during calm weather.

The Ends Justify The Means: The slogan most tied to Machiavelli never appears in The Prince; the closest line says that in the actions of princes 'one looks to the result.'

Discourses on Livy: Machiavelli's longer, less famous book praises republics and argues the people are wiser and more constant than princes, which has kept scholars arguing for centuries over which Machiavelli was the real one.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: In The Social Contract he claimed The Prince was secretly a satire, 'the book of republicans,' teaching ordinary people what tyrants really do while pretending to advise kings.

Frederick the Great: As crown prince he wrote Anti-Machiavel, a point by point rebuttal edited by Voltaire and published in 1740, then within months of becoming king that same year he invaded Silesia.

Christopher Marlowe: The prologue of The Jew of Malta is spoken by a ghost named 'Machevil,' showing how quickly Elizabethan England turned the Florentine diplomat into a stock stage villain.

Thomas Babington Macaulay: His 1827 essay repeated the popular story that 'Old Nick,' a nickname for the Devil, came from Niccolò, though word historians consider that a folk etymology.

Mach IV Scale: Psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Geis built this 1970 personality test from statements adapted from The Prince, and people who score high are better at bluffing and manipulating in lab games.

Dark Triad: In 2002 psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams grouped Machiavellianism with narcissism and psychopathy, making a 500 year old book the namesake of a modern personality trait.

La Mandragola: Machiavelli was also a hit playwright, and this comedy about a gullible husband tricked with a fake fertility potion is still ranked among the best plays of the Italian Renaissance.

The Art of War (Machiavelli): Printed in 1521, it was the only major political work Machiavelli saw published in his lifetime, and it pushed Florence to replace hired armies with its own citizen militia.

Condottieri: Machiavelli called these mercenary captains 'useless and dangerous,' disloyal in peace and cowardly in war, after watching them bleed Italian city states dry.

Letter to Francesco Vettori: In this 1513 letter Machiavelli describes spending his days gambling at a country inn, then changing into formal court robes each night to 'converse' with ancient authors, and announces a little work called De Principatibus.

Girolamo Savonarola: The Prince holds up the executed Florentine friar as the classic 'unarmed prophet,' arguing that armed prophets conquer while unarmed ones are ruined.

Benito Mussolini: In his 1924 essay Preludio al Machiavelli he praised The Prince as the statesman's essential handbook, one of many strongmen who claimed Machiavelli as a mentor.

Antonio Gramsci: Writing from a fascist prison, the Italian Marxist recast the revolutionary political party as 'The Modern Prince,' borrowing Machiavelli's idea of a founder who remakes a people.

Leo Strauss: His 1958 book Thoughts on Machiavelli opened by calling the Florentine 'a teacher of evil,' a verdict that shaped decades of American political philosophy.

Basilica of Santa Croce: Machiavelli's monument in Florence, added in 1787, carries the epitaph 'Tanto nomini nullum par elogium,' meaning no praise is equal to so great a name.

Isaiah Berlin: His 1971 essay The Originality of Machiavelli counted well over twenty competing interpretations of The Prince and argued its true shock was showing that political success and Christian virtue could be incompatible.