The Prince: An Introduction to Machiavelli’s Political Philosophy

The Only Resource You’ll Ever Need

This is a brief on Niccolò Machiavelli and The Prince that I prepared for my exam on political philosophy at the London School of Economics. May it help you in whatever way you need to prepare for Machiavelli. It’s not complete, but covers most areas.

It covers Machiavelli on topics of morality, history, fortuna, virtu, the relationship between virtu and fortuna, success, appearances, and glory. Treat this is a resource that you can refer back to rather than something that should be read in one go.

“Critiques Of” includes philosophers or ideas that challenge the topic. “Importance Of” explains the most important points on the topic from the philosopher’s point of view. And “Excerpts Of”, as the name suggests, offers a few quotes by the philosopher.

MACHIAVELLI BRIEF

INDEX

I MORALITY

II THE PEOPLE

III HISTORY

IV FORTUNA

V VIRTU

VI RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VIRTU AND FORTUNA

VII SUCCESS

VIII APPEARANCES

IX GLORY

I MORALITY

CRITIQUES OF:

• Aristotle: Rejects Aristotelian thesis about the unity of the virtues. Rulers did well when they did good; they earned the right to be obeyed and respected inasmuch as they showed themselves to be virtuous and morally upright.
• Aristotle is most likely to value stability and the means necessary to achieving it.
• Cicero: Rejects Ciceronian account of the origin of the republic/state through friendship.
• Shakespeare: “Murderous Machiavel”
• Index of Prohibited Books in 1559 and in France and England, he was regarded as godless.
• Rejects the tradition of natural jurisprudence — just war tradition. War is a right and duty — pursuit of freedom and glory.
• Strauss (1958): “Immoral and irreligious”
• Strauss: “A Teacher of Evil”
• Berlin (1972): He appreciates that in deviating from righteousness, princes do evil.
• Berlin: Machiavelli introduces the notion of multiple, compatible moralities. It is the beginning of pluralism.
• Berlin: Morality is incompatible with social ends; if you do things that are conventionally moral, the consequences will be much worse. But the reason that he is not immoral is because he does believe that those things are immoral. Christian values have an intrinsic value, but they are not compatible with a society that satisfies men’s permanent desires and wants.
• Berlin: he is contrasting his own “political” ethics with another ethical conception which governs the lives of persons who are of no interest to him. He is indeed rejecting one morality—the Christian—but not in favor of something that is not a morality at all but a game of skill, an activity called political, which is not concerned with ultimate human ends and is therefore not ethical at all.
• Berlin: Once you embark on a plan for the transformation of a society you must carry it through no matter at what cost: to fumble, to retreat, to be overcome by scruples is to betray your chosen cause. To be a physician is to be a professional, ready to burn, to cauterize, to amputate; if that is what the disease requires, then to stop halfway because of personal qualms, or some rule unrelated to your art and its technique, is a sign of muddle and weakness, and will always give you the worst of both worlds.
• Berlin: “One chooses as one chooses because one knows what one wants, and is ready to pay the price.”
• Berlin: But the well-being of the state is not the same as the well-being of the individual—”they cannot be governed in the same way.”
• Berlin: politics has its own morality; it does not require perpetual terror, but it approves, or at least permits, the use of force where it is needed to promote the ends of political society
• Berlin: If there is only one solution to the puzzle, then the only problems are first how to find it, then how to realize it, and finally how to convert others to the solution by persuasion or by force. But if this is not so (Machiavelli contrasts two ways of life, but there could be, and, save for fanatical monists, there obviously are, more than two), then the path is open to empiricism, pluralism, toleration, compromise. Toleration is historically the product of the realization of the irreconcilability of equally dogmatic faiths, and the practical improbability of complete victory of one over the other. Those who wished to survive realized that they had to tolerate error. They gradually came to see merits in diversity, and so became skeptical about definitive solutions in human affairs.
• Berlin: By breaking the original unity he helped to cause men to become aware of the necessity of making agonizing choices between incompatible alternatives, incompatible in practice or, worse still, for logical reasons, in public and private life (for the two could not, it became obvious, be genuinely kept distinct). His achievement is of the first order, if only because the dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light (it remains unsolved, but we have learned to live with it). Men had, no doubt, in practice, often enough experienced the conflict that Machiavelli made explicit. He converted its expression from a paradox into something approaching a commonplace.
• Berlin: The sword of which Meinecke spoke has not lost its edge: the wound has not healed. To know the worst is not always to be liberated from its consequences; nevertheless it is preferable to ignorance. It is this painful truth that Machiavelli forced on our attention, not by formulating it explicitly, but perhaps the more effectively by relegating much uncriticized traditional morality to the realm of utopia. This is what, at any rate, I should like to suggest. Where more than twenty interpretations hold the field, the addition of one more cannot be deemed an impertinence. At worst it will be no more than yet another attempt to solve the problem, now more than four centuries old, of which Croce at the end of his long life spoke as “una questione che forse non si chiuderà mai: la questione de Machiavelli.”
• Berlin Criticism: He assumes that different societies must always be at war with each other, since they have conflicting purposes. He sees history as one endless process of cutthroat competition, in which the only goal that rational men can have is to succeed in the eyes of their contemporaries and of posterity. He is good at bringing fantasies down to earth, but he assumes, as Mill was to complain about Bentham, that this is enough. He allows too little to the ideal impulses of men. He has no historical sense and little sense of economics. He has no inkling of the technological progress that is about to transform political and social life, and in particular the art of war. He does not understand how either individuals, communities, or cultures develop and transform themselves. Like Hobbes, he assumes that the argument or motive for self-preservation automatically outweighs all others.
• Nietzsche: Politics obeys its own rules, beyond good and evil.
• Croce (1925): Defender of political amorality.
• Russell (1959): A Manual for Gangsters, but Machiavelli appreciates distinction between power and glory.
• Denounced as an apostle of the Devil: for many, his teaching adopts the stance of immoralism or at least amoralism on the grounds that he counsels leaders to avoid the common values of justice, mercy, temperance, wisdom, and love of their people in preference to the use of cruelty, violence, fear and deception.
• Rousseau: Machiavelli, that is to say, was an unqualified republican who, under the guise of advising princes, tried to warn all free men of the dangers of despotism.
• Kelly (2010): Rejects the idea of natural law and common good.
• Smith (2006): The name Machiavelli has become synonymous with deception.
• Meinecke: Dirty hands or reason d’etat; rulers must do bad things for the common good.
• Meinecke: The dagger with which Machiavelli inflicted the wound that has never healed.
• Femia (2003): Conventional vices are political virtue and conventional virtue is political vice.
• Femia: Politics obeys its own logic, follows its own rules, and judges actions in accordance with its own standards of success or failure. He did not deny the absolute validity of Christian morality, still less its applicability to private relationships. He simply recognized the contradiction between politics and ethics.
• Skinner (1990): Prince must be able to enter into path of wrongdoing when necessary if he wants to promote the common good.
• Skinner (1978): Machiavelli prefers conformity to moral virtue ceteris paribus.
• Coleman (2000): To save the lift and preserve the freedom of one’s country requires a momentary setting aside of considerations of justice, kindness, praiseworthiness.
• Coleman: Once established he is not a tyrant who rules by unguided whim alone.
• The Discourses: “When the need accuses him, the effect excuses him” Romulus over killing his brother Remus.
• Smith (2006): “Extreme situations” What distinguishes Machiavelli from his predecessors, in many ways, is his attempt to take the extraordinary situation, the extreme situation, again, the extremes of political founding, conspiracies, wars, coups, as the normal situation and then makes morality fit that extreme… In those situations one must learn, as he says, how not to be good, to have to violate the conventions and cannons of ordinary morality. Machiavelli takes his bearings from these extreme states of emergency and in his own way, seeks to normalize them, to present them as the normal condition of politics.
• Smith: “What would great leaders have been without the prior existence of evil, of extreme circumstances?” We finally or fully understand what people are only in the most extreme situations. The paradox that, you might say, runs throughout all of Machiavelli’s morality is that the very possibility of virtue grows out of and, in fact, is even dependent upon the context of chaos, violence, and disorder that always threatens the political world… What would the Duke of Marlborough have been without Louis XIV? What would Washington have been without George III? What would Lincoln have been without the slave interest? What would Churchill have been without Hitler?
• Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian?
• Viroli: Machiavelli was not a scientist because his method was interpretive and historical; he wrote to persuade, to delight, to move, to impel to act — hardly the goals of the scientist.
• Gentile: Machiavelli wrote a satire.
• Wälder, Kaegi, and von Muralt: is a peace-loving humanist, who believed in order, stability, pleasure in life, in the disciplining of the aggressive elements of our nature into the kind of civilized harmony that he found in its finest form among the well-armed Swiss democracies of his own time.
• Hegel: Machiavelli is the man of genius who saw the need for uniting a chaotic collection of small and feeble principalities into a coherent whole.
• Hegel: The march of world history stands outside virtue, vice and justice.”
• The Jesuits: “the devil’s partner in crime,” “a dishonorable writer and an unbeliever.”
• E.W. Cochrane: He did not deny the validity of Christian morality, and did not pretend that a crime required by political necessity was any the less a crime. Rather he discovered…that this morality simply did not hold in political affairs, and that any policy based on the assumption that it did, would end in disaster. His factual objective description of contemporary practices is a sign not of cynicism or detachment but of anguish.

IMPORTANCE OF:

• Absence of conventional standards of morality: he understands that sometimes it is necessary for the prince to deviate from conventional standards of morality; holds conventional virtue in high regard, but appreciates the necessities of modern politics.
• Does not respect to the just, the noble and the sacred: elevated amoral pragmatism into a desirable principle.
• No standard outside history, which is a series of physical events, no transcendent meaning, no teleology
• Politics defined in supremacy of coercive power: divorces legitimacy from morality; as long as the prince maintains, expands the power of the state, not necessarily by righteous means, he gains legitimacy; whoever has the right to command; but goodness does not ensure power and the good person has no more authority by virtue of being good.
• Authority and power essentially coequal.
• Morality of politics is not the same as conventional morality
• Dirty hands: the problem of dirty hands refers to the conflict of duties, again conflict of moralities between the harsh requirements of politics and the equally demanding desire for moral purity, to keep the world at a distance. Machiavelli doesn’t deny that there is something deeply admirable about the desire to remain morally pure, morally decent, morally innocent, but he just wants to say this is a very different morality from the morality of politics.
• Machiavelli is a realist advocating the suspension of commonplace ethics in matters of politics. Moral values have no place in the sorts of decisions that political leaders must make, and it is a category error of the gravest sort to think otherwise.
• Political jungle: the world of politics is depicted as a jungle in which there is no reality but power, and power is the reward of ruthlessness, ferocity, and cunning. In such a jungle the tyrant is king, and republican ideals –justice, liberty, equality — count for little. At best, they are pleasing fictions that can be used to disguise the exercise of naked power.

EXCERPTS OF:

“Our religion,” he writes, obviously thinking of the Catholic Christianity of his time. “Our religion,” he writes, “has glorified humble and contemplative men, monks, priests, humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action. It is assigned as man’s highest good humility, abnegation, and contempt for mundane things,” whereas the other, that is to say the ancient moral code, “whereas the other identified it with magnanimity, bodily strength, and everything that conduces to make men very bold. And if our religion,” he says, “demands that in you there be strength what it asks for is the strength to suffer rather than to do bold things.”

“It would be ‘praiseworthy’ or ‘laudable’ for a prince to posses all those qualities normally regarded as good, but then adds that these ‘good’ princes would be crushed in a world of evil men. Such evident neutrality fits in with the idea that politics is the sphere of instrumental rationality, where moral judgments can have no practical relevance”

II THE PEOPLE

CRITIQUE OF:

• Plato/Aristotle: The rule of the people is always fickle and unstable and subject to whim and passion.

IMPORTANCE OF:

• Human motives: a) pleasure + satisfaction (the majority of people) b) the power to rule others (the minority);
• Human nature does not change: people are good when it suits them, but they stop to be good when its ceases to suit them
• People must not hate the prince, else it causes instability: Fortresses will not save the prince if the people hate him; the purpose for the prince is not to ensure that the people have a good life, but he must ensure that the people do not hate him; you need to keep the balance of rear right; do not try to please people.
• People are happy as long as their status quo is intact, else revolution: It requires little to keep people happy and if they are controlled in the right way they are obedient and complacent. However if the prince oppresses them, the people will not hesitate to rise up against the prince.
• People are predictable: they are ruled by desires and fears; they are gullible and passive, and it is for this reason that Machiavelli warns of the necessity to win their support and use them as a counterweight to the scheming and treacherous nobility.
• People are more reliable than nobles: People are more constant and reliable than nobles; people lack ambition and do not have the desire to dominate and control; Machiavelli feels more comfortable directing power to the people rather than to the nobles; the people are the dominant social power as they can be more trusted. Remember: the prince was written for a dysfunctional society to restore stability and health.

EXCERPTS OF:

“One can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal, timid of danger and avid of profit… Love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes”

“Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it, but when they are too free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become everywhere rampant.”

III HISTORY

CRITIQUES OF:

• Cicero: Historia Est Magistra Vitae
• Famia (2003): He was more like a physician than a physicist, diagnosing his patient’s illness and then prescribing a remedy based on what has worked in the past.

IMPORTANCE OF:

• History as a lesson to appear virtuous: as Machiavelli relies on historical examples rather than theory, his historical lessons teach the prince to appear virtuous. It teaches that successful men who have followed the conventional virtues when possible, have always used force when necessary. They then took care to give the appearance of having been conventionally virtuous. The aim of a prince, then, is to be judged honorable and be universally praised. Especially if he is not, in fact, a conventionally virtuous man, he should be so prudent as to know how to escape the evil reputation attached to those vices which could lose him his state.
• Good laws are a function of people obeying them and people are more likely to obey when a prince appears to be virtuous. In other words, the legitimacy of laws rests entirely upon the threat of coercive force. Consequently, Machiavelli is led to conclude that fear is always preferable to affection in subjects, just as violence and deception are superior to legality in effectively controlling them.
• History reveals patterns: The Prince is full of references to recent history and contemporary politics, and certainly reflects Machiavelli’s experience in the chancery service. In all his works he supports his general propositions with exampled drawn from several different periods of history — thus suggesting that he appreciates the difference between a type of behavior characteristic of some particular period and a more general historical law.
• History lessons: don’t judge by intentions but by results; sometimes you have to deviate from standards of morality to achieve your end.

EXCERPT OF:

“Things for as they are for things as they are imagined”

“Whoever wishes to see what has to be considers what has been; for all worldly things in every time have their own counterpart in ancient times. That arises because these are the work of men, who have and always had the same passions, and they must of necessity result in the same effect”

“Since there cannot be good laws without good arms, I will consider laws but speak of arms.”

IV FORTUNA

CRITIQUES OF:

• Strauss (1969): Others see it as ungovernable product of man’s actions.
• Strauss: Definitely external to human will and consciousness.
• Sadlier (2009): The utterly changing circumstances of political life.

IMPORTANCE OF:

• The goddess fortuna: she is the arbiter of half the things we do but the other half is within our own control. It means that our life is a series of actions and reactions to unforeseen and unintended consequences.
• Preparation to counter fortuna: princes should always act to solve problems before problems fully manifest themselves; fortuna may be resisted by human beings, but only in those circumstances where virtù and wisdom have already prepared for her inevitable arrival; virtuous ruler will take precaution to avoid damage by wild winds of fortune

EXCERPTS OF:

“One of our destructive rivers which, when it is angry, turns the plains into lakes, throws down the trees and buildings, takes earth from one spot, puts it in another; everyone flees before the flood; everyone yields to its fury and nowhere can repel it.”

“She shows her power where virtù and wisdom do not prepare to resist her, and directs her fury where she knows that no dykes or embankments are ready to hold her”

V VIRTU

CRITIQUE OF:

• Smith (2006): “Calculated use of cruelty”

IMPORTANCE OF:

• Opposite of Aristotle’s moral virtues: princely virtù becomes whatever range of qualities the prince may find it necessary to acquire in order to maintain his regime and achieve great things. His prudence deals with treating the unintended consequences of necessity, fortuna, opportunistically… although he does not preach abandoning conventional moral norms in general… Virtues are not judged such by theoretical reason by rather by practical reason.
• Learn how to be ungodly: of flexible disposition’, forsaking conventional virtue to benefit to the state; ability to act swiftly and effectively to do anything to secure good of the state… even diverging from conventional morality; only honor word when it suits him; while he accepts cruelty at times, praise reserved for those who know how and when to use force and guile.
• The lion and the fox: learning how to recognize traps as does the fox and to frighten away wolves as does the lion; avoid evil if possible but do not hesitate to be evil if necessary
• Cesare Borgia: a positive example is given of how Cesare Borgia first gave full powers to a cruel man to pacify a province and then had this man decapitated and his body placed in the main square in order to pretend it was not Borgia who had been cruel… And having seized this opportunity he had emplaced one morning in the piazza in two pieces, with a piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him. He had him cut in two. The bloody knife and piece of wood beside him. “The ferocity of this spectacle,” Machiavelli concludes, “left the people at once satisfied and stupefied.” That, of course, is Machiavelli’s virtù, princely virtue, what you do to leave the people satisfied and stupefied. What we might call today shock and awe.
• Evil if necessary: range of personal qualities that the prince will find it necessary to acquire in order to “maintain his state” and “to achieve great things”, the two standard marker of power for him. Machiavelli expects princes of the highest virtù to be capable, as the situation requires, of behaving in a completely evil fashion.
• Virtue = virility: a force of nature such as drive, ambition, courage and will-power. It is a means to an end and therefore always ambiguous (drive, ambition, courage, and will-power); virtù is made good in the ability to acquire and master an end such as power.
• The Art of War: the strategic prowess of the general who adapts to different battlefield conditions on a different scale; to possess virtù is indeed to have mastered all the rules connected with the effective application of power. Virtù is to power politics what conventional virtù is to those thinkers who suppose that moral goodness is sufficient to be a legitimate ruler:

VI RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VIRTU AND FORTUNA

CRITIQUES OF:

• Pocock (1975): The virtuous ruler, through the correct management of state apparatus, can limit negative effect of fortuna.
• Smith (2006): the Founding Fathers: opportunity gave them the matter to introduce any form they please. They created something out of nothing. They only had the occasion, audacity and cunningness to take advantage of the situation. Such opportunity made the men successful and their excellent virtue made them recognize opportunity.

IMPORTANCE OF:

• Impetuous instead of cautious: Machiavelli advises that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune, as a woman, lets herself be overcome by youthful force and boldness.
• Fortuna is the enemy of political order, the ultimate threat to the safety and security of the state. His fortune is a malevolent and uncompromising font of human misery, affliction, and disaster. While human Fortuna may be responsible for such success as human beings achieve, no man can act effectively when directly opposed by the goddess.
• Tame fortuna: Profound political skill in using power to tame “fortuna”. The opportunity to use that skill at the most favorable circumstance. That is what virtù provides: the ability to respond to fortune at any time in and in any way that is necessary.
• You have to be able to seize the opportunity when it arises.

VII SUCCESS

CRITIQUES OF:

• Skinner (1978): “Coercive authority within a given set of territory.”
• Kelly (2010): “The prince needs to be ready to get his hands dirty.”
• Femia (2003): A successful prince must have the capacity to transform his own character to suit changing circumstances.
• Coleman (2000): “Experience” A successful prince must therefore be sufficiently experienced so that he is prepared to seize opportunities that require that he does what is necessary before adverse times come upon him.
• Smith (2006): “A philosopher and reformer” Who is Machiavelli but an archetypal, unarmed prophet? He has no troops. He has no territory. He controls no real estate. He’s been banished, yet he is clearly attempting to conquer, comparing himself to Columbus, to conquer in large part through the transformation of our understanding of good and evil, of virtue and vice. In other words, to make people obey you, you must first make them believe you. Machiavelli’s prophetic prince, in other words, must have some of the qualities of a philosopher, as well as a religious reformer trying to reshape and remold human opinion, especially opinion over, as we said, good and evil, just and unjust.
• Smith: The true statesman, the true prince for Machiavelli, must be prepared to mix a love of the common good, a love of his own people, with a streak of cruelty that is often regarded as essential for a great ruler in general, another part of knowing how not to be good, knowing when and how to use cruelty or what Machiavelli tellingly calls “cruelty well used.”
• Femia (2003): “An Illusion” Men are reluctant, though, to accept this harsh truth, and try to soften it by creating an illusory world of ideals that give a spurious moral justification to our predatory instinct.

IMPORTANCE OF:

• State and warcraft: a successful prince must always be aware of foreign powers and the threat of invasion. A focus on power diplomacy and warcraft; the methods for achieving obedience are varied, and depend heavily upon foresight that the prince exercises. Hence, the successful ruler needs special training
• The success of the people: the success of the prince depends on how obedient the people are
• Knows when to use violence and when to cease: the successful Prince cannot eradicate Fortuna but he can adapt his character to tame her. The successful prince is not merely one who will use violence when necessary but who knows how to use it and when to cease. He needs to know when to strike and when to stay one’s hand.

EXCERPTS OF:

“If it were possible to change one’s nature to suit the times and circumstances, one would always be successful”

“In discussing this subject, I draw up an original set of rules. But since my intention is to say something that will prove of practical use to the inquirer, I have thought it proper to represent things as they are in real truth, rather than as they are imagined. Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation… Political life is, at bottom, a gladiatorial arena where the strong subdue the weak and obtain preferential access to the limited number of goods.”

“A new prince is prepared to vary his conduct as the winds of fortune and changing circumstances constrain him and… not deviate from right conduct if possible, but be capable of entering upon the path of wrongdoing when this becomes necessary.”

VIII APPEARANCES

CRITIQUES OF:

• How realistic is it that the prince is not transparent?
• Sadlier (2009): politics based on what people actually do rather than what they should do. Learn how not to be good, but you must appear to be good. A ruler has to be decisive and cruel; appearing to be compassionate/popular.
• The Art of Fear: neither loved, nor hated; all men are wicked thus you do not need to keep faith with him.
• Chiron the centaur: half man, half beast; cunning as a man, cruel as a beast.
• Machiavelli assumes that all men are wicked and self-interested. To what extent is that realistic?

IMPORTANCE OF:

• History judges people by what they have appeared to be: history preserves reputations for great man, what they appeared to do and be, and not what they were
• Men judge by appearances: A prince should therefore seem to be merciful, trustworthy, full of integrity, humanity and religiously devout; he must especially appear to be pious, for men judge more by the eyes than by the hands, all see what a prince appears to be, few feel what he is, and those few will not dare oppose themselves to the many when the opinion of the majority of the common people is sustained by the majesty of the political community.
• The skills needed to cultivate appearances, a reputation for being great and excellent, are the skills that will encourage a people’s love.
• It would be better if everybody be virtuous, but since that is not realistic, the prince needs to be prudent enough to avoid the scandal of vice which would lose him the state.
• Appearance is good, practice is harmful: the prince, he writes, should appear all mercy, all faith, all honesty, all humanity and all religion, he writes, adding nothing is more necessary to appear to have this last quality. The point is clear. The appearance of religion, by which he clearly means Christianity, is good while the actual practice of it is harmful.
• Generosity does not work because in order to be generous, the prince needs to tax the people at the same time.
• Clemency does not work because if you are too merciful you are prone to be attacked by your enemies. This behavior is therefore self-destructive and self-defeating (I.E. when Scorpio forgave a mutiny, there was another one)
• If followed, lead to one’s ruin and others which appear vices would result in one’s greater security and well-being. The real skill is in judging which apparent vices and virtues really are vices and virtues in circumstances.

EXCERPT OF:

“He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.”

IX GLORY

CRITIQUE OF:

• The prince seems outright cruel and evil, and not worthy of being called glorious and honorable.

IMPORTANCE OF:

• Machiavelli distinguishes between power and glory: Machiavelli is more than the amoral pragmatist he is sometimes made out to be. The distinction made between power and glory indicates that, in Machiavelli’s view, some princes are better than others. While any prince can achieve and maintain power, glory remains a more elusive goal. Although Machiavelli is primarily concerned with how princes perform as rulers, he also gives an assessment of the different kinds of princes. Machiavelli’s view is that the prince who rises and survives by means of treachery and the prince who succeeds by his innate prowess are both technically princes. But he also admits that the two are not equal in honor or glory, and, perhaps, even moral worth.
• Glory as yardstick to measure success of prince: Instead, the best leaders were those who practiced cruel or evil acts as a matter of necessity rather than because their positions allowed it. The idea of glory that he discusses becomes the yardstick by which a great ruler is measured, not how feared he was by his subjects or enemies.
• Image Management: successful leadership involves a delicate relationship between balanced and carefully meted cruelty (only when circumstances demand it), careful diplomacy, and attention to the idea of his or her glory
• With the people on his side, the prince is more likely to achieve his goals of a robust civil life for his people and eternal glory for himself.

EXCERPT OF:

“Agathocles, the Sicilian, became King of Syracuse not only from a private but from a low and abject position. This man, the son of a potter, through all the changes in his fortunes always led an infamous life. Nevertheless, he accompanied his infamies with so much ability of mind and body that, having devoted himself to the military profession, he rose through its ranks to be Praetor of Syracuse. Being established in that position, and having deliberately resolved to make himself prince and to seize by violence, without obligation to others, that which had been conceded to him by assent, he came to an understanding for this purpose with Hamilcar, the Carthaginian, who, with his army, was fighting in Sicily. One morning he assembled the people and senate of Syracuse, as if he had to discuss with them things relating to the Republic, and at a given signal the soldiers killed all the senators and the richest of the people; these dead, he seized and held the princedom of that city without any civil commotion. And although he was twice routed by the Carthaginians, and ultimately besieged, yet not only was he able to defend his city, but leaving part of his men for its defence, with the others he attacked Africa, and in a short time raised the siege of Syracuse. The Carthaginians, reduced to extreme necessity, were compelled to come to terms with Agathocles, and, leaving Sicily to him, had to be content with the possession of Africa.”

“Yet it cannot be called talent to slay fellow-citizens, to deceive friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; such methods may gain empire, but not glory. Still, if the courage of Agathocles in entering into and extricating himself from dangers be considered, together with his greatness of mind in enduring overcoming hardships, it cannot be seen why he should be esteemed less than the most notable captain. Nevertheless, his barbarous cruelty and inhumanity with infinite wickednesses do not permit him to be celebrated among the most excellent men. What he achieved cannot be attributed either to fortune or to genius.”

That is it. This resource from Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy is very useful.