The Prince 725was written in 1513 during a year of forced exile
for its author but was not published until 1532, five
years after his death.
The Prince is a brief treatise on statecraft in the
form of loosely organized essays. It was written at a
time when the Italian states were devastated by wars
and the machinations of foreign powers. Machia-
velli’s objective was to exhort Italian rulers to restore
Italy’s lost glory and establish a unified, stable, and
peaceful state. Unlike medieval literature in this
genre, Machiavelli does not invoke the concept of
an ideal ruler or notions such as the divine right of
kings. He was an acute observer of the contemporary
political scene. He believed that lessons of the past
and the current situation demanded that a ruthless
ruler wrest political power, eliminate his rivals, put
an end to factions, throw out foreign political pow-
ers, avoid mass discontent, and strengthen national
religion to bind people together. What counted in
politics was success and not virtue. He recommends
the use of harsh measures to register the impact of
authority as most men, he believes, are simple, greedy
and wicked. The state, he insists, must subordinate
moral principles to its survival and the welfare of its
citizens. For him the ultimate good of the people
justifies unethical conduct on the part of a ruler.
Machiavelli’s blatant dismissal of the virtuous,
the idealistic, and the moral from the world of poli-
tics earned him much opprobrium even though his
pragmatism paved the way for a “scientific” attitude
to politics.
Gulshan Taneja
ethicS in The Prince
Even though The Prince was written in 1513, it was
initially read in manuscript form and was published
only in 1532, five years after the death of its author.
Yet, by the time an English translation appeared
more than a hundred years later, in 1640, The Prince
had already earned great notoriety for its advocacy of
an amoral attitude to gaining and retaining political
power, so much so that the name of the author of The
Prince, Machiavelli, came to be used as a synonym
for diabolical scheming. Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama are full of “Machiavellian” politicians, villains,
and murderers. Machiavelli himself earns specific
mention in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Marlowe’s The
Jew of Malta, and Webster’s The White Devil, among
others. Macaulay remarked: “We doubt whether any
name in literary history be so generally odious” as
that of the author of The Prince.
The image of Machiavelli as a wily and evil
adviser to cruel, scheming princes refuses to go away.
Yet a careful reading of The Prince would convince
the reader otherwise. Machiavelli did not wish to
compose a primer for an ideal prince to create an
ideal state for a morally upright and virtuous and
law-abiding citizenry. His understanding of his-
torical precedence, as well as his experience as a
diplomat and a statesman, convinced him that living
realities and practical politics are different from ideal
constructs. A utopia was certainly far from his mind.
He makes no mention of such notions as the divine
rights of a king or the belief that a king must be
like a father to his children. His was an impassioned
response to a 16th-century Florentine political situ-
ation (no different from the other Italian city-states)
marked by chaos and anarchy and the maneuverings
of foreign powers. The situation had been made
worse by the weak and ineffective rulers of Italian
city-states. Machiavelli was an acute observer of the
political scene. He sought a solution to revive the
Italian nation that then lay in fragments, bereft of
the glory that he believed was her due.
He believed that for the creation and maintenance
of a unified nation-state, a ruthless ruler must rise and
wrest political power by hook or by crook, eliminate
his rivals through fraud or, if necessary, violence. He
firmly repudiated the primacy of morality as the
basis of an enduring state and advocated that moral
principles must be subordinated to the survival of the
state and the welfare of its citizens. As most men are
self-centered and greedy, a prince must therefore be
ready to lie, cheat, or treat his subjects with force and
cruelty in the interest of a stable society and lasting
peace. He believed that moral behavior was necessary
only if it benefited the prince’s people and that rulers
must only appear to be virtuous, as men are prone to
obey leaders who appear to be so.
The attitude that marks Machiavelli’s maxims
and the sheer clarity and simplicity with which he
puts forth his ideas about the rejuvenation of a sick
state through force, fraud, and dissimulation were
enough to shock the readers of his work. One can