Machiavelli's The Prince

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The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, is a political treatise/non-fiction book written as a guide for how to be an effective ruler. Machiavelli intends to guide rulers on how to seize a country and how to destroy an enemy. He writes about rulers of his time and the things they did well and did not do so well. His purpose was to right a book to advise the aristocracy in what they should do to rule effectively so government would be run in the way his mind pictured it. He told the world the truth about how politics really were, and did not soften it up one bit. He had a perfect view in his mind of how a monarchy should be run and worked to achieve what he pictured for his monarchy.
Machiavelli begins the book by discussing the various types of …show more content…
He discusses that a very important factor of being a good and effective state is by having laws that keep your citizens and your country in order, and having a strong military force to protect and fight for your country when it needs defending. He explains that good laws and good arms directly rely on each other, and you cant effectively have one without the other. In this he means that in order for people to obey the laws, you need a strong military force to scare the people into following the laws, as there are consequences if they do not. This theory also works in the reverse. With a strong military force to support the country, good laws will follow because they have the military to back it up in case something goes wrong. Machiavelli does a good job of describing the relationship between the two, and how without both working in harmony the government will never prosper in the way that it wishes to. He effectively explains that if a ruler refuses to accept that war is necessary, he and his country will be weak and never expand and prosper. A country could have the best system of laws to govern there people, but without a strong military force the laws will be broken without consequence and the country will collapse from enemies that they have no way of defeating. With facts to support his claim, Machiavelli advises that all rulers should study warfare and prepare an army as well as

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