Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince Essay

Through their powerful renderings of war and politics, Niccolò Machiavelli's iconoclastic 1532 political treatise The Prince and Shakespeare's 1599 historical tragedy Julius Caesar mutually seek to explore the nature of human weakness. A manifestation of Machiavelli's radically realpolitik interpretation of Renaissance humanism, The Prince subverts the traditional Christian moral zeitgeist, redefining weakness in instrumental terms - that a leader's results are superior in importance to his…

Niccolo Machiavelli would not have written the Prince if his life were any different. He was born in Florence, Italy in 1469. In 1494 he became an Italian diplomat for the city of Florence. He served while the medici family, who were a wealthy bankers who had high political power in Florence, were in exile. One of Machiavelli’s duties included his creation and maintenance of the Florentine militia whom he created because of his lack of trust of militia’s. However, with help from Pope Julius…

The Prince was a book that was written by Niccolo Machiavelli . Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat to several European courts. Machiavelli wrote The Prince in dedication to the prince of Italy at the time: Lorenzo De Medici. The Prince is a book about royals written by a commoner who was better informed on the matters of the royals. Machiavelli asserted that The Prince was the aggregation of the knowledge he had acquired over time through many difficulties, sometimes in dangerous ways as he…

Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in chapter 15 of his famous work, The Prince that “it is necessary for a ruler, if he wants to hold on to power, to learn how not to be good, and to know when it is and when it is not necessary to use this knowledge” (Machiavelli, The Prince, 48). Throughout The Prince, Machiavelli emphasizes the importance of being crafty and the necessity of being violent. He makes it clear that in order to be a successful ruler, one does not always have to be good; moreover, one…

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was an Italian logician and writer who both shocked and intrigued the mind of Renaissance Europe. In his most renowned work, Il Principe (The Prince)(1532), he set out his thoughts on how the ruler of a nation could set out to achieve power and how he may keep that power once he had secured it. In spite of the fact that Shakespeare's most notorious Cunning character is Richard III, the model of the political rogue out to secure his own particular position can be…

evil it might be? A few leaders probably came to mind, while it may seem like these leaders are ruthless to Niccolo Machiavelli these leaders are the perfect candidates for ruler ship. Machiavelli lies all the qualities he believes and effective leader should possess in his book The Prince. However, The Prince is not Machiavelli’s only piece of literature that describes the effective prince, this concept also comes up in his play La Mandragola which follows the story of Callimaco trying to…

theorise on government and how to rule. From the Republicanism of Plato to the Absolutism of Hobbes, countless theories abound about how to effectively govern. But none of these have come close to influence of a former Florentine official. Niccolo Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469 in Florence, Italy. He was the son of a legal official, and received an education which included the Greek and Roman classics (1). When he was 29 he acquired a job as secretary of the Second Chancery of Florence, the…

beginning of this semester we’ve studied numerous political theorists and their revolutionary contributions to modernity as we know it. None of them were more radically convincing than Niccolo Machiavelli and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who both wrote compelling arguments on how society should be structured. In “The Prince”, Machiavelli took a very cynical and harsh approach to leadership whereas Rousseau, in “The Social Contract”, took an open minded approach. Rousseau’s ideas were far more…

The immoral acquisition and abuse of authority is facilitated by the presumption of inherent human morality within political systems. This is the dominant intertextual perspective between William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, examined through the values of stability and morality within politics. Texts, as manifestations of values and attitudes, are incontrovertibly influenced by their distinct contexts. As such, though an intertextual perspective may exist…

Kim Jong-un: A Twenty-First Century Machiavelli Niccolò Machiavelli believed that in order to be an effective ruler one needed to use whatever methods were necessary to achieve success. In the book he published in the 1500s entitled, The Prince, Machiavelli advised rulers on how to act in order to gain power, keeping in mind that “the end justifies the means”. One current leader who appears to have modeled his leadership principles on Machiavellian teachings is Kim Jong-un, the “Supreme…