Niccolò Machiavelli

Thomas More's Utopia and Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince are two extremely distinctive and contrasting products created during the Renaissance. Both the works produced by More and Machiavelli concern themselves with the fundamental issues of how society maintains itself and continues to work regardless of what occurs. The two contrasting scholars may both focus on society but yet both authors created works with exceedingly distinctive purposes behind the products. More's Utopia can be seen as a…

In the excerpt from “The Prince” by Niccolo Machiavelli, Machiavelli does not make rules, but creates guidelines for those who want to be rulers in the renaissance time period. In this time period Italy did not have a central government; it consisted of city-states that each had a ruler. These city-states fought all the time to show who had the most power. This often resulted in the destruction of city-states. Princes in this time were generalized in two ways. Either the ruler was liberal or 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…

Arts and the Machiavellian Principles Niccolo Machiavelli had a tragic life. Machiavelli was born in 1469 during the Medici family’s control of Italy. Machiavelli was initially employed as a man of letters by the state, and later became Second Chancellor and diplomat for 14 years. However, in 1512, Machiavelli was forced out of politics. He was charged with conspiracy against the rulers of the time, and was imprisoned and tortured. Eventually Machiavelli was exonerated and found not guilty.…

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Shanti Gurung History 101 Professor Montague 20 November, 2015 After disintegrative patterns of fourteenth century, a remarkable recovery of Europe took place that encompassed a revival of arts and letters in the fifteenth century, and a religious renaissance in the sixteenth century known as the Reformation. Machiavelli argues for the centralization of authority around a single figure through his book ‘The Prince’ which had a great impact in the…

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…

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…

coning, deceitful, ruthless, words often used to described the political philosophy of Niccólo Machiavelli. He was the first philosopher of the renaissance, lived in an Italy divided by states, he lived in Florence Italy under different Florentine empires. His exile ethic took place under the Medici family rule. "One should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person,”Machiavelli was a realist and made a point of writing things as they were rather than as they…

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…