The Art of War

Dedicated to the Florentine ruler Lorenzo II de’ Medici, Machiavelli’s Prince is a guidebook on how to acquire power and stabilize your state. Inscribed in a tradition of political advice books , what sets it apart from those that came before him are the radical and obviously wicked guidelines it puts forwards. However, before establishing whether or not The Prince is truly a handbook of wickedness, this term must be elucidated. Wickedness, synonym of evilness, is commonly interpreted as either…

Pressfield, author of The War of Art, states that most people have two lives: the life we live and the unlived life within us, but between the two stands resistance. Resistance is a disease that is more widespread than the common cold and more deadly than the Bubonic Plague. Every human being on planet Earth is a carrier of this disease, it is a disease that will cripple and prevent anyone from achieving what the carrier was put on this planet to do; whether that calling be art, music, writing,…

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…

The ANPO: Art X war documentary is amazing collection of oil painting, photographs, movie clips, and contemporary art. I think it is an important tool to understand the conflict between Japanese labor unions, students, and general people vs. Japanese government and the U.S. base camps. This movie explores the ANPO Treaty and chaos created by it through the lenses of Japanese great artists, who had live experience from the conflict. I did not know much about the treaty and post WWII conflict in…

The Second World War also continued the First World War tradition of documenting the western theatres in landscapes. By the early 1920s, a new group of Canadian painters emerged with the aim to help establish a Canadian identity in art. These seven artists, known as the Group of Seven, traveled around central and northern Ontario to paint landscapes with broad sweeping brushstrokes, which ultimately become their signature style. From 1920 until 1931, their Canadian landscapes were held in eight…

In The Prince, Machiavelli writes on how a prince is to take power and how to maintain his position (Ryan, 2012, p.364). The concept of virtù is introduced, as an essential component that a prince must possess. It could be translated as the ability, quality or determination that secures political success (Ryan, 2012, p.375). Machiavelli finds an example of a virtuous prince in Cesare Borgia, described as a skillful leader who was only defeated by the negative effects of fortuna (Ryan, 2012,…

Machiavelli is a man of many labels, but perhaps the most accurate is that he was a main of calculation. For all the talk of evil, cruelty and virtues, he could really be seen as the father of the cost-benefit analysis. In that same light, Machiavelli’s virtù and traditional virtues should not be seen as at odds, but rather as tools that work in tandem. To view them as wholly incompatible by nature is a narrow view at best, and woefully idealistic at worst. Indeed, they appear incompatible only…

Machiavelli – asses machiavelli’s claim that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. Is such a dictum useful in democratic politics? The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, offers many different ideas about how to gain and maintain political Power. One of the main stigmas within the entire text is that, as a leader, it Is better to be feared then loved. As with majority of Machiavelli’s dictums this particular point is still incredibly relevant and useful in democratic politics.…

The Prince 1.) Machiavelli wrote The Prince because he wanted to win the favor of Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici by dedicating him the book. He also just wanted to give general advice on leadership and power, as well as draw attention to his belief that a prince should be more successful over being good and honest. 2.) The major themes of The Prince are Love vs Fear; a prince should be loved to stay in power, but his people should also have a sense of fear from him so they obey him. Power;…

"scene of action." Once you do something it affects everything else that happens in your life. Caution tells you "not to make moves too hastily." Franklin gives an example of how Caution pertains to war by saying "as the game thereby becomes more the image of human life, and particularly of war." When at war one must be careful and beware of his…