Italian · b. 1469
Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian Renaissance diplomat and political philosopher whose treatise The Prince founded modern political realism.
Niccolò Machiavelli served as a diplomat and official of the Florentine Republic before its fall, and drew on that hard political experience in his writing.
His most famous work, The Prince (1532), offers unsentimental advice to rulers on acquiring and maintaining power, arguing that effective politics must reckon with how people actually behave rather than how they ought to — a break with idealism that founded modern political realism and made “Machiavellian” a byword for cunning. His Discourses on Livy set out his republican thought.
Machiavelli remains one of the most influential and debated political thinkers in history, his clear-eyed analysis of power still studied and argued over.
by Niccolò Machiavelli
Written in 1513, published posthumously — a guide for a new prince on how to acquire and keep power. Machiavelli argues that political survival requires abandoning conventional morality when necessary: it is better to be feared than loved, princes must know how to be beasts, and fortune favours the bold.
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