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What You’ll Love about… The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Critics tend to think of The Prince as an important work in the history of political philosophy, but we can really just leave out that word “political.” The text doesn’t get enough credit for its innovative work within several philosophical traditions. I admire it for its usefulness, which is more immediately apparent than in most philosophical texts. The way that Machiavelli applies human intelligence to the problems of politics can be used as a model for analyzing other subjects, and various parts of the text can be usefully applied in a broad range of contexts and situations.
The Prince is a masterpiece of empiricism (or, to use Machiavelli’s term, “practical truth”), which is the idea that knowledge is based on observation. Although Machiavelli refers to received knowledge from time to time, and he takes some examples from literature (for example, he refers to the story of Chiron tutoring Achilles to illustrate his point that men need to be half man and half beast), most of The Prince draws on examples from recent history and analyzes them practically outside of the context of cultural, religious, or political ideology. What I prize about The Prince is how incisively it cuts through the distractions of culture, which in many cases appear to have been erected to obscure reality and to help the wealthy and powerful consolidate and preserve…
