The Prince

Nicolò Machiavelli

Would it be complimentary or critical to call someone Machiavellian? With this question in mind, I read Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. Still don’t know. Machiavelli does emphasise the need for a Prince to have two faces eg. merciful and cruel so maybe this is where the dichotomy arises. I found this interesting quote in Chapter 18:

Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.

I wonder if the sord sophistry had been coined by the time Machiavelli wrote that. Clearly, Roget’s Thesaurus was available for him.

Machiavelli was in favour of a republic and so it’s not surprising he portrayed a Princedom (a single source of power) as duplicitous thereby attracting the wrath of the Catholic Church which banned his book.