The inner life
The Prince
Direct answer
The Prince is a short political treatise written by Niccolò Machiavelli in 1513 on how a ruler, especially a new one, acquires a state and holds on to it.
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At a glance
- Also called
- il principe
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Machiavellianism, Virtù and Fortuna, The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of War
The Prince is a short political treatise written by Niccolò Machiavelli in 1513 on how a ruler, especially a new one, acquires a state and holds on to it.
A plain educational schematic; it does not diagnose a condition or replace professional care.
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What is The Prince about?
In twenty-six chapters Machiavelli sorts the kinds of principality and the ways they are won, then turns to the conduct of the ruler. His break with earlier advice books is stated outright: he writes about how people do live, not how they ought to. A prince must therefore learn how not to be good when the safety of the state requires it, must be both fox and lion, and, if he cannot be loved and feared together, is safer feared, provided he is not hated.
The book closes with a call to free Italy from foreign armies. Readers have never agreed on its intent. It has been taken as cynical counsel to tyrants, as realism about politics, and, by Rousseau among others, as a covert warning to peoples about their rulers. Machiavelli's longer Discourses on Livy favour republics.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Power and influence.
What sets The Prince apart
Genre is the key to it. Advice books for rulers, the mirrors for princes, were an old form that told the ruler to be just, generous and devout. Machiavelli kept the form, even the Latin chapter headings, and reversed the content, testing each traditional virtue against whether it keeps a ruler in power. His model in several chapters is Cesare Borgia, whom he had met on embassy. The book is also short, a few hours' reading, and written in plain Italian, which helps explain how fast it spread.
- Original title: De principatibus, On Principalities
- Written: 1513, at Sant'Andrea in Percussina near Florence
- Dedicated to: Lorenzo de' Medici the younger
- First printed: Rome, 1532, by Antonio Blado
- Length: twenty-six chapters
- Model figure: Cesare Borgia, discussed in chapter seven
Often mistaken for something else: The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli's longer work, examine how republics stay free; The Prince examines how one man holds a state. The same author wrote both.
The story behind The Prince
Machiavelli had served the Florentine republic as a secretary and envoy for fourteen years when the Medici returned in 1512; he was dismissed, briefly imprisoned and tortured, and wrote the book at his farm in 1513. He dedicated it to Lorenzo de' Medici, without result. It circulated in manuscript and was printed in Rome in 1532, five years after his death. The Church placed his works on the Index in 1559.
Why The Prince matters
The Prince is the founding text of political realism and the book that gave the language the word Machiavellian.
How to read The Prince
Students of politics read it for its method of arguing from cases, and general readers for a clear-eyed account of how office is won and lost.
The Prince in practice: an example
A reader watching a new manager remove rivals in the first week and then turn mild is seeing a pattern Machiavelli set down in chapter eight.
Where readings of The Prince go wrong
The Prince addresses the survival of a sixteenth-century state, and offers no warrant for cruelty or deceit in private life.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- the prince machiavelli, il principe, the prince summary, machiavelli the prince meaning, the prince book
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is The Prince about?
It is advice to a ruler on acquiring and keeping power: which kinds of state are easiest to hold, how to manage armies and ministers, and when harshness or deception is, in Machiavelli's view, necessary.
Did Machiavelli say the ends justify the means?
Not in those words. In chapter eighteen he writes that in the actions of princes people look to the result. The famous phrase is a later summary and sharper than anything in the text.
Is it better to be feared or loved, according to The Prince?
Machiavelli answers in chapter seventeen that it is best to be both, but since that is hard, fear is the safer bond because it does not depend on the goodwill of others. He adds that a prince must avoid being hated.
