The Prince

The most slandered book in political thought, and the most clear-eyed. Machiavelli described power as it is actually taken and kept, not as moralists wished it were, and earned five centuries of insult for the honesty. Read it against his Discourses and a different writer appears, a republican who studied tyranny in order to resist it. The Prince is not advice to the wicked. It is a map of the terrain, drawn by someone who refused to pretend the terrain was flat.

The Florentine diplomat whose name became an insult, unfairly. He wrote two books that look opposed and are not. The Prince describes how power is taken and kept, with a cold eye and no comfort. The Discourses on Livy is the work of a committed republican who believed liberty was worth the conflict it brought. Read together, they are one mind looking hard at how states actually work, refusing to pretend otherwise. The refusal to pretend is the lasting lesson.