This paper analyzes Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (1517), a book which openly admits that the end justifies the means and two wrongs do make a right. This is a situation not only found on the political scene, but also in the business world of today.
Essentially, Machiavelli's political philosophy is scientific and empirical. It is founded on his own experience in the political arena in Florence during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. When all the idealism is stripped away from the behavior of the human animal, ethics and morals do not appear to be particularly honored. Machiavelli's viewpoint is not for hypocrites or the faint hearted.
Such intellectual honesty, on the Dart of Machiavelli, concerning political dishonesty would probably not have been possible in any other era or in any other country. .Machiavelli looked to such historical figures as Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus as examples of great leadership.
Certainly, Machiavelli's methods have enormous utilitarian value regardless of their moral worth. So he says: "This follows from another common and natural necessity: a prince is always compelled to injure those who have made him the new ruler, subjecting them to the troops and imposing the endless other hardships which his new conquest entails" (35). In modern times, we have seen these concepts in action in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba, and the Third World countries of Africa.
The Prince is dedicated to a younger member of the Medici Family, Lorenzo the Magnificent. The translator, George Bull, must have a sense of humor, since he dedicates the translation: 'For My Wife.'
Machiavelli's infamous masterpiece was partly motivated by a desire to demonstrate how useful its author could be as a political advisor. The scope of the book ranges from philosophical discussion of the nature and the workings of principalities to realistic and practical teachings on the relat...