The Prince Read Online Free PDF

little book was a constant threat. It reminded people that power is always up for grabs, always a question of what can be taken by force or treachery, and always, despite all protests to the contrary, the prime concern of any ruler. In their attempt to discredit The Prince , both religious and state authorities played up the author’s admiration for the ruthless Borgia, and never mentioned his perception that in the long run a ruler must avoid being hated by his people and must always put their interests before those of the aristocracy; the people are so many, Machiavelli reflected, that power ultimately lies with them.
    Liberal and left-wing thinkers were not slow to pick up on this aspect of the book. As Rousseau saw it, the whole of The Prince was itself a Machiavellian ruse: the author had only pretended to give lessons to kings whereas in fact his real aim was to teach people to be free by showing them that royal power was no more than subterfuge. Both Spinoza and, later, the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo saw it the same way: The Prince was a cautionary tale about how power really worked, the underlying intention being to deprive those who held it of dignity and glamour and teach the people as a whole how to resist it; Machiavelli after all declared himself a republican and a libertarian. The communist leader Antonio Gramsci would even see The Prince as looking forward to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
    Others took a more traditional view: Bertrand Russell described The Prince as ‘a handbook for gangsters’, and in so doing did no more than repeat the position of Frederick the Great, who wrote a book to refute Machiavelli and present a more idealistic vision of monarchical government. Others again (Jakob Burckhardt and Friedrich Meinecke) found a space between denigration and admiration to suggest that the novelty of Machiavelli was to present leadership and nation-building as creative processes that should be judged not morally but aesthetically ; in a manner that looked forward to Nietzsche the charismatic leader made a work of art of himself and his government. Mussolini simply took the book at face value: it was a useful ‘ vade mecum for statesmen’, he enthused.
    But whatever our interpretation of his intentions, one reaction that Machiavelli never seems to provoke is indifference. Reading The Prince it is impossible not to engage with the disturbing notion that politics cannot be governed by the ethical codes that most of us seek to observe in our ordinary lives. And however we react to this idea, once we have closed the book it will be very hard to go on thinking of our own leaders in quite the same way as we did before.

Translator’s Note
    Translations have a way of gathering dust. This isn’t true of an original text. When we read Chaucer or Shakespeare we may need a gloss, or in the case of Chaucer a modern translation, but we only look at these things so that we can then enjoy the work as it was first written. And we’re struck by its immediacy and freshness, as if we had been able to learn a foreign language in a very short space of time with little effort and maximum reward.
    This is not the case with an old translation. If we read Pope’s translation of Homer today, we read it because we want to read Pope, not Homer. Linguistically, the translation draws our attention more to the language and poetry of our eighteenth century than to Homer or ancient Greece.
    So to attempt a new translation of Machiavelli is not to dismiss previous translations as poor. We are just acknowledging that these older versions now draw attention to themselves as moments in the English language. My efforts of course will some day meet the same fate. Such distractions are particularly unfortunate with Machiavelli, who insisted that he was only interested in style in so far as it could deliver content without frills or distraction. ‘I haven’t prettified the book,’ he tells us,