The Prince

"to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it."

"I studied political theory when I was in college and Machiavelli was always intriguing to me. It’s a description of the human character and in my profession, lobbying, which is all about influencing people, it’s important to get some insights into human nature. Obviously there’s a debate about what Machiavelli really meant: whether it was meant as a parody or satire. But I thought he had a good understanding of human nature. That’s true, but then you can take someone like Hobbes, who says that life is nasty, brutish and short. If you are trying to influence policymakers, one can be realistic, one can be cynical, ultimately it’s about what you think the human condition is like. And when Machiavelli talks about flattery, when he talks about characteristics like that… Yes, and you could also quote Lord Acton saying ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ In my life you have people coming to Washington who want to do good or turn the country around and are seduced. They are seduced by power, they are seduced by wanting to stay in office. It’s fascinating, because whether you’re talking about MoveOn.org [on the left] or the Tea Parties [on the right], that’s what happens, that’s what’s happening now. There are people who have been seduced by Washington, and in that sense Machiavelli is also apt. But the reason I started with The Prince, which was written in the 16th century, is also to show that this matter of influencing, this matter of governing, this matter of reconciling various interests, reconciling various goals, various personal and public ambitions, goes all the way back to the beginning. It’s not a new phenomenon. We talk about lobbying – the term was first used to refer to the British parliament – but it goes all the way back. This question of how to govern. The isolation of the policymakers, who are surrounded by adulators, the flattery, the seduction of power. It’s all of those things that characterize human frailty, human hubris, which he picks up on. I’m not sure I play on them. I understand them – I try to understand human nature as well as I possibly can. When I looked at The Lobbyists for example, and I read what the author there, Jeffrey Birnbaum, said about me. In many ways – yes. I was exploiting what Machiavelli said to exploit: being deferential, flattering people…"

"History students at Oxford have to read The Prince . It has the benefit of being very short and it stuck in my mind. While at Number 10, I was looking for a book on how to wield power in practice. I chose this one. Many books deal with the theory of the British constitution but few look at how power works in practice. It’s almost treated as a dirty subject. Machiavelli was one of the earliest diplomats. Negotiation was his life; he saw it as power. That’s what really got me interested in him. Very much so. The reason we still read the book today is that, like Shakespeare’s plays, it’s based on human nature. Just as you nod along to Hamlet or Macbeth and acknowledge that aspects of human nature in them are present in people today, the same is true of The Prince . Machiavelli broke away from the Augustinian notion of what the world should or ought to be. He wrote about what he observed around him. That’s what makes him so interesting. Yes. Instead of writing another memoir of the Blair years, I did something a little different. I took Machiavelli’s maxims and principles – like the one about a leader being a lion and a fox – and tried to see if they still worked in modern politics. Surprisingly, many of them did. Tony Blair’s negotiating tactics in Northern Ireland were largely based on the lion-and-fox approach. There’s no way he could have moved forward if he’d not possessed some fox-like qualities. He calls it ‘constructive ambiguity’ in his own book: trying to lead people into agreements for which they weren’t necessarily ready. Equally, if he hadn’t been a lion and believed he could do it, he wouldn’t have got there. British leaders like Winston Churchill had given up on Northern Ireland. Because he thought he could solve it, Blair did not. You need both ‘lion’ and ‘fox’ attributes for that."

"This is of course a very, very different thing. If you want a complete contrast with Montaigne then read Machiavelli. Well of course, Machiavelli wrote two great books—the most famous of which was The Prince, a sort of cynical primer for these new people. You see in Italy at the time, the new people, the new warrior princes like the Medici and so on, they were coming to power without any royal tradition behind them. They weren’t hereditary princes, they had fought their way to the top—they were the original “man on the white horse”, and they’d fought themselves into positions of absolute power. What Machiavelli was saying to them was, you can’t rely on any sense of decency. Kings had divine right; it was easy for them to rule because they had god on their side, and the public was frightened, or in awe of them. But these new princes, they had none of that. They had no veneration so they couldn’t behave like gentlemen, they had to behave like ruthless tyrants. I mean Machiavelli would say if you’re going to get rid of your opponents don’t just get rid of a few, get rid of the whole lot of them. If you get rid of a few, the ones you don’t get rid of will be so angry they’ll never forgive you, and you’ll have made mortal enemies. So make a clean sweep, have no mercy. In Ireland you know we would have simply killed all the Irish. Machiavelli was an advisor to these princes, and this was his, so to speak, his realistic advice to them if they wanted to stay in power: never trust anybody. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Well, he certainly came from nowhere didn’t he? But then of course he did try and turn himself into a hereditary emperor. I’m sure everybody in that position did or should have read The Prince , but it isn’t at all fashionable nowadays, and it never has been fashionable in this country because we somehow or other have managed to keep a sort of continuous tradition of orderly and civilized, or relatively civilized government, and we never got a wholly new lot of people who didn’t benefit by the habits of the people to accept their authority, but we’re getting that now. It’s a good point that: we’re getting these new people, who absolutely know we don’t trust them an inch, or respect them. I mean a prime minister today is almost in the same position, in that he can’t afford to think the public are going to give him a second chance. We’re almost reverting to the time when reading Machiavelli might be necessary in English. That would be a thought for today—if Gordon Brown were to start mugging up on his Machiavelli, then he’d have to kill off David Cameron mighty fast. Before Cameron kills him off. This interview was published on August 6th, 2009"

"If you want to get a perspective on how the politics of power and ruthlessness work, or simply see some of the thinking behind Game of Thrones , this short, slightly fragmentary book, written in the 16th century, is still the best around. Machiavelli, after a successful career as a diplomat in Florence, was tortured and exiled by the Medici after they came to power in the city state. He wrote The Prince from his exile, possibly as a way of gaining favour with those who could bring him back to Florence. So extreme is Machiavelli’s willingness to recommend any means whatsoever to gain and retain power, that many have read this book as ironic. I think he was probably serious: if you want your city state to survive, you’d better be ruthless at times, and it isn’t safe to be honest and fair. The Prince is full of pragmatic wisdom on such issues as whether it is better to be loved or feared (both if possible, but if you have to choose, be feared), how much luck is involved in human affairs (quite a lot, but you can prepare yourself in ways that make you more likely to succeed), and the animals a wise leader should emulate (the fox and the lion, rather than the lamb)."

"I choose Niccolò Machiavelli because he wrote the one book that is still widely read by all kinds of people. I see people on the metro reading Machiavelli’s Prince . There’s Machiavelli on Management There’s a whole culture around Machiavellianism and the Machiavelli figure in literature and drama. And it’s all based on The Prince . But what I’d like to say is that The Prince is an occasion piece. It was written in 1513 after the Medici had been returned to power. Machiavelli was out of a job—he’d been tortured and fired—and couldn’t afford to live in Florence. And his obsession with politics and international affairs was such that he couldn’t let go. So he started a correspondence with his friend Francesco Vettori and, from that correspondence, arose The Prince . “I see people on the metro reading Machiavelli’s The Prince” It was a book about how to deal with the crisis of Italy after the French invasions. Machiavelli’s response, in The Prince, was that the only way Italy was going to maintain its independence, and freedom, and drive out the barbarians—which is a term he always used for northern Europeans—was to beat them at their own game, to be more violent, more vicious, more brutal, and more faithless. He saw in the figure of Cesare Borgia—the Duke Valentino of The Prince —a figure who was capable of doing this: a person without morality, without pity, with no principles whatsoever, being the Pope’s son. Machiavelli saw, at that moment, an opportunity to try to undo the crisis of Italy. But he was also a committed republican. He was completely committed to the idea of principle in government. The Prince is a moment of trying to address a crisis and the solution was to out-brutal the brutality of the northerners. When we put him in context, though—when we look at the Discourses and the other things he wrote—he is talking about the corruption of human nature. Italians had reached a state of such moral weakness, such political and military weakness, that they could be walked over by the barbarians. The Prince is a kind of antidote. It was a cold shower. It was the tough drill sergeant who was going to restore what he calls ‘virtù.’ Virtù has nothing to do with virtue—it comes from the Latin ‘virtus,’ meaning manfulness and resourcefulness. Only with enough virtù is it possible to overcome the forces of malicious fortuna or fortune. That is how he sees the world: a struggle between ability (virtù) and fortune (fortuna) over which we only have limited control. All we can do is struggle against it. So The Prince is focusing on a moment of struggle, saying, ‘Okay the virtù that we need now is the virtù of the brutality and viciousness of Cesare Borgias.’ But he says in the Discourses , when this heroic figure—this man on horseback—appears, that when he’s done his job, he should retire. He should let the republic rise again. Which is very naïve. But Machiavelli was a politician and, consequently, naïve by choice and by nature. I always tell my students, if you’re going to talk about Machiavelli, don’t just talk about The Prince —put it in the context in which The Prince was written and all the other things that Machiavelli wrote. Then it becomes much more important and much more comprehensible, how this dedicated republican could suddenly write a book about brutality and about despotism. I think for two reasons. One is that most people—I mean, look at the election we just had in the United States—look for simple solutions to complex problems. Machiavelli’s solution was very simple: find a man on horseback, somebody with sufficient virtù, to come and solve all the problems. And then, when the problems are solved, he can go away. That was the lesson of Donald Trump. He said, ‘I’ve got the only answer, if you want these problems solved, elect me.’ That is true Machiavellianism—that you need a man on horseback to address the problems in a way that the consultative world of democracy really doesn’t allow for. On the other hand, there is this idea that, in order to succeed in the world, principles get in the way. That is why books like Machiavelli on Management become popular. It’s this idea that the important thing is the ability to deliver—whether you’re in government, in business, or in almost any aspect of life. What matters most is the ability to deliver what you promise, regardless of how you do it. And Machiavelli, then, has been adopted as a kind of patron saint of delivery systems because that’s what The Prince is about. “Machiavelli was not a bad man; he’s had a bad reputation, most of which came from a book written by Innocent Gentillet during the French Wars of Religion.” The Prince is the ultimate deliverer—he’s going to deliver Italy from bondage and he’s going to recreate a nation of tough soldiers full of virtù, able to withstand any assault of fortune. That’s why, I think, he’s terribly attractive. It’s sort of like teen movies: we seem to be attracted to bad men. Machiavelli was not a bad man; he’s had a bad reputation, most of which came from a book written by Innocent Gentillet during the French Wars of Religion. It was called Anti-Machiavel and it blamed the French Wars of Religion on the fact that the queen regent of France, Catherine de’Medici, was a Florentine. Machiavelli was a Florentine, Catherine de’Medici was a Florentine, and this is what they do—terrible, horrible things. There is this attraction to people with power, people with influence, people with a larger-than-life personality and character. We’re attracted to these characters in Game of Thrones and we’re attracted to these characters in literature. You don’t want to marry them—you don’t want your sister to marry them—but, at the same time, there’s something fatally magnetic about the man of action. That’s what Machiavelli does in The Prince : he creates a man of action. Not at all. Machiavelli was a student of history. He was a true humanist, recognising the value not only of classical examples but of his own time, in providing insight into how to behave. Probably the single most famous letter written in the Italian language was Machiavelli’s letter to Vettori. He is talking about his writing of The Prince and how he spends the day with wood-cutters and playing cards. Then he goes to his house and strips off his sweaty clothes. He puts on these curial robes and enters his library—where he discusses world affairs with the Ancients. Whatever decision you ultimately reach about how problems should be solved, Machiavelli says that history is a guide. History is something that will assist you in making decisions, not because history repeats itself—it doesn’t—but because there are parallels of examples that force you to think about (a) what could go wrong and (b) what has gone right. So I think that Machiavelli is very thoughtful and highly educated. He realises that history is part of the information system needed in order to solve the problems of his own time. And, consequently, for us to solve the problems of ours. Not at all. First of all, he dedicated the book to one Medici prince who died. He then rededicated it to the next one, a cousin, who paid no attention to it whatsoever. It was not printed in his lifetime. It was hardly known at all. It was only Machiavelli-after-Machiavelli that took on this reputation. In the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s, with Gentillet, it became very popular. Although there are references to him in, for example, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s advisor, who spent a lot of time in Italy and thought that Machiavelli was providing some very good advice about how to respond. That’s right. We’re all told to behave in a particular way—but if we behave that way, either nothing would get done, or everything would get done badly. That is his point. Ultimately, what matters is the ability to deliver. And the greater the crisis, the more important this delivery system must be."

"I think anyone in an authoritative position should read it. Even if you don’t agree with its principles, it’s amazing how relevant something written 600 years ago is to today’s society."

"It would be Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince.” Machiavelli is frequently dismissed today as an amoral cynic who supposedly considered the end to justify the means. In fact, Machiavelli is a crystal-clear realist who understands the limits and uses of power."

"Machiavelli's 'The Prince,' because it so shakes the students. Young as they are, they're ambitious enough to see themselves in it."