Description
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince as direct advice to rulers, and its indifference to conventional morality is exactly what’s made it notorious for five centuries. He’s less interested in how a prince ought to behave than in what actually keeps a prince in power, and the book is often credited as the first real work of political realism — a way of describing politics as it functions rather than as anyone would prefer it to. The phrase most associated with it, that the end justifies the means, isn’t a fair summary of the whole text, but it captures the argument’s spirit closely enough that the association has never gone away.
