Machiavelli's Ideas

When you read the short excerpts from Machiavelli's The Prince from our text I hope that he made you feel angry and defensive. Reading Machiavelli makes me bristle; I want to argue with him. His formulas for political success contradict my most basic religious beliefs, those I have held from childhood, and help me to see why Mennonites have traditionally been so suspicious of politics. And yet I know that his pragmatic approach is the very basis of modern political theory. Because we have, as citizens of the twentieth century, to a large extent followed his advice, I am put on the defensive. I am astonished to see how

Machiavelli uses a compound-complex sentence to inform those who want to be a leader the need of malevolent. Machiavelli uses an independent and dependent clause to gain attention from audience with the purpose of clearing his idea. For Machiavelli’s long sentences in the end of the first paragraph, the prince “profession of virtue” will get “destroyed” by other evil. This cause and effect sentence help the audience to have an images of the impossible of a perfect pure personality of a leader. He warn those who want to be a leader that the prince should be wise and knowing when to act evil rather than good. Moreover, he lists good and bad adjectives such as “cruel” and “compassionate” to imply that a good ruler need to be both moral and immoral. .After all the conventional moral advice, he convey to the prince that action that appear good will damage his position, prince’s power, while those that depict as bad will enhance it.

Machiavelli concentrated more on the way things should be and how to manipulate them for his own personal gain rather than for the betterment of the state. He was well-known for being a political thinker who believed that outcomes justified why things happened. A key aspect of Machiavelli’s concept of the Prince was that “men must either be caressed or annihilated” (Prince, 9). What Machiavelli meant by

Unlike what we see in the articles of lao-tzu and Thomas Jefferson. Machiavelli, in comparison, has almost no faith in human nature. He believes a monarch is better be feared than loved. And he believes that people should be strictly controlled by the monarchies. It is like what Hannah Arendt described in total domination, where there is no trust between the elite and the people. Even in some violent way, suppression is acceptable. Different from both lao-tzu and Jefferson. Lao-tzu believes that any kind of war is destructive and unnecessary. Jefferson believes that war fought to defend oneself is destructive but necessary. On the other hand, Machiavelli celebrate the act of war and praise the ones who prepare for war. These ideas seems cruel

Machiavelli demonstrated a great knowledge and insight regarding politics through his writings but more importantly he displayed a man who went through great effort to pay attention to details. Nowhere else is this fact more evident than in the advice and instructions that he imparted to less experienced government officials. His own advice states to “…write to those with whom you do business so clearly that when they have a letter of yours they may think they are there-in such detail it describes the thing to them”(Gilbert 1961, 123). Not only does this apply to his beliefs in documentation, but also encourages them to pay close attention to details in order to supplement those writings. This type of statement was far from uncommon, in a large quantity of his letters to less experienced diplomats he advised them to “’go to the extreme of writing too much rather that too little” (Gilbert

In The Prince, Machiavelli uses many examples of battles and people to emphasize and illustrate his points. He exalts some as examples of great leadership, and condemns others for their mistakes and imperfections. Machiavelli, in the Prince, praises Philip of Macedon for fighting to hold onto his country, and for holding onto most of his kingdom even after surrendering a few cities to Rome. His purpose in doing this was to provide an example of a prince that did the opposite of the princes of Italy, and to further reprimand the princes of Italy for allowing their kingdom to slip through their fingers. And yet, Machiavelli only speaks on Philip’s last war, and praises only his preparedness to go to war, not mentioning the amount of power

According to Machiavelli, he believes the ideal prince must be a force by the necessity of being ruthless and at all will to use a conventional morality to keep his power in order. Although the prince should be ruthless Machiavelli mentions the prince must appear to be fair even if he is not. His firm belief is that any prince must do whatever that is necessary to deal with any issues that are faced in a prince path. Of course, with that being said sometimes the prince must be dishonest. Machiavelli believes that to be a prince you have to be willing to lie to people so they can hear what they wish to hear, but at all cost must make the people believe he is telling the truth and only the truth. Even if a prince does not have all the good qualities

A family of monarchy which tortured Machiavelli for months causing him great suffrage and sorrow. He writes to Lorenzo “May I trust, therefore, that Your Highness will accept this little gift in the spirit in which it is offered: and if Your Highness will deign to peruse it, you will recognize in it my ardent desire that you may attain to that grandeur which fortune and your own merits presage for you.” This enough is confusing because if this is the same principality that caused so much suffering why dedicate a book to let their reign continue into longevity? As to add to this confusion, Machiavelli explains how a prince should use cruelty and violence correctly against the people. To use cruelty and punishment all at once so that the people learn to respect you by fear. He includes that if you had a choice on either being loved or feared, be feared for love can change as quick as it came. Fear of punishment, people would avoid and be subservient. He also goes on to put out that a prince must be cunning like a fox yet strong and fearsome like a lion. To use Realpolitik, morality and ideology left out for the world is not these things as you should not be as well. Furthermore, Machiavelli explains what must happen when a new ruler overtakes a new city and the people in it. “And whoever becomes the ruler of a free city and does not destroy it, can expect to be destroyed by it,

All of Machiavelli’s political philosophy revolved around the simple theory that all men are bad. The only reason men ever do good is because it will benefit them personally or because they are afraid of the consequences of not doing good.

The ideas of Machiavelli were documented in his publication ‘ The Prince’ and continued to live in politics as a way of gaining and keeping leadership. The word ‘Machiavellian ‘has somewhat negative connotations with a dictionary definition of "the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct" . Rather than a judgment of Machiavelli per se it is useful to judge the ideas presented, to him it was the practicalities of leadership that were of greater importance than the ideals of how it ought to be, this meant that the means justified the ends and that a leader should do what it takes to reach these ends. These ideas would be used by many leaders and continue to be so, they have application within a representative

playwright, and poet. Niccolo Machiavelli’s views of human nature strongly influenced his recommendations for governing. By nature Machiavelli’s cynical regard towards the nature of man were shaped by his observations of the Medici family and by his victimization at the hands of the powerful.

To further illustrate this point, consider another one of his works, The Mandrake Root. In the Mandrake Root Machiavelli tells the fictitious story about a group of people who all lie, deceive, and manipulate to get what they want. At the end of the play we find all the main characters completely thrilled with their deceptive escapades as then walk into a church building as the worship service is about to begin. The moral of the story? Do whatever you need to do to get what you

Niccolo Machiavelli is a very pragmatic political theorist. His political theories are directly related to the current bad state of affairs in Italy that is in dire need of a new ruler to help bring order to the country. Some of his philosophies may sound extreme and many people may call him evil, but the truth is that Niccolo Machiavelli’s writings are only aimed at fixing the current corruptions and cruelties that filled the Italian community, and has written what he believed to be the most practical and efficient way to deal with it. Three points that Machiavelli illustrates in his book The Prince is first, that “it is better to be feared then loved,”# the second

Relying on the needs of the society of that time, Machiavelli comes to the conclusion that the most important task is the formation of a single Italian state (Machiavelli 15). Developing his thoughts, the author comes to the following inference: only a prince can become a leader capable of leading people and building a unified state. It is not a concrete historical personality but someone abstract, symbolic, possessing such qualities that in the aggregate are inaccessible to any living ruler. That is why Machiavelli devotes most of his research to the issue of what qualities should the prince possess to fulfill the historical task of developing a new state. The written work is constructed strictly logically and objectively. Even though the image of an ideal prince is abstract, Machiavelli argues that he should be ruthless, deceiving, and selfish.

It is fundamentally important to preface the discussion hosted in this essay by addressing ourselves to the most mundane question-why consider Machiavelli in the context of philosophy, least of all, political philosophy? This question dominates any philosophical inquiries of the Machiavelli’s political ideologies. Put differently, do the contributions by Niccolò Machiavelli to the various salient discourses in the Western thought, most notably political theory, meet the requisite standard models of academic philosophy? Machiavelli essentially seems not to consider himself a philosopher. In fact, he overtly disapproved of any philosophical inquiries into his works. In addition, his credentials do not qualify him to be properly admitted within the realm of philosophy (NeDermAN, 2002).