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What Members Thought
Turned out to be an easier and more entertaining a read than expected from a political treatise. After having read Walden, Civil Disobedience and now The Prince one after the other, I now feel equipped enough to take on heavy weights like Nietzsche and heavier tomes.
It’s easy to dismiss Machiavelli as immoral and scheming. His name has become synonymous with such. However, though there is no correlation in fact, Machiavelli’s The Prince reminded me of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Both seek a simply defined good. Aristotle’s good for the individual was existence and intellectual growth deemed “happiness” whereas Machiavell’s good for the prince is the existence and political growth of the state. To achieve each end, both discuss how people should interac
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How to get what you want ant keep it no matter what. Machiavellian casuistry for kings and presidents.
I first read "The Prince" many years ago as a college freshman while taking a course on Political Philosophy. We had to read excerpts from Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Marx (among others) and Machiavelli was the one that stuck with me. "The Prince" is the most famous (and infamous) of his works, and has many good insights into human behavior. Machiavelli, writing in exile after serving as a diplomatic secretary in service to the Florentine Republic for many years, discussed how men act
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Mar 23, 2011
Alan Pendleton
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