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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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Machiavelli may not live up to his sinister reputation, but I am not going to defend him. No one but a politician can love or accept some of his advice, such as the importance of being a hypocrite and the value of disloyalty. His writing is powerful so that his perverse opinions sound compelling and even reasonable until you stop and think about them. As to conquering foreign nations, I thought that advice made sense. A conquered foreign nation is much easier to maintain if they share the same l
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Mar 16, 2013
Rivka
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review of another edition
Shelves:
classic-fiction,
philosophy
Whatever I was expecting this book to be, I was surprised. I picked it up while my kids were playing at the library and I couldn't put it down. I hadn't paid too much attention to all the literary and political debates over it. That sort of thing really isn't to my taste, but it's a classic and I decided I ought to read it. I found it an interesting break down of tyrannical patterns and extremely informative historically. Read in negative I think it could be a very good handbook on how to avoid
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Frustrating that Goodreads lumps together different translations.
Mar 23, 2011
Alan Pendleton
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Jul 02, 2013
Ravyn Jazper-Hawke
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Jul 24, 2013
Charles
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review of another edition
Shelves:
philosophy,
politics
Apr 21, 2017
RC
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Oct 10, 2017
Rommie
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Sep 11, 2018
toria (vikz writes)
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Sep 23, 2018
Theresa Wright
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Dec 27, 2019
Pat Carlson
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Apr 22, 2020
Karigan
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