Ruling cut loose from being good
What should a ruler do when the thing that keeps him in power is exactly the thing a good man may not do? Machiavelli answers by prying politics apart from morality and refusing to sew them back.
Machiavelli takes his stand on how men actually live rather than on how they ought to, and concludes that a prince who means to survive must learn to be able not to be good, using cruelty and faith-breaking when necessity demands. He is not praising evil; he is denying that private virtue and successful rule are the same skill, and insisting the ruler who follows the moralists into ruin serves no one. It is the move that earned him an adjective and a place on the Index — and the reason his book still reads as a scandal five centuries on.
- governance
- statecraft
- political realism
- political ethics
- human nature
- authority
- political legitimacy
- sovereignty
- power
Enter a dialogue
- Someone in charge must choose between doing right and keeping their position — what do you actually say to them at that moment?
- You insist you are not teaching evil, only realism — but doesn't every tyrant tell himself exactly that?
- How is the prince's readiness to set goodness aside different from a man who simply has no principles at all?
- If a ruler must learn to be able not to be good, what part of his own conscience does he have to stop consulting?
- A person tries to stay decent inside a corrupt institution and keeps losing — does your prince tell them decency was the mistake?