The Prince

It is much safer to be feared than loved: the sentence arrives without heat, without apology, the way a surgeon names the thing that has to be cut. That coolness is the whole unsettling genius of The Prince. For centuries the books written for rulers told them how to be good; Machiavelli, stripped of office and tortured by the Medici he would then dedicate it to, sat down to tell them instead how to survive, and the gap between those two instructions is the nerve he keeps pressing. A prince who insists on virtue among men who have none, he argues, will be destroyed, and cruelty used well and quickly is a kind of mercy. The examples come like evidence in a brief, Cesare Borgia, Moses, Romulus, never ornament. What lingers is not the shock of the conclusions but the calm, the sense of a man describing the world exactly as it is while everyone around him agrees to pretend otherwise. Read it once and you will hear its level voice under every speech a powerful man ever gave.