Machiavelli’s guide to power was revolutionary in that it described how powerful people succeeded-as he saw it-rather than as one imagined a leader should operate.īefore his exile, Machiavelli had navigated the volatile political environment of 16th-century Italy as a statesman. It was his hope that a strong sovereign, as outlined in his writing, could return Florence to its former glory. Rather, when Machiavelli wrote The Prince, his shrewd guidelines to power in the 16th century, he was an exiled statesman angling for a post in the Florentine government. Tony Soprano and Shakespeare’s Macbeth may be well-known Machiavellian characters, but the man whose name inspired the term, Niccolo Machiavelli, didn’t operate by his own cynical rule book. According to Machiavelli, the ends always justify the means-no matter how cruel, calculating or immoral those means might be.
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