Opinions? I think it's pretty neat-o. Never imaged ruling back then was actually complex desu.
It's also free for Amazon Kindle hence me reading it
>>8291977
*my reading it
No Socrates or Everyman philosopher could have written it. What makes Machiavelli's account so scintillating to me is how it's so unprecedented, like mailing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Only courtesans and monarchs have experienced the benefits of furtive and manipulative dominion, and reading this is like putting another person's head on. I don't think Machiavelli intended it, but in the countryside, flummoxed out favor, he wrote today's equivalent of a tell-all book hoping it would place him back into favor.
Imagine if Edward Snowden wrote a letter to Obama saying how 'tasteful invasive surveillance' should be executed.
>ruling back then
Still applies to nowadays and is widely applied by nowaday's politicians.
Machiavelli never wrote a manual on how to be a dick like many people seem to think. He wrote a book on how to effectively maintain your kingdom stable if you are a political leader. A shame it is distorted so often.
Obligatory read for law students by the way, I had to do this at the second/third month of my first semester. But I had already read it before, pretty good read, especially interesting if you are reading the version with Napoleon's commentaries (you will find that he is a immense moron that only says "THE POWER!! THE POWER!!!" every single time, I wonder how someone like that managed to be such a based political leader)
I was just thinking about this.
The Italian literary tradition never really recovered after Dante. Perhaps understandably since he is a hell of an act to follow but the English followed up and prospered after Shakespeare so im not entirely sure why that is.
Still, while its easy to deprecate Italian lit what they had instead was an explosion of art, sculpture and architecture that was unlike anything the rest of Europe was able to sustain. And the Renaissance is more visible now anything the English literary tradition came up with.
Pretty sure Machiavelli was just trolling the Medicis when he wrote this.
>>8291977
When I first read it, I thought this feels like a good game guide for medieval 2: total war.
Pro-tip it really isn't (that's probably the problem of M2:TW more, than of Machiavelli).
But now I feel that the Prince is like a proto-foucauldian writing, trying to grasp the power at it's most direct levels, trying to spell out how the free city and free people transform into subjects of the sovereign, that is the prince.
I don't know, when I read it I felt like I was reading one of those silly self-help books, only this was the first of them, and it wasn't directed to average "I wanna get rich" man, but to medieval ruler.
>>8293831
you need to grow up kid, then you'll understand.
there is no such shit as self-help in the prince, he takes historical accounts, analyses them and makes conclusions, that is everything the book is about. it is not without merit why this book is the foundation of modern politics.
Vaguely interesting, but more as a historical document than anything. Not really relevant to the present day.
>>8293046
>The Italian literary tradition never really recovered after Dante.
Petrarch? Boccaccio? Both only a few decades after Dante?
Fuck off idiot.
>>8294155
Also in relatively recent times they have Eco.
>>8294231
>Eco
r.i.p in peace
>>8293198
he just needed a job
