PhilosophersNicolas Machiavel

Nicolas Machiavel

Power is judged by its effects, not good intentions.

Political realism · Humanism1469 – 1527 ItalyPolitical realistRepublicanDiplomat and civil servantHistorian
è molto più sicuro essere temuto che amato, quando si abbia a mancare dell'uno de' dua
It is much safer to be feared than loved, when one of the two must be given up.
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andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa, che alla immaginazione di essa
To follow the effective truth of the matter rather than the imagination of it.
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non il bene particulare, ma il bene comune è quello che fa grandi le città
It is not private good but the common good that makes cities great.
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mi pasco di quel cibo che solum è mio e ch’io nacqui per lui
I feed on the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. He is describing his evenings spent reading the Ancients.
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Misconceptions

False
Machiavelli wrote: "The end justifies the means."

The phrase appears nowhere in his writings. The Prince (18) says something else: when there is no court to judge princes, people judge by the result, and the crowd finds honourable the means of a prince who succeeds. It describes how the crowd judges, in a chapter on appearances. The closest passage is in the Discourses (I, 9): Romulus killed his brother to found Rome; "the deed accuses him, the result excuses him". But Machiavelli limits this excuse to violence that founds or repairs a free order, never violence that destroys. Beware: Thomson's 1883 English translation adds the word "means", which is not in the Italian.

False
Machiavelli was a supporter of tyranny.

The Prince gives hard advice to a new prince. But the Discourses on Livy blame the founders of tyrannies as much as they praise the founders of republics, refuse to admire Caesar, and argue that a people is more prudent and constant than a prince. Rousseau went so far as to read the Prince as "the book of Republicans": lessons given to peoples while pretending to teach kings.

Nuanced
Machiavelli advises being cruel and deceitful.

He advises knowing how to be so when necessity requires it, and appearing good. But he also writes that every prince should wish to be thought merciful and not cruel, and should not depart from the good when he can. And he refuses to call "virtue" killing one's fellow citizens or betraying one's friends: it can win power, not glory.