The Prince

The Prince is a book that was controversial before it had even been sent to the printer. Written in vernacular Italian instead of Latin, dedicated to a member of one of the most powerful Italian families of the day, and only printed after Machiavelli's death, this treatise on how to tyrannize effectively was considered shocking even by his contemporaries. The discussion of its morality that continues to this day gives us the modern-day word Machiavellian. The book is organized into several sections, each one giving direction on the ruthless rule of principalities that Machiavelli based on both reading and personal experience. Despite its controversial nature, The Prince is often cited as one of the first examples of modern philosophical thought, and the "advice" contained within is still quoted as relevant today. Blunt, unsentimental, and startlingly modern in its refusal to flatter, The Prince remains the book every reader reaches for when they want to understand power as it actually operates rather than as it is supposed to-a short, sharp companion to Machiavelli's longer and more republican Discourses on Livy. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)