Machiavelli’s Job Application to Power

How a fired civil servant wrote the coldest manual for keeping a state—and what it asks of us.

Each night in 1513, a disgraced Florentine official walked home from a day of haggling with woodcutters and millers, washed the mud from his hands, put on “regal and courtly garments,” and entered “the ancient courts of ancient men.” In his study, Niccolò Machiavelli conversed with Livy and Cicero until midnight, feeding—as he put it—on the only food he was born for. Then he turned to a little book he called De Principatibus. It would become The Prince.¹

Machiavelli was not a cloistered theorist but a sacked diplomat with ink-stained sleeves, recently tortured and exiled after the Medici returned to power in Florence. That fall from office sharpened his one burning question: how, in a world of shifting loyalties and mercenary armies, does a ruler actually hold onto power? He drafted The Prince in 1513–1514 and saw it published only in 1532, five years after his death—a posthumous “job application” dedicated to a Medici, written in brisk Italian rather than scholarly Latin. The pitch was audacious: I will tell you how power works when morality gets in the way.

The engine of that book is a hard separation between private virtue and public security. Machiavelli calls the ruler’s skill virtù—not moral goodness, but the agility to read a moment and act decisively—set against Fortuna, the weather of events. Think of a leader not as a saint but as a pilot in a storm: instruments, not ideals, keep the plane aloft. That is why Chapter 17 offers the line that haunts ethics courses and cabinet rooms alike: “it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.”² He adds the caution modern spin doctors recognize instantly: avoid hatred, respect property and families, and you can rule for a long time. In the next chapter he turns to animals—force as the lion, deception as the fox—and counsels princes to master both, even if they must merely appear virtuous. The mask matters as much as the move.³

Ideas like these can feel like abstractions—until you watch them staged. Enter Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, Machiavelli’s favorite case study. When Borgia seized the Romagna, he faced a landscape of banditry and faction. He appointed Remirro de Orco, a “swift and cruel” governor, with full powers to pacify the region. Order returned—along with deep resentment. Then came the tableau: one morning Remirro’s body lay cut in two in the piazza of Cesena, a butcher’s knife beside it. The message was surgical. Cruelty had been “well used” to restore peace; the hatred was offloaded onto an expendable lieutenant; the prince appeared just. The people were, Machiavelli writes, “satisfied and dismayed.”⁴

Here is the ethical dilemma that sits at the center of tyranny’s anatomy. If stability is the aim, selective cruelty can look like prudence; if appearances shape consent, deception can look like statecraft. Machiavelli does not pause to bemoan this. He writes as a field surgeon: stop the bleeding first; argue about bedside manners later. That is why his book can be read both as a handbook for autocrats and a warning label for citizens.

So what? The Prince gives you a simple diagnostic for today’s headlines.

First, separate ends from means. When a leader insists extraordinary measures are necessary “just this once,” ask whether fear is being engineered to be more reliable than love. Fear is a durable glue; it sticks even when admiration peels away. Look for the telltales Machiavelli lists—spectacles of punishment, ostentatious “mercy” that costs nothing, and carefully chosen scapegoats who absorb public anger so the sovereign can pose as healer. We still see Remirro de Orco moments: a minister fired at dawn, a tycoon “made an example,” a dissident paraded on television. The choreography, not the speech, is the message.

Second, watch the staffing and the stories. Machiavelli warns against flatterers and praises rulers who surround themselves with capable, even blunt, advisors. When you see leaders purge competence in favor of praise—or keep only those who echo their line—you are watching the fear strategy take root, because a frightened court will not tell inconvenient truths. When the gap between a ruler’s actions and their appearance widens, remember his counsel: it is “very necessary to appear” virtuous, even when acting otherwise.³

Finally, translate the old categories into modern ones. Machiavelli’s mercenaries and auxiliaries are today’s informal militias, private contractors, bot farms, and compliant oligarchs—forces a ruler can rent until they turn. His citizen militia becomes independent institutions: courts, auditors, a free press. A prince who bets on fear works to capture or bypass these; a republic that wants to avoid tyranny strengthens them. The question behind every “tough” policy, then, is not only whether it works, but what habits it trains in the body politic. Do we become a people that obeys because we admire—or because we flinch?

Machiavelli, the man in courtly garments speaking to the dead, was not teaching us to love cruelty. He was teaching us to recognize it when it is dressed as prudence. The Prince is a mirror. If, when you look into it, you mostly see the fox and the lion, that is your cue to ask what kind of pilot you want in the storm—and what kind of passengers you want us to be.