Niccolò Machiavelli is arguably the most influential political thinker from the Italian Renaissance. Following the publication of his political theory masterwork The Prince in 1532, his name became ...

The name Niccolo Machiavelli is synonymous with political deceit, cynicism and the ruthless use of power. The Italian Renaissance writer called his most famous work, The Prince, a handbook for ...

Few thinkers have been so widely quoted and so deeply misunderstood as Niccolo Machiavelli. For centuries, his name has been shorthand for political deceit—a man who supposedly preached that any act, ...

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was a diplomat, civil servant, and political philosopher born in Florence during one of the most fascinating periods of the Italian Renaissance. His name has come down ...

The Italian Renaissance diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli has become synonymous with subtle scheming. And now, an extremely rare first edition of his most famous work, the political manual “The Prince,” is ...

Clues concerning Machiavelli’s thinking as to his own immediate personal path lie in one of the Italian Renaissance’s most beautiful—and in some ways most deceiving—letters, which he wrote to his ...

“A Prince who is not wise himself cannot be well advised by others.” “I do not believe that divisions purposely caused can ever lead to good.” No, these are not the sayings of Buddha. They are ...

Niccolò Machiavelli offered a famously dim view of human nature in The Prince. People are so “ungrateful, fickle, [and] false,” he wrote, that a ruler should comfortably abandon conventional morality ...

Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World, by Harvey C. Mansfield (Cambridge University Press, 298 pp., $34.99) Harvey Mansfield, not known for timidity, has characteristically titled ...

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our ...