The Prince

I bought this book after seeing a documentary on Machiavelli on BBC.. The book was written 500 years ago. I should have bought this 49 years ago, now I am retired. But still find it very interesting and now I am thinking where did I go wrong. I never knew that this book was in existence for 500. No body told me about this book. I am now happy that my son and daughter have bought this book and they find it useful in their career.

I wasn’t happy with the copy - it was bigger than I expected, I thought it would be A5. And it came with a scratch.

This book will teach you a very difficult lesson to grapple with: the right thing to do is entirely based on your position and the utility of your action. I didn't really know anything about Machiavelli except that his name is used in a negative manner all the time. I Googled him and read his Wikipedia just to get a better (and hopefully accurate) sense of who he was. On that Wikipedia page there was a quote from a letter he had written or something like that, and he was describing how in-depth intellectual conversations with the local statesmen during his exile made him cease fearing death. I found that so powerful and moving I figured I would give this guy a shot. This book is a serious mental exercise and very very fascinating. The details are almost irrelevant in the modern day but the message is clear: this is a guidebook explicitly for the rulers of old. It's very limited in it's context but it sheds some light on what these so called "1%" people have to do to survive. It's easy to forget that the "1%" isn't exactly an organized conglomerate, but rather a group of people that are actively trying to screw each other as much as they are trying to screw "the working man" in order to get filthy rich and insane levels of power. I digress; by far the best message in this book is something along the following: "a man should be befriended or utterly crushed; there is no middle ground".

Fantastic introduction to state level diplomacy, and power politics, a must read for anyone who wants to get into philosophy or politics

I needed this for my son who has it as a set text in a Civics class. It's a perfectly decently made book at a price which makes it cheaper than printing out sections at home from public domain sources, and it's a lot easier to read this way too. Hey, I may even 'borrow' it back to improve my own education!