Stendhal’s “The Charterhouse of Parma” lays out thousands of rules and stratagems for elites trying to stay in the good ...

Advertisement © 2025 TIME USA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Service, ...

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 ...

Machiavelli’s book, however, contained a new and shocking thesis for its time. Written not in Latin, but Italian, The Prince exalts ruthlessness and centers on lessons learned from Borgia’s ...

Stacey Vanek Smith probably had a terrific elevator pitch for her debut book, “Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace.” After all, Niccolò ...

Machiavelli’s self-proclaimed realism, his book’s main selling point, was a fraud. And Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and England were among its first victims.

Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, is widely viewed as an instruction manual for tyrants, and it kind of is. But there’s more to Machiavelli than that.

Machiavelli explained the behavior of despots not to excuse them, but to show the rest of us what to look out for. By . Philip Delves Broughton. Share. Resize.

For Machiavelli, leadership was about the decisive exercise of power, not about morality. The prince’s task was to create a strong state, not necessarily a “good” one.

The majority leader is a mélange of contradictions—a Machiavelli with malaprops (otherwise known as Reidisms)—but you can’t understand them just from the vantage point of the theater up on ...