The Great Courses - Books that Matter - The Prince - William Landon, Ph.D.

Ph.D., William Landon

Category: Education

Narrator: Ph.D.

Tags: Education, Documentary, Adults, Literature

Do the ends justify the means? Should leaders be feared or loved? Can dictators give rise to democracy? Should rulers have morals or wear them like a mask? Niccol Machiavellis The Prince puts forth unsettling questions like these, whose answers redefined centuries of political wisdom. But what does it really mean to be Machiavellian?, Written in the early 1500s at the height of the Florentine Renaissance, The Prince is well known to most of us as a manual for political corruption and a symbol of the underlying dark heart of politics. But to read Machiavellis slim volume only in this way is merely to scratch the surface of how groundbreaking a book it is; how it shattered the old classical approach to politics, replacing it with something grittier and, in some ways, better suited to the ruthlessness of the dawning modern age., A compelling and multifaceted document, The Prince has gone on to shape subsequent centuries of Western civilization. Its controversial (and complex) views on pow