Political Realist
Niccolò Machiavelli
Your quest companion appears in the header, offers one of their ideas on your home page each day, and cheers you on in lessons. You can change companions at any time, and your progress stays the same.
A Florentine diplomat who, after losing office, wrote The Prince on how power is actually won and kept.
Key work: The Prince (1532)
“It is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.”
Key ideas, in brief (in our words)
Study politics as it is, not as it ought to be.
A ruler may have to choose between love and fear.
Fortune yields to the bold, and to those who build dikes in calm weather.
Read more: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
On the climb
Feared or Loved?
Quest with Niccolò Machiavelli above to start the climb and open these lessons.
