Chapter XV
"It is better to be feared than loved" — the passage that made Machiavelli infamous, and that still defines the popular image of realpolitik.
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Niccolò Machiavelli · 1532 · Florentine (Italian)
It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XVII
Official judgment: “The Prince was placed on the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum ever issued by the Catholic Church. It was condemned for its advocacy of political means divorced from Christian morality, its secular analysis of power, and its implicit argument that religion was a tool of statecraft.”
What happened: Added to the first Pauline Index. All of Machiavelli's works were banned.
Outcome: The ban enhanced the book's prestige throughout Protestant Europe. In England and the Netherlands, where the Papal Index had no force, The Prince circulated freely and was widely read by statesmen.
Official judgment: “The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572) was attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Machiavellian counsel. Anti-Machiavellian tracts multiplied; Innocent Gentillet's Contre-Machiavel (1576) blamed Machiavelli for corrupting French politics.”
What happened: The 'Machiavel' became a stock theatrical villain in English drama, associated with atheism, murder, and political duplicity.
Outcome: Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Richard III bear the 'Machiavel' character as a dramatic type — evidence of how thoroughly the name had become synonymous with evil statecraft.
Florentine
Niccolò Machiavelli served the Florentine Republic as Second Chancellor and Secretary of the Ten of War — effectively its foreign minister and intelligence chief — for fourteen years (1498–1512), during which he observed at close quarters the politics of Renaissance Italy: the Borgias, the Sforzas, Pope Julius II, the French invasions, and the complex dance of Italian city-state politics in which no moral scruples could be assumed of anyone. He met Cesare Borgia three times, watched him operate with the ruthless efficiency that Machiavelli would later analyze in The Prince, and was simultaneously appalled and fascinated.
When the Medici returned to Florence in 1512 with Spanish support and the republic was dissolved, Machiavelli was dismissed from office. In February 1513, he was briefly imprisoned and tortured (strappado — hung by the wrists behind the back) on suspicion of participation in an anti-Medici conspiracy. He had no involvement but confessed nothing. Released under a general amnesty, he retired to his small farm at Sant'Andrea in Percussina and began writing to console himself for the loss of his political career.
The Prince was composed in late 1513 and dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici — a gift, in effect, from a disgraced republican official to the ruling family that had ended the republic, offering his political knowledge in the hope of obtaining employment. The dedication was never acknowledged. Machiavelli never regained significant political employment under the Medici, though he was eventually given minor commissions.
The Discourses on Livy, written simultaneously with The Prince and largely finished before it, represents Machiavelli's actual political philosophy — a thoroughgoing republicanism that makes The Prince's analysis of princely power look like a necessary detour through political realism. The Discourses are less read than The Prince because they are less scandalous, which is itself a lesson in how canonization works.
The Prince is dangerous because it says out loud what political actors have always known and never said: that power operates according to its own logic, which does not automatically align with Christian morality, legal principle, or philosophical justice. The prince who wants to hold power must understand how power actually works — through fear, through spectacle, through strategic cruelty and strategic mercy — rather than how moral philosophy says it should work.
This is not a celebration of immorality but a diagnosis of political reality, and the diagnosis is dangerous because it is accurate. Every political actor who has ever made a "necessary" compromise with ethical principle, who has ever used religion as a tool of social control, who has ever calculated when to project strength and when to project mercy — every such actor has been operating on Machiavellian principles whether or not they have read The Prince. Machiavelli's sin was simply describing this openly.
The "Machiavel" of popular imagination — the scheming, atheistic, conscienceless manipulator — is a caricature that has served the interests of those who found the actual analysis too uncomfortable. If Machiavelli is monstrous, his insights can be dismissed as monstrous. If he is simply a realist describing how power works, then everyone who exercises power must either adopt his analysis or pretend they don't.
The placement of The Prince on the very first Index ever issued reveals what the Church found most threatening: not the specific practical advice about cruelty and mercy, but the book's fundamental premise that politics is an autonomous domain with its own rationality, independent of theological authority. A secular science of politics — one that analyzes power without reference to God's will or Christian virtue — is a science that has no need of clerical oversight or validation. This was the real heresy.
The Protestant reception of the book is revealing in a different way. In England, the Netherlands, and Protestant Germany, where the Papal Index had no force, The Prince was widely read precisely because it offered a secular analysis of power that Protestant rulers — who had just detached themselves from Rome's authority — found useful. The same text that the Church banned as godless, Protestants found practically instructive.
The "Machiavel" caricature that developed in English drama reveals how difficult it is for culture to assimilate an analysis that confirms its worst suspicions about power. The theatrical Machiavel is a villain precisely because making him a villain externalizes and demonizes insights that would otherwise force uncomfortable self-recognition. He is not us, the audience reassures itself. We would not do such things.
The root of the inquisition
Read The Prince because it is the founding text of modern political science — the first systematic attempt to analyze politics as a domain with its own rationality rather than as applied ethics. Every subsequent political philosophy, whether it agrees with Machiavelli or argues against him, is in dialogue with his work. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Weber — they are all responding, directly or indirectly, to the questions The Prince raised.
Read it because it is short, clear, and perpetually startling. The famous passages — on cruelty used well, on the lion and the fox, on the nature of fortune — retain their capacity to shock because they strip away the rhetoric with which power typically disguises itself. Machiavelli writes about power as it is, not as it pretends to be.
Read it alongside the Discourses, which reveals that Machiavelli's full political vision was republican, not tyrannical. The Prince is a tactical manual for holding power in a principality; the Discourses is his preference — for republics, popular participation, and civic virtue. Reading them together reveals a political thinker far more complex and interesting than the cartoon Machiavel who has haunted five centuries of Western culture.
Chapter XV
"It is better to be feared than loved" — the passage that made Machiavelli infamous, and that still defines the popular image of realpolitik.
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Chapter XVIII
On the lion and the fox — the two modes of power, force and cunning, and why a prince must know how to be both.
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Chapter XXV
On Fortune — the famous passage comparing Fortune to a river and a woman, one of the Renaissance's most distinctive political metaphors.
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This book was silenced. It now lives permanently on the Flow blockchain — free to read, impossible to erase.
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