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The Most Misunderstood Man in History: What Machiavelli Actually Said About Power
Paperback
Historical FiguresGeneral Political ScienceItalian History
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 132
Weight: 0.41
Height: 0.31 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
For five hundred years, we have been reading the most infamous man in history completely wrong.
His name became a synonym for evil. Shakespeare made him a stage villain. The English nicknamed him Old Nick, after the Devil himself. His little book was banned, burned, and blamed for the crimes of tyrants he never met. To call an act Machiavellian is to accuse someone of cold, scheming, self-serving cruelty.
There is only one problem. Almost none of it is true.
The real Niccolò Machiavelli was a patriot who gave fourteen years to his city and asked for little in return. He was tortured by the very government he then begged to serve again. He wrote a second book, longer and by his own reckoning greater, that is a passionate argument for liberty and self-government. And he cared more about how power is used than almost any writer before or since.
So how did one of history's most selfless men become its most enduring villain?
This book puts the famous charges on trial, one by one, and weighs each against the record:
- That he taught men to seize power (he wrote a manual for keeping a state from collapse)
- That he believed the ends justify the means (he was obsessed with means, because outcomes are half luck)
- That he preached betrayal (he prized good faith and called a reputation for it a ruler's most valuable possession)
- That he worshipped fear (he drew a hard line at hatred, and taught that real safety is the support of the people)
- That he was the enemy of freedom (he defined liberty as the absence of arbitrary power)
- That he was a cold cynic (he sacrificed everything rather than serve any cause but his country)
Drawing on Machiavelli's own words, his letters, his diplomatic dispatches, and five centuries of scholarship, this is the story of how a brilliant and honest mind was turned into a monster, and why the truth matters more than ever in our own age of power, perception, and spin.
Read him at last as he was. Not the legend. The man.
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