I’m certainly a big fan of the short reads that pack a big punch and I think this is a great example of that. Machiavelli’s ideas reminded me slightly of Plato’s Republic because neither of them are concerned with people’s happiness, they are both more worried with the functionality of the society. Specifically, Machiavelli is more interested in the patriotism of his citizens than their overall happiness. He seems to see citizens as unimportant, and that they only exist to serve their political leader.

Machiavelli is somewhat harsh in terms of the way that he describes the correct way for a leader to gain power. He explains that cruelty is a necessity and even goes on to explain how to inflict cruelty in the most effective way possible. He says that Princes should be cruel for a short period of time and then stop, because shortly after, all of the citizens will simply forget the cruelty. I don’t necessarily understand what he means, nor do I agree with him, but I’m sure he was onto something…

I also found what he said about generosity to be pretty interesting. He says that generosity is an admirable quality for a leader to have, but that it’s a bad thing to be known as generous, because being generous requires depleting your resources. He thinks that it is best to originally be thought of as stingy, because then you will have plenty of resources to be generous with, and any acts of generosity will be more greatly appreciated by the population. He also stresses the importance of self-reliance in terms of having your own soldiers fight for you, and also having resources to last a long time in case of any sort of emergency. If you have auxiliary soldiers that you hire to help you in war-time, they can be helpful to you, but in the end they still have allegiance to their home country.

Overall I definitely thought it was an interesting read and I look forward to hearing everyone else’s thoughts about the book.