The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli (trans. W. K. Marriott) · 1908
4.8 · 6 ratings
About the book
The most notorious management book ever written: how power is won, kept and lost, by a Florentine who watched it done at close range and declined to pretend otherwise. Marriott's Everyman translation, with the life of Castruccio thrown in.
Try the short course
Part 1 · Where your power came from. The first six slides, free.
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Most advice about power starts with character: be fair, be bold, inspire people. The Prince starts with a filing system. Every state that has ever ruled over men, Machiavelli says in his first line, is either a republic or a principality.
It looks like throat-clearing, and most readers skim straight past it. But the order is the argument. Before he tells a ruler how to behave, he wants to know what kind of power that ruler is actually holding.
A commander who inherits a loyal army and a commander who has just talked his way into the job face different dangers, even sitting in the same tent. Machiavelli thinks advice that ignores that difference is worthless, which is why his whole first chapter is a single act of sorting.
Inside the course
12 parts- The kinds of principalities, and how they are acquiredFree above
- Mixed principalities: why conquests rebel
- New states won by one's own arms and ability
- Fortune's principalities: the rise of Cesare Borgia
Questions
Is The Prince free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, German, French, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
12 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. The Prince is waiting in the app’s library.
