Themes in The Prince?

Question

For my history class I need to come up with three themes in The Prince. Obviously I'm having some difficulty.

I would really appreciate if anyone could name and explain a few themes for me!

Answer 1

1: Love vs Fear - Machiavelli goes on at length about how it is better to rule through fear than through love, because love is fickle, difficult to earn and harder to keep, which means you waste a lot of effort where ruling through fear is quicker, easier, and more likely to work in the long-term.

2: Proper use of Force - Machiavelli is NOT about brutality and evil for its own sake. He goes on and on about who to kill and when as a means of keeping your place as Prince. More than once he advocates killing an entire enemy family, down to the last woman and child. Why? Look at classic literature, fantasy novels, and so on. the last survivor of the dead clan is the one who will kill you! It's like something right off the Evil Overlord List! But he also advocates STOPPING once they're all dead. There's no need to kill people who pose you no threat - after all if you kill everyone, who's left to rule?

3: Efficiency - Absolutely everything Machiavelli advocates has as its end goal efficiency. How do you do the most during your tenure as Prince with the least wasted effort? That's the overarching theme of all the advice he gives. How do you not get killed by the family of the last Prince? Kill them all. Problem solved. How do you maintain a loyal army? Pay them well, train them well, lay off the mercenaries, and don't borrow other people's troops. Done. This, really, is the primary theme of the whole thing, I think.

Answer 2

Free Will: The Prince is one of the quintessential Renaissance manuscripts, and as such it is often associated with individualism, humanism, and a sense of personal agency. Nonetheless, the extent to which Machiavelli meditates explicitly on free will is notable. He writes: “rather than give up on our free will altogether, I think it may be true that Fortune governs half of our actions, but that even so she leaves the other half more or less in our power to control.” To Machiavelli, Fortune is a “woman” who can be countered, but who must be defied with boldness and brashness. In many ways, The Prince can be read as an exploration of the convergence between luck and agency in human affairs. How can a prince use luck to his advantage? How can he, in turn, surmount the obstacles Fortune places in his way? In this regard, Machiavelli presents a profoundly secular view, one in which men may carve out their own destinies through shrewdness and prudence, in which ecclesiastical states are of less analytical interest than non-theocracies, and in which Fortune must either be exploited or battled.

Cruelty: In one of The Prince’s key chapters, “On Cruelty and Clemency,” Machiavelli argues that it is safer for a prince to be feared than it is for him to be loved. Men dread punishment, and this fear can be used to a prince’s benefit. Love can lie, but fear knows no such mendacity; it is a primitive emotion that will not change at the tip of a hat, that will not give way to greed or dissolve amidst a flurry of developments. A prudent prince will therefore use cruelty to his advantage – though only when necessary. This last point is not a minor one. Though Machiavelli’s reputation may suggest otherwise, he argues explicitly in The Prince that cruelty is well-used when it preserves a prince’s safety or secures the state; gratuitous cruelty is to be condemned. That said, there is a hint of admiration in Machiavelli’s tone when he writes of criminal princes such as Agathocles and Oliverotto da Fermo.

History: “As for exercising the mind,” Machiavelli writes, “a prince should read history and reflect on the actions of great men.” Machiavelli was, above all, a student of the past, and he peppers The Prince will numerous scholarly examples: from Cyrus to Cesare Borgia, from the ancient Romans to King Louis of France, from Carthage to German city-states, the art of the telling example is crucial to The Prince’s rhetorical strategy. That strategy is, in turn, recommended for princes: Machiavelli argues that in order to be great, one must study the greats of the past, and in order to avoid pitfalls, one must examine the mistakes of failed predecessors. This may seem like common sense, but it is also a view grounded in the thinking of Machiavelli’s time, when Renaissance scholars were reshaping history, looking to the past for inspiration, and calling attention to the giants of long ago.