The Prince

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.

He sets republics aside almost at once, noting that he has written about them at length elsewhere. What remains is the principality, and the first cut is simple: it is either hereditary or new.

A hereditary principality is one where the ruling family has been long established. A new one comes in two shapes. It can be entirely new, as Milan was to Francesco Sforza, a soldier who made himself its duke. Or it can be a limb grafted onto a state the prince already inherited, as the kingdom of Naples was to the King of Spain.

Machiavelli calls that half-old, half-new kind mixed. What matters for now is the line itself: between power that came with the family and power that somebody had to take.

Where does Machiavelli's sorting of power begin, in the very first line of The Prince?

• All rulers are either good men or bad men
• All states are either republics or principalities✓Correct answer
• All power is either lawful or usurped
• All states are either strong or weak

His first cut is about the form of the state, not the morals of the ruler. Lawful versus usurped is the division a modern reader expects, and it is exactly the one he declines to open with.

The last sentence of Chapter I adds two more questions to ask of any newly won state. First: were its people accustomed to live under a prince, or to live in freedom? A city that has never had a master behaves very differently when it suddenly gets one.

Second: how was it won? Here Machiavelli offers two pairs. By the prince's own arms, or by the arms of others. By fortune, or by ability.

That one dense sentence is the plan of the first half of the book. Chapter after chapter picks up one branch of it and follows it to the end: the city used to freedom, the prince who built with his own hands, the one lifted by somebody else's luck. Read it slowly once, and the rest of The Prince stops feeling like a string of anecdotes.

A captain seizes a city that has always governed itself, using troops lent to him by a powerful ally. How would Machiavelli's opening sort describe that state?

• Used to freedom, and won by the arms of others✓Correct answer
• Hereditary, and won by his good fortune
• Used to a prince, and won by his own arms
• Used to freedom, and won by his own ability

The city lived under its own laws, so it was used to freedom; the soldiers belonged to someone else, so it was won by the arms of others. Leading the attack himself does not turn borrowed troops into his own arms.

Chapter II turns to the easiest case, and the surprise is how little it asks. A hereditary prince, Machiavelli says, needs only "not to transgress the customs of his ancestors, and to deal prudently with circumstances as they arise."

That is the whole job description. He is not required to be brilliant. A prince of average powers can hold such a state, unless some extraordinary and excessive force takes it from him.

Think of someone who takes over a shop that has stood on the same street for three generations. The customers already trust the name, the suppliers already know the terms, the routines already work. The heir's main task is not to wreck any of it. Most of the strength belongs to the inheritance, not to the heir.