This new edition of the acclaimed translation of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince - revised for the first time after thirty years - includes a rewritten and extended introduction by Quentin Skinner. Niccolò Machiavelli is arguably the most famous and controversial figure in the history of political thought. The Prince remains his best-known work, and throws down a challenge that subsequent writers on statecraft and political morality have found impossible to ignore. Quentin Skinner's introduction offers a lucid analysis of Machiavelli's text both as a response to the world of Florentine politics and as a critical engagement with the classical and Renaissance genre of advice-books for princes. This new edition also features an improved timeline of key events in Machiavelli's life, helping the reader place the work in the context of its time, in addition to an enlarged and fully updated bibliography.
- Fully updated for the first time after thirty years
- Includes a thoroughly revised introduction by Professor Quentin Skinner, one of the most influential historians of political thought of our time
- Features an improved timeline of key events, an updated bibliography, and useful biographical notes on characters in the text
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Product details
- Edition: 2nd Edition
- Date Published: February 2019
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9781316509265
- length: 202 pages
- dimensions: 215 x 137 x 11 mm
- weight: 0.29kg
- contains: 1 map
- availability: In stock
Table of Contents
Editorial note
Introduction
Principal events in Machiavelli's life
Bibliographical note
Translator's note
Map: northern and central Italy, c.1500
Dedicatory letter: Niccolò Machiavelli to His Magnificence Lorenzo de' Medici
1. How many kinds of principality there are, and by what means they are acquired
2. Hereditary principalities
3. Mixed principalities
4. Why the Kingdom of Darius, which Alexander occupied, did not rebel against his successors after Alexander's death
5. By what means cities or provinces that lived under their own laws before they were occupied ought to be administered
6. New principalities acquired by one's own arms and ability
7. New principalities acquired through the arms and fortune of others
8. Those who become rulers through crime
9. The civil principality
10. In what ways the strengths of all principalities should be measured
11. Ecclesiastical principalities
12. How many kinds of soldiers there are, and mercenary troops
13. Auxiliaries, mixed troops and one's own troops
14. How a ruler should act concerning military matters
15. The things for which men, and especially rulers, are praised or blamed
16. Liberality and parsimony
17. Cruelty and mercifulness
and whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the contrary
18. In what way rulers should keep their promises
19. How contempt and hatred should be avoided
20. Whether building fortresses, and many other things that rulers frequently do, are useful or useless
21. What a ruler should do in order to be thought outstanding
22. On those whom rulers employ in secret matters
23. How flatterers should be shunned
24. Why the rulers of Italy have lost their states
25. How much control fortune has over human affairs, and by what means she can be resisted
26. An exhortation to seize possession of Italy and assert her liberty from the barbarians
Appendix A. Letters relevant to The Prince
Appendix B. Notes on the vocabulary of The Prince
Biographical notes
Index of subjects
Index of proper names.
Look Inside
Author
Niccolo Machiavelli
Editors
Quentin Skinner, Queen Mary University of London
Quentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University between 1974 and 1979 and Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a foreign member of many other national academies, including the Academia Europea, the American Academy and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. His scholarship, which is available in more than two dozen languages, has won him many awards, including the Wolfson History Prize, the Bielefeld Wissenschaftspreis and a Balzan Prize. He has been the recipient of honorary degrees from numerous leading universities, including Athens, Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. His two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1979), was listed by The Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the hundred most influential books published since World War II. His other books include Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1997), Machiavelli (2000), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), Forensic Shakespeare (2014), From Humanism to Hobbes (Cambridge, 2018) and a three-volume collection of essays, Visions of Politics (Cambridge, 2002).
Russell Price
Russell Price, who died in 2011, was Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Lancaster.