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Books that Matter: The Prince
Should leaders be feared or loved? Can dictators give rise to democracy? Should rulers have morals or wear them like a mask? Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince puts forth unsettling questions like these, whose answers redefined centuries of political wisdom. But what does it really mean to be Machiavellian?
These 24 lectures are more than just a close reading of one of the great books of Western history. They're a revealing investigation of the historical context of Machiavelli's philosophical views, his tumultuous relationship with Florentine politics, his reception by his contemporaries and by 20th-century scholars, and his lasting influence on everyone from William Shakespeare to Joseph Stalin.
Throughout the lectures, you'll dive deeply into the work's most important chapters to survey their main insights; read between the lines to uncover hidden meanings, inspirations, and ironies; learn how scholars have debated their historical inspiration and importance; and discover the author's startling imagery and sometimes beautiful language. Going beyond the commonly held vision of Renaissance Italy as a place of creative genius, Professor Landon reveals the drama and terror of Machiavelli's life and world, including his relationships to the city of Florence, the powerful Medici family, and the villainous Cesare Borgia (Machiavelli's ideal prince).
For those who have already heard The Prince, prepare to engage with the text on a deeper level than ever before. And for those who've always wanted to listen to this important book, this is your introduction to one man's revolutionary beliefs about achieving - and maintaining - power.
These 24 lectures are more than just a close reading of one of the great books of Western history. They're a revealing investigation of the historical context of Machiavelli's philosophical views, his tumultuous relationship with Florentine politics, his reception by his contemporaries and by 20th-century scholars, and his lasting influence on everyone from William Shakespeare to Joseph Stalin.
Throughout the lectures, you'll dive deeply into the work's most important chapters to survey their main insights; read between the lines to uncover hidden meanings, inspirations, and ironies; learn how scholars have debated their historical inspiration and importance; and discover the author's startling imagery and sometimes beautiful language. Going beyond the commonly held vision of Renaissance Italy as a place of creative genius, Professor Landon reveals the drama and terror of Machiavelli's life and world, including his relationships to the city of Florence, the powerful Medici family, and the villainous Cesare Borgia (Machiavelli's ideal prince).
For those who have already heard The Prince, prepare to engage with the text on a deeper level than ever before. And for those who've always wanted to listen to this important book, this is your introduction to one man's revolutionary beliefs about achieving - and maintaining - power.
12 pages, Audible Audio
First published January 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 12, 2020
[4.5] William Landon makes details about Machiavelli's life and times clear and interesting in a way they never seemed in dry textbooks when I was at university. He especially brings alive the years when Machiavelli worked for the Florentine government and wrote The Prince. Along with this lecture series, Erica Benner's Be Like the Fox (2017) and Alexander Lee's doorstopper biography Machiavelli: His Life and Times (2020), show that Machiavelli scholars are now communicating in a more lively fashion than did those of twenty years ago and more. Machiavelli was not one of my first choice topics as a student; I felt I'd got stuck with him. As a result - not helped by the dryness of most of the books at the time (still in evidence to me now when I look at the old ones) - I neglected him and have always felt I have some unfinished business with him.
After discussing each chapter of The Prince, Landon goes into some relatively specialist material, including about Machiavelli's relationship to Lucretius and atheism - it turned out this was adapted from talks he'd given at symposia - an unexpected delight to find among what I'd assumed would be pretty basic content. He also puts more of himself into the lectures than other Great Courses presenters I've heard so far, and whilst it certainly won't be to everyone's taste, I liked this, as it felt more like the way you get to know a tutor while you are at university yourself, even if you don't see eye-to-eye with them about everything. As Machiavelli is one of Landon's main research interests, there was both more depth, and more personal opinion, here, than in Great Courses which are an overview of a broad subject area (e.g. The Western Literary Canon in Context), or in those presented by academics who aren't researchers on the lecture topic themselves (The Black Death by Dorsey Armstrong). Landon acknowledges his opinions as opinions, explains how he came to those conclusions, and mentions opposing views - just as it should be done.
One of the few downsides is that Landon is continually at pains to tell his audience that he is shocked and horrified by some of the advice in The Prince, and by wars and other atrocities that happened in early modern Europe. He sounds entirely genuine about this, but I would guess that years of teaching in an obscure public university in the Southern US may have made it important to emphasise his own morality when lecturing on a controversial subject. (Regardless, he's surprisingly good for a place like that, and it looks like he only returned there to teach because he grew up in the area.) The Great Courses' target audience also seems to be one of older centrist or conservative Americans for whom this approach would work well. Though I got so tired of it at one point that I had to take a break and listen to an audiobook with a UK reader. Landon's wholesome middle-American shock is 180 degrees from the jaded British outlook on topics like these which was the norm when I was an undergraduate, and which I still prefer. Landon's own (British) PhD supervisor, Richard Mackenney, put it thus in a 1993 general textbook on Sixteenth Century Europe: "What was so special about … [The Prince]? For the twentieth century, the answer probably lies in the sheer modernity of expression. For a generation accustomed to the cynicism of dictators and presidents an excellent modern translation of The Prince reads as natural and obvious. While we might not wish to espouse Machiavelli's ideas overtly, we are not shocked by them either" (p.64). With that in mind, I would love to hear the two of them discuss the idea of being shocked by history.
Following Italian Machiavelli biographers Sebastian de Grazia in Machiavelli in Hell (1989) and Maurizio Viroli in Niccolò's Smile (1998, US English in late 2000, I just missed it first time round), Landon almost always refers to his subject as Niccolò. (Ctrl `o - yay it can be typed easily without pasting, I eventually discovered.) Landon overdoes it somewhat, to the extent that I sometimes wondered if he had hurriedly used Find and Replace in sections of his notes, e.g "Niccolò scholars" for "Machiavelli scholars" (though it's not like this throughout) and even if he thought better of it later, didn't always remember to change what he was saying from what he saw on the page. (My theory about him being in a hurry gained traction when Landon described his very last-minute preparations for a presentation at an academic conference; and the one about reading on autopilot from notes, more than it sounds like he does from his voice, via sentences in a lecture on the afterlife of The Prince, which had Frederick the Great of Prussia and Voltaire alive in the 1530s and 1540s.)
As the lecturers wore on, I got to know and like the lecturer, so I was embarrassed on his behalf that he wasn't given a retake for that. However, these two features - the frequently being shocked, and the overuse of "Niccolò" - grated on me sufficiently throughout the lectures that I'm not sure I can give this 5 stars, even though I think the academic content, the clarity and 'stickiness' of the way Landon relates the info, and the animated, friendly delivery otherwise deserve them.
The lectures first really clicked for me with Landon's explanation of Machiavelli's mismanagement of power relationships when he worked for the Florentine Chancellery from c.1498-1512. (It was already a common academic opinion twenty years ago that Machiavelli himself wasn't very good at being 'Machiavellian'; he was too outspoken and opinionated at crucial times. This idea is now ubiquitous, found in just about every new vaguely academic book on the man.) I couldn't have told you anything much about this part of Machiavelli's life before, but Landon made it into the sort of clear outline which sticks, in a way that stuff from university didn't; the sort of thing you can then modify with detail, or hang other information on. Savonarola's opening up of public appointments to the middle classes persisted somewhat after his execution, enabling the employment of someone like Machiavelli (whose father was a non-practising lawyer and anti-Medici intellectual living in genteel poverty, with tax debts that barred him from public office himself). Machiavelli's mistake was that, when he became a favourite with Chancellor Piero Soderini, he failed to also keep on the right side of the man who was, in current parlance, his line manager - Marcello Adriani, a closet Medici supporter and possibly a former university teacher of Machiavelli's. Machiavelli went off travelling on exciting diplomatic missions, which he was offered because of his (supposed) flair for negotiation, leaving Adriani pen-pushing in Florence. (In the Alexander Lee biography, it's shown Machiavelli wasn't always very successful on these missions; unfortunately, in that book there isn't - so far - any discussion of whether somebody else might have managed them better, with examples, or if they would have been impossible for anyone.) Adriani also inveigled Machiavelli into writing a scandalous, now lost, play, Masks, which had the potential to get the younger man sacked. And, of course, eventually the Medici took Florence over again (after the failure of a citizen army which was one of Machiavelli's pet projects), Machiavelli was arrested and tortured - but not so badly that he wasn't able to start work on texts like The Prince and probably The Discourses within a few months. (Later, in lecture 16, there is a surprisingly detailed discussion of when The Discourses was begun relative to The Prince, weighing up evidence for theories of a number of different timings, including when Machiavelli may have first read Polybius, and when he began attending the Orti Orticellari gatherings. Whilst this may be a bit much for casual listeners, for those who like or need more than a general survey, this is just one example of how this lecture set goes over and above, enough that it could be useful to a final year or taught masters student.)
One of Landon's particular foci in the relevant lectures (and in his academic publications) is the role of patronage from the Strozzi brothers, Filippo & Lorenzo, in helping Machiavelli back into public life as a writer after he'd floundered for several years. Filippo was thirteen years Machiavelli's junior, and, though capable, was not intellectually in the same league as Machiavelli, who acted as the younger, wealthier man's scribe. This is one of a number of junctures at which Landon sounds almost indignant at the lack of recognition Machiavelli's genius received in his own lifetime, that such a man had to stoop to this, and where he talks about Machiavelli's brilliance in general. (This seems like a very 20th century view of writing, characteristic of forming one's ideas during those few decades when serious literature could be a reliable way of earning a living - and understandably due to immersion in another discipline, not having registered quite how much things have changed lately. It also echoes the old 19th-century 'great man' theory of history. When those of us of Landon's & my generation were students, great man theory was the worst of the worst, so I can understand how a scholar who was so interested in individuals might react against that and rehabilitate it a little, even whilst, myself, I tend to be most interested in the influence of big historical forces like climate, disease and economic change. And after what I read and heard this summer from various recent authors on Machiavelli, I concede that the man was just so influential and revolutionary in political theory and history of ideas - for starters in describing what those in politics did rather than what they morally ought to do - that it's honestly hard to say who might have had a similar effect, or when. However, the great mind also needs to be alive at the right time and place to have major influence.) It was the even better-connected Lorenzo Strozzi who finally got Machiavelli an interview with Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, as it happened, shortly before the latter's death. Whilst this didn't pay off, Strozzi soon got him in front of successor Giulio (later Pope Clement VII), who commissioned the Florentine Histories.
A theme throughout is the ironies, sometimes tragic ironies, of Machiavelli's life. Landon feels that one of these is the way in which Machiavelli had to be beholden to less talented, sometimes younger men such as the Strozzis. Whilst I think this is among the weakest examples - patronage was the norm for any intellectual or artist without substantial independent means, or a church living, at the time, and for centuries after - otherwise I think he is on to something, something which always felt apparent about Machiavelli but which I hadn't named before. In the way that this man who is the byword for everything manipulative and underhand could be too honest for his own good, and wasn't great at the games on which he was so skilled at advising others. (One of my own abiding ideas of Machiavelli has always been of the depressed torture victim of 1512-13, not long home and trying to work out what he will do and what he will focus on, almost the obverse of the predatory "murderous Machiavel".) That someone who believed in and praised the active life and felt that public politics was more valuable than writing, became most famous as a writer - in his own lifetime as a playwright of comedies, not even for the political texts he's now remembered for. Landon also sees many ironies and contradictions within The Prince, which I think is a good way of making sense of this strange text, which is stranger than a lot of casual readers want to believe. I can't remember if I knew the term 'trolling' when I first read The Prince in the 90s - at any rate it wasn't the big deal it would later become, but there are layers in the text, and its circumstances (I don't believe that the wily adviser who writes The Prince would seriously recommend employing the writer of The Prince), that can be seen as partly trolling and trying it on, in that complicated, millefeuille, serious/not serious way which is so familiar from parts of the 2010s internet, and so much easier to name and define because of it. I guess in the late 90s a similar, though simpler and less serious mode was familiar from the media, especially lads' mags, more usually about pop culture and lifestyle topics than politics. Which I was reminded of when Landon suggested that the bravado of passages in The Prince like the now-notorious ravishing of Fortuna were intended to get the attention of "a cocky young man of twenty-three", i.e. Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, its dedicatee.
Continued below in comment field.
(listened April-May 2020, review finished from notes, Oct 2020)
After discussing each chapter of The Prince, Landon goes into some relatively specialist material, including about Machiavelli's relationship to Lucretius and atheism - it turned out this was adapted from talks he'd given at symposia - an unexpected delight to find among what I'd assumed would be pretty basic content. He also puts more of himself into the lectures than other Great Courses presenters I've heard so far, and whilst it certainly won't be to everyone's taste, I liked this, as it felt more like the way you get to know a tutor while you are at university yourself, even if you don't see eye-to-eye with them about everything. As Machiavelli is one of Landon's main research interests, there was both more depth, and more personal opinion, here, than in Great Courses which are an overview of a broad subject area (e.g. The Western Literary Canon in Context), or in those presented by academics who aren't researchers on the lecture topic themselves (The Black Death by Dorsey Armstrong). Landon acknowledges his opinions as opinions, explains how he came to those conclusions, and mentions opposing views - just as it should be done.
One of the few downsides is that Landon is continually at pains to tell his audience that he is shocked and horrified by some of the advice in The Prince, and by wars and other atrocities that happened in early modern Europe. He sounds entirely genuine about this, but I would guess that years of teaching in an obscure public university in the Southern US may have made it important to emphasise his own morality when lecturing on a controversial subject. (Regardless, he's surprisingly good for a place like that, and it looks like he only returned there to teach because he grew up in the area.) The Great Courses' target audience also seems to be one of older centrist or conservative Americans for whom this approach would work well. Though I got so tired of it at one point that I had to take a break and listen to an audiobook with a UK reader. Landon's wholesome middle-American shock is 180 degrees from the jaded British outlook on topics like these which was the norm when I was an undergraduate, and which I still prefer. Landon's own (British) PhD supervisor, Richard Mackenney, put it thus in a 1993 general textbook on Sixteenth Century Europe: "What was so special about … [The Prince]? For the twentieth century, the answer probably lies in the sheer modernity of expression. For a generation accustomed to the cynicism of dictators and presidents an excellent modern translation of The Prince reads as natural and obvious. While we might not wish to espouse Machiavelli's ideas overtly, we are not shocked by them either" (p.64). With that in mind, I would love to hear the two of them discuss the idea of being shocked by history.
Following Italian Machiavelli biographers Sebastian de Grazia in Machiavelli in Hell (1989) and Maurizio Viroli in Niccolò's Smile (1998, US English in late 2000, I just missed it first time round), Landon almost always refers to his subject as Niccolò. (Ctrl `o - yay it can be typed easily without pasting, I eventually discovered.) Landon overdoes it somewhat, to the extent that I sometimes wondered if he had hurriedly used Find and Replace in sections of his notes, e.g "Niccolò scholars" for "Machiavelli scholars" (though it's not like this throughout) and even if he thought better of it later, didn't always remember to change what he was saying from what he saw on the page. (My theory about him being in a hurry gained traction when Landon described his very last-minute preparations for a presentation at an academic conference; and the one about reading on autopilot from notes, more than it sounds like he does from his voice, via sentences in a lecture on the afterlife of The Prince, which had Frederick the Great of Prussia and Voltaire alive in the 1530s and 1540s.)
As the lecturers wore on, I got to know and like the lecturer, so I was embarrassed on his behalf that he wasn't given a retake for that. However, these two features - the frequently being shocked, and the overuse of "Niccolò" - grated on me sufficiently throughout the lectures that I'm not sure I can give this 5 stars, even though I think the academic content, the clarity and 'stickiness' of the way Landon relates the info, and the animated, friendly delivery otherwise deserve them.
The lectures first really clicked for me with Landon's explanation of Machiavelli's mismanagement of power relationships when he worked for the Florentine Chancellery from c.1498-1512. (It was already a common academic opinion twenty years ago that Machiavelli himself wasn't very good at being 'Machiavellian'; he was too outspoken and opinionated at crucial times. This idea is now ubiquitous, found in just about every new vaguely academic book on the man.) I couldn't have told you anything much about this part of Machiavelli's life before, but Landon made it into the sort of clear outline which sticks, in a way that stuff from university didn't; the sort of thing you can then modify with detail, or hang other information on. Savonarola's opening up of public appointments to the middle classes persisted somewhat after his execution, enabling the employment of someone like Machiavelli (whose father was a non-practising lawyer and anti-Medici intellectual living in genteel poverty, with tax debts that barred him from public office himself). Machiavelli's mistake was that, when he became a favourite with Chancellor Piero Soderini, he failed to also keep on the right side of the man who was, in current parlance, his line manager - Marcello Adriani, a closet Medici supporter and possibly a former university teacher of Machiavelli's. Machiavelli went off travelling on exciting diplomatic missions, which he was offered because of his (supposed) flair for negotiation, leaving Adriani pen-pushing in Florence. (In the Alexander Lee biography, it's shown Machiavelli wasn't always very successful on these missions; unfortunately, in that book there isn't - so far - any discussion of whether somebody else might have managed them better, with examples, or if they would have been impossible for anyone.) Adriani also inveigled Machiavelli into writing a scandalous, now lost, play, Masks, which had the potential to get the younger man sacked. And, of course, eventually the Medici took Florence over again (after the failure of a citizen army which was one of Machiavelli's pet projects), Machiavelli was arrested and tortured - but not so badly that he wasn't able to start work on texts like The Prince and probably The Discourses within a few months. (Later, in lecture 16, there is a surprisingly detailed discussion of when The Discourses was begun relative to The Prince, weighing up evidence for theories of a number of different timings, including when Machiavelli may have first read Polybius, and when he began attending the Orti Orticellari gatherings. Whilst this may be a bit much for casual listeners, for those who like or need more than a general survey, this is just one example of how this lecture set goes over and above, enough that it could be useful to a final year or taught masters student.)
One of Landon's particular foci in the relevant lectures (and in his academic publications) is the role of patronage from the Strozzi brothers, Filippo & Lorenzo, in helping Machiavelli back into public life as a writer after he'd floundered for several years. Filippo was thirteen years Machiavelli's junior, and, though capable, was not intellectually in the same league as Machiavelli, who acted as the younger, wealthier man's scribe. This is one of a number of junctures at which Landon sounds almost indignant at the lack of recognition Machiavelli's genius received in his own lifetime, that such a man had to stoop to this, and where he talks about Machiavelli's brilliance in general. (This seems like a very 20th century view of writing, characteristic of forming one's ideas during those few decades when serious literature could be a reliable way of earning a living - and understandably due to immersion in another discipline, not having registered quite how much things have changed lately. It also echoes the old 19th-century 'great man' theory of history. When those of us of Landon's & my generation were students, great man theory was the worst of the worst, so I can understand how a scholar who was so interested in individuals might react against that and rehabilitate it a little, even whilst, myself, I tend to be most interested in the influence of big historical forces like climate, disease and economic change. And after what I read and heard this summer from various recent authors on Machiavelli, I concede that the man was just so influential and revolutionary in political theory and history of ideas - for starters in describing what those in politics did rather than what they morally ought to do - that it's honestly hard to say who might have had a similar effect, or when. However, the great mind also needs to be alive at the right time and place to have major influence.) It was the even better-connected Lorenzo Strozzi who finally got Machiavelli an interview with Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, as it happened, shortly before the latter's death. Whilst this didn't pay off, Strozzi soon got him in front of successor Giulio (later Pope Clement VII), who commissioned the Florentine Histories.
A theme throughout is the ironies, sometimes tragic ironies, of Machiavelli's life. Landon feels that one of these is the way in which Machiavelli had to be beholden to less talented, sometimes younger men such as the Strozzis. Whilst I think this is among the weakest examples - patronage was the norm for any intellectual or artist without substantial independent means, or a church living, at the time, and for centuries after - otherwise I think he is on to something, something which always felt apparent about Machiavelli but which I hadn't named before. In the way that this man who is the byword for everything manipulative and underhand could be too honest for his own good, and wasn't great at the games on which he was so skilled at advising others. (One of my own abiding ideas of Machiavelli has always been of the depressed torture victim of 1512-13, not long home and trying to work out what he will do and what he will focus on, almost the obverse of the predatory "murderous Machiavel".) That someone who believed in and praised the active life and felt that public politics was more valuable than writing, became most famous as a writer - in his own lifetime as a playwright of comedies, not even for the political texts he's now remembered for. Landon also sees many ironies and contradictions within The Prince, which I think is a good way of making sense of this strange text, which is stranger than a lot of casual readers want to believe. I can't remember if I knew the term 'trolling' when I first read The Prince in the 90s - at any rate it wasn't the big deal it would later become, but there are layers in the text, and its circumstances (I don't believe that the wily adviser who writes The Prince would seriously recommend employing the writer of The Prince), that can be seen as partly trolling and trying it on, in that complicated, millefeuille, serious/not serious way which is so familiar from parts of the 2010s internet, and so much easier to name and define because of it. I guess in the late 90s a similar, though simpler and less serious mode was familiar from the media, especially lads' mags, more usually about pop culture and lifestyle topics than politics. Which I was reminded of when Landon suggested that the bravado of passages in The Prince like the now-notorious ravishing of Fortuna were intended to get the attention of "a cocky young man of twenty-three", i.e. Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, its dedicatee.
Continued below in comment field.
(listened April-May 2020, review finished from notes, Oct 2020)
March 2, 2024
Twenty-four half-hour-long lectures available as an audio download, with accompanying .pdf.
Excellent for listening to while cooking, laundering, or ironing, as I did.
I may never actually sit down with a physical book and read The Prince, but listening to a series of lectures about it (which many refer to (esp. in Washington, D.C.), but few actually read) is an adequate substitute. The lectures are excellent. I didn't actually end up liking Machiavelli or The Prince any more than I did before, but at least my dislike now is better informed. There is some evidence that my previous view of Machiavelli, to wit, that he was a revolting suck-up who wrote this while attempting to ingratiate himself with powerful people who had sent him into exile, was insufficiently nuanced, although also not 100% incorrect.
Like many great books, this book had a fascinating life after the final text left the control of its author, and the lectures that cover this history are great to listen to, as the book experiences rises and falls, including near extinction, during the hundreds of years that has passed since it was written.
Back when Machiavelli wrote, behaving ruthlessly while mouthing Christian platitudes was a daring act, but today behaving in this manner does not raise an eyebrow. Machiavellian tactics do not scale, that is, they no longer work when a large number of people are using them. Richard Nixon is alleged to have said “We are all Keynesians now”, but I contend that we are all Machiavellians now, and the state of our world shows the unhappy result of that fact.
However, the previous paragraph should not be interpreted as a criticism of the lectures, which helped me prepare more delicious soups and more wrinkle-free shirts than I would have had otherwise.
Excellent for listening to while cooking, laundering, or ironing, as I did.
I may never actually sit down with a physical book and read The Prince, but listening to a series of lectures about it (which many refer to (esp. in Washington, D.C.), but few actually read) is an adequate substitute. The lectures are excellent. I didn't actually end up liking Machiavelli or The Prince any more than I did before, but at least my dislike now is better informed. There is some evidence that my previous view of Machiavelli, to wit, that he was a revolting suck-up who wrote this while attempting to ingratiate himself with powerful people who had sent him into exile, was insufficiently nuanced, although also not 100% incorrect.
Like many great books, this book had a fascinating life after the final text left the control of its author, and the lectures that cover this history are great to listen to, as the book experiences rises and falls, including near extinction, during the hundreds of years that has passed since it was written.
Back when Machiavelli wrote, behaving ruthlessly while mouthing Christian platitudes was a daring act, but today behaving in this manner does not raise an eyebrow. Machiavellian tactics do not scale, that is, they no longer work when a large number of people are using them. Richard Nixon is alleged to have said “We are all Keynesians now”, but I contend that we are all Machiavellians now, and the state of our world shows the unhappy result of that fact.
However, the previous paragraph should not be interpreted as a criticism of the lectures, which helped me prepare more delicious soups and more wrinkle-free shirts than I would have had otherwise.
December 17, 2023
So enlightening in understanding Machiavelli and the greater context of his world. I will teach him differently now and see better the varied interpretations of him. Excellent lecture series
February 8, 2020
Before starting these lectures I read a translation of Niccolo's "The Prince", and reviewed it earlier on Goodreads, trying what I thought might be an interesting exercise to see if my interpretation of this 'little book' would the same, or even similar to, Dr Landon's. It turns out that it was!
I think it helps to have at least a working knowledge of the life and times of Machiavelli...what the environment of Florence was in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. I was helped by a recent visit to Florence during which I was impressed by the artistic and literary genius of that time, and the influences that Niccolo must have had.
Dr Landon refers to him often as a literary genius and dedicated republican, as he certainly was. But these lectures filled gaps in his personal life that I didn't pick up...his religious views...his attempts at military endeavours...his somewhat unconventional personality...and finally, his purpose in writing a how-to book that was not intended for publication. I agree with Landon that the book was not intended as a satire, but rather a relatively naive attempt to unify Italy as a republican nation/state through any means available.
And, as for current leaders who have Machiavellian tendencies, I suppose only some future historian will be able to identify them, since the good (?) tyrants won't be recognized during their 'reign', especially the ones who have read this 'little book' (or had it read to them) And that could be HUUUUGE!
Recommended for the history buff who is ready to do his/her homework...and who recognizes a sale and coupon.
I think it helps to have at least a working knowledge of the life and times of Machiavelli...what the environment of Florence was in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. I was helped by a recent visit to Florence during which I was impressed by the artistic and literary genius of that time, and the influences that Niccolo must have had.
Dr Landon refers to him often as a literary genius and dedicated republican, as he certainly was. But these lectures filled gaps in his personal life that I didn't pick up...his religious views...his attempts at military endeavours...his somewhat unconventional personality...and finally, his purpose in writing a how-to book that was not intended for publication. I agree with Landon that the book was not intended as a satire, but rather a relatively naive attempt to unify Italy as a republican nation/state through any means available.
And, as for current leaders who have Machiavellian tendencies, I suppose only some future historian will be able to identify them, since the good (?) tyrants won't be recognized during their 'reign', especially the ones who have read this 'little book' (or had it read to them) And that could be HUUUUGE!
Recommended for the history buff who is ready to do his/her homework...and who recognizes a sale and coupon.
February 7, 2023
Books that Matter: The Prince by William Landon is another really good series from The Teaching Company. I am pretty sure I am a sucker for people who have both an infectious admiration for their study, while always maintaining a critical eye towards it so as to avoid romanticizing it. Landon doesn't let Machiavelli and his Prince get away with much, but he is still able to provide an informative overview that conveys the spirit of the book, the man who wrote it, and the broader times where it took place. So far, the Books that Matter subseries that I've had the chance to watch or listen to have all been hits. That makes me a little sad that it appears as though the Teaching Company gave up on them. I'd take some of their literature courses and just go down the list to give them enough Books that Matter to fill up the next decade or so with worthwhile courses.
December 23, 2020
The Great Courses are aptly named. I learned a lot.
January 31, 2023
Beyond excellent.
January 23, 2024
I really enjoyed the author's take on this book. The lectures were excellent. I read the Prince years ago and really didn't get a lot out of it. The lessons in the course were definitely a help.
May 6, 2018
Excellent context of The Prince. I had read it way back when, of course, but had really not known much of Machiavelli's background or motivation in writing this book. So, it was a good overview for me. I expect the more sophisticated history buffs out there might have a lot of quibbles with Landon's points of emphasis, but I found it enjoyable and a great review. I read it, frankly, because of all of the comparisons and discussion of Machiavellian political activity these days, and I wanted a refresher as to what exactly that might or might not mean and what relevance it might or might not have to today's politics.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews