38); a Prince should also appear to keep at least some of the old ways so the people will readily accept the new ways (Machiavelli, Discourses on the first decade of Titus Livius, 2007, p. 98). While the circumstances may change, it is clear that a Prince must be willing and able to manipulate appearances in order to convince others to give their power over to him.
3. Conclusion
Niccolo Machiavelli's ideas on appearance, reality and power stem from his background and place in the political shifts of 16th Century Italy. A career politician who used and was used by the politics of the time, Machiavelli developed certain unvarnished "truths" about gaining and retaining power. It was during his political exile that he wrote the Prince, his most famous work and a book that is still read 500 years after its publication. For Machiavelli, reality was quite different from the ideally morally-driven politics espoused by Aristotle. In Machiavelli's world, reality was about obtaining and retaining personal power, necessarily divorced from ethics/morality because men are "ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous…" and fortune is fickle/cruel. Rather than acting...
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