Question

What theme is featured in Machiavelli’s The Prince?

Answer 1

Answer:

B. the importance and limits of political power

Explanation:

Niccolo Machiavelli was an eminent Italian author and statesman who in his best-known work, The Prince, described the means by which government may gain and maintain its power. He believed in gain of power by whatever means and to maintain it for long period of time. He said that gaining power is the only way to live with honor because the world is a place for the fittest people and not the weak ones. This famous theory is known as Realism in Political Science.

Answer 2

Answer:

B. The importance and limitis of political power

Explanation:

Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, just after he was forced to leave Florence as a political exile. Dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the book is Machiavelli’s advice to the current ruler of Florence on how to stay in power. It was also his effort, though unsuccessful, to gain an advisory post in the Medici government. The Prince was not published until five years after Machiavelli’s death.

Machiavelli’s treatise makes a clear break from the Western tradition of political philosophy that preceded him. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, the thinkers of this tradition were concerned with issues of justice and human happiness, and with the constitution of the ideal state. Until its final chapter, The Prince is a shockingly direct how-to manual for rulers who aim either to establish and retain control of a new state or to seize and control an existing one. Rather than basing his advice on ethical or philosophical principles, Machiavelli founds his political program on real-life examples. When explaining what a prince should or should not do in pursuit of his ambitions, Machiavelli cites the actions of well-known historical and contemporary leaders, both successful and unsuccessful. Throughout The Prince, Machiavelli explicitly aims to give an unsentimental analysis of actual human behavior and the uses of power. “I have thought it proper,” Machiavelli writes of a prince’s conduct toward his subjects, “to represent things as they are in a real truth, rather than as they are imagined” (p. 49).