Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince

A philosopher puts a microscope to the nature of the world. Niccolò Machiavelli was a philosopher and the essence of his posthumous discourse The Prince revolves around the nature of princes and their education. This is why the core of his teaching is that a prince should ruthlessly acquire and maintain power by using fear, his own arms, and a strategic combination of vice and virtue instead of fortune. Cesare Borgia, an armed non-prophet, used fear and his own armed forces to successfully maintain his empire. However, Machiavelli felt that his rise to power through fortune made his fall from power inevitable. Moses, an armed prophet, used virtue instead of fortune and the fear of God to conquer the enslaved people of Egypt. Thus, by Machiavelli’s

If a prince is merely a prophet without arms, he will fail. If a prince is a prophet with arms, he will conquer. Machiavelli asserts that a prophet with strong foundations upholds “veneration”(p. 24). In turn, the armed prophet will “remain powerful, secure, honored, and happy”(p. 24, p. 25). This, according to Machiavelli, is of the utmost importance and a “high example”(p.25). By letting the Israelites experience a prolonged suffering and then releasing them from enslavement with God’s army, Moses cleverly uses vice and virtue the way Machiavelli suggests using them. In the Exodus, Moses is divinely inspired to take the people of Israel out of bondage so that they “would be disposed to follow him”(p. 23). This following, according to Machiavelli, constitutes as the prophecy with which Moses garners much of his power. Instead of doing what was just, Moses did what was necessary, “for war is just to whom it is necessary, and arms are pious when there is no hope but in arms”(p. 103). One may contend that Moses could not veritably contribute to this teaching because he was divinely inspired. However, at the end of his writing, Machiavelli asserts, “God does not want to do everything”(p. 103). Machiavelli’s admiration of Moses, use of arms, and treatment of the conquered land inspired his core