Nicolo Machiavelli 
The Prince 

The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli. Officially published five years after his death, Machiavelli’s best-known work is seen as the first work of modern political philosophy. Like Dante’s Divine Comedy, it was written in Italian vernacular, not Latin, a practice that was gaining popularity during the Italian Renaissance. The book itself is a study of how to acquire and maintain power politically. Dedicated to Lorenzo De Medici, it is notable for creating the term machiavellian to describe a type of unscrupulous and scheming method attaining power.

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Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469–1527) was an Italian politician, philosopher, and writer of the Renaissance period. His most famous work, The Prince, is responsible for the term Machiavellian as a way to describe unscrupulous political acts. A senior official in the Florentine Republic, he also wrote comedies, songs, and poetry. The Prince (Il Principe) is notable for its apparent espousal of immoral behavior, such as lying and killing, as effective political strategy. Other commentators have argued that his writings inspired the republican ideals of the Enlightenment, and have called him the father of modern political science.