Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli detail. Santi di Tito ( 1536 - 1603). Wikicommons/Palazzo Vecchio. Some rights reserved. Is Machiavelli relevant today? Relevant, perhaps, but a democrat? Was he not the author of a book of tyranny? Perhaps not quite.
In The Prince, the most famous how-to about governing ever composed, Niccolò Machiavelli speaks to the man set to govern the state of Florence. His message is straightforward: if you are to govern, you better be effective.
Well, exactly who he is addressing himself to, and why, and what he means to say, is a bit of a mystery. He does preface his tract with a letter to “the Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici,” but when he started to write it he did not know that Lorenzo would be selected by the Pope (in 1513) to be the new Florentine leader after the collapse (in all but name) of the Republic.
