Machiavelli The Fox And The Prince

The prince was written to the Medici family by an ex - diplomat as a final plea to have his job back. Niccoli Machiavelli's questionable morals rocked the world at the time, where before political philosophy was extremely theoretical and courtly. Machiavelli, on the other hand, believed in whatever means necessary to achieve power, and the stability that came along with it. A strong state is a secure state, according to Machiavelli. So, Machiavelli encouraged deceit and violence in a ruler, but only to gain a stronger control and stability as a nation. A ruler uses many tricks to get his own way, not all of these tricks are completely honest ones. Machiavelli uses the examples of two animals, the fox and the lion, throughout
This was because he was living at a very unstable time. All of his morally ambiguous and before unheard of ideas was because Machiavelli desired stability for Florence, the weakest of the Italian city states at the time. The whole first two chapters of the prince are about the distrust and unreliability of mercenaries, and that was because at that time Florence was using France's army, something Machiavelli obviously did not find wise. His politics want stability, but not the stability where the state stays in tradition and is left to rot, but rather an ever expanding, secure place for the citizens to enjoy living in. Machiavelli firmly believes in stability, “Most of all, though, a ruler should have the kind of relationship with his subjects where nothing that can happen, good or bad, will force him to change his approach, because if hard times demand it, your cruelty will come too late, while any concessions you make will be seen as wrung out of you and no one will be impressed”
He was a desperate man living in desperate times, and would do what it takes to survive. In the letter to his friend, he writes about writing the prince, "Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty or frightened of death. I live entirely through them." Machiavelli never lived to see his dreams of the stable state fulfilled, dying long before Italy achieved any real power. However, his plea in the last chapter shows what a need for stability there is and how the narrator of Machiavelli, which seemed so self-assured the rest of the book, is humbling himself in this necessity, “There is no one present better in whom she can place more hope than in your illustrious house, with its valor and fortune, favored by God and by the Church of which it is now the chief, and which could be made the head of this redemption.” He flatters the Medici’s profoundly the whole closing paragraph, believing they could provide his much needed