Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, from a farm outside Florence, having been dismissed from fifteen years of service to the Republic, arrested, tortured on the rack six times, and released. He wrote it in a few months and dedicated it to a Medici, hoping for employment. He never got it.
The book's reputation is that it recommends wickedness. What it actually does is stranger and more useful: it describes political behavior as it observably occurs, and declines to describe it as it ought to occur. Machiavelli says as much — he intends to go to the effectual truth of the thing rather than to the imagination of it, because a man who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.
Two propositions in it are the foundation of everything in this part of the guide.
The first concerns appearance. It is not necessary for a prince to have all the good qualities, he writes, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. He must appear merciful, faithful, humane, upright and religious, and should be so — but must be prepared, when necessary, not to be, and to conceal it. The reason he gives is entirely empirical: everyone sees what you appear to be, few touch what you are, and those few dare not oppose the opinion of the many.
That is a claim about the asymmetry of information in politics, and it is correct. Subjects and citizens judge on surfaces because surfaces are what they can access. Modern impression-formation research — Ambady and Rosenthal's work on thin slices, the durability of first impressions — establishes that judgments made from minimal cues are formed fast and defended afterwards.
The second concerns fear and love. Machiavelli asks whether it is better to be loved or feared, answers that it would be best to be both, and observes that since the two rarely coincide, it is safer to be feared — because love is held by a chain of obligation which men break whenever it serves them, while fear is maintained by a dread of punishment that never fails.
Stated in the vocabulary of Part 1, this is loss aversion. Gratitude is a gain and its motivational weight decays. The prospect of losing property, standing or life is a loss, and losses are weighted more heavily and do not decay.
He adds a caution that is usually left out: the prince must avoid being hated, which he does by leaving his subjects' property and their women alone, because men forget the death of a father sooner than the loss of a patrimony.
The word Machiavellian arrived within decades and meant something the book does not say. It is worth reading as what it is — the first attempt to write down the mechanics of power without moralizing them — which is also the argument for Part 10 of this guide.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: The Offense Codex Foundations