Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World, by Harvey C. Mansfield (Cambridge University Press, 298 pp., $34.99) Harvey Mansfield, not known for timidity, has characteristically titled ...

No, these are not the sayings of Buddha. They are aphorisms from diplomat and writer Niccolò Machiavelli’s 1532 classic of realpolitik and power-grabbing, “The Prince.” At a time when the ...

Niccolò Machiavelli offered a famously dim view of human nature in The Prince. People are so “ungrateful, fickle, [and] false,” he wrote, that a ruler should comfortably abandon conventional ...

“Politics have no relation to morals.” Controversial since its publication, Niccoló Machiavelli’s “The Prince” has had a significant impact on political philosophy. But beyond the ...