In 1513, Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli wrote his best-known work, Il Principe (The Prince), as advice to any in the ruling classes who\u00a0wanted to gain or maintain power and also attain glory.<\/p>\n
He describes what he has seen in his political life\u00a0as the necessary things a prince must do – in essence combining the guile of the fox with the force of the lion.<\/p>\n
Subsequently, the use of his name has had very negative connotations.\u00a0Most people would not relish being called “Machiavellian”. But his thinking has been very influential in shaping our history – and in many good ways. It helped stimulate liberal political philosophy to advocate positive change for the citizen, promoted the supremacy of civil rather than religious or monarchical power and stressed the ideals of honesty,\u00a0hard work and people’s responsibility to their communities. Like Kafka and Freud, the adjective derived from his name paints just a narrow idea of what he had to say. So his reputation is rather ill-deserved.<\/p>\n
While The Prince is not meant to be a moral guide for the day-to-day living of the average Joe Bloggs, it\u00a0nonetheless has ideas in it which we can all learn from. So, for example,\u00a0he tells us that Fortune is the force that can always crush you. “Extremima malignita” or pure misfortune can be just around the corner. The results of the current economic conditions might feel like that to some. What seemed certain is no longer so.<\/p>\n
How can you defend yourself against what might happen? Machiavelli says that\u00a0you should try to “master Fortune”.\u00a0To paraphrase, as they might say in the US, you should try to “get\u00a0lucky”. How do you do that?\u00a0You have to take action: “It is better to have acted and regretted than not to have acted and regretted”. In doing so, “Fortes fortuna adiuvat” – fortune favours the brave (here\u00a0he borrows from Levy the Roman historian).<\/p>\n
Maybe now is the time to act. What steps can you take?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1513, Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli wrote his best-known work, Il Principe (The Prince), as advice to any in the ruling classes who\u00a0wanted to gain or maintain power and also attain glory. He describes what he has seen in his political life\u00a0as the necessary things a prince must do – in essence combining the guile of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[27],"tags":[50,21,54],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":527,"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions\/527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}