This is an excerpt of something I did for school about The Prince. Share if you have any thoughts.

It is hard to believe that today’s social culture would be so inspired by this work in its fullness. We may often hear references to people operating in a very “Machiavellian” way, but after reading The Prince, I am not convinced that it is possible. Like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, this work can be seen as a great reference to the efficiency of acquiring and maintaining power, and yet with the moral emphasis placed on ultimately every decision people make, the application is lost today. The fact is that in Western culture, at least, it is not a question of whether morality will be applied but rather how it will be applied. It is the Sophist versus the Rationalist today. It is the inductive mind affected by their swayed moral emphasis against the deductive mind that assumes based upon their beliefs. Therefore the utilization of Machiavelli’s work would only be to further the agenda based on the belief structure of either camp. Therefore, there is no relevant application for his work as a tactic for influence. From another point of view, however,  the work can be valuable as an assessment of what man could be like in the absence of morality and simply reliant upon the acquisition and maintenance of power. This would be valuable to study if anything for the recognition that natural law is very real and does have an influence. We have a distinct human nature and it is a self-seeking villainous thing. Emotionless? No. Much like reading George Orwell’s 1984, the reader cannot help but know that such a closed environment cannot last and it will be usurped for better or for worse by the emotions that use and abuse the morals that are written on all human hearts.