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Comment by throwaway173738 | Hacker News Reader

The Prince was a satire of the political dynamics of the time.

The Prince was a hardheaded analysis of governance that was sponsored by a prince, so had to pretend that the prince was the hero. I think the same about Hobbes (or Spinoza or Descartes); with Protestantism came a huge and multiplying number of heresies from Catholic orthodoxy, and materialist atheists could write about rationality through extremely abstract metaphors that they referred to with Christian labels. The same applied to royalty, who were the intermediaries between God and man, and often the patrons of these secular scholars.

i.e. don't deny God, don't deny the King, and you can finally write about reality.

The Prince wasn't sponsored by anyone. Machiavelli wrote the manuscript on his own initiative as a gift to a prince, with the hope of being given a job. It was basically his (unsuccessful) application letter. The same motivation for flattery remains in both cases, however.

What makes you think it is a satire?

Exactly, it seems like a clear eyed instruction manual for the time.

I don’t necessarily think it is an obvious satire, but IIRC, at the time he wrote it he was a persona non grata at the Florentine court and was attempting to curry favour.

It was most definitely written to confirm the Medici’s biases and stroke some egos.

> It was most definitely written to confirm the Medici’s biases and stroke some egos

Yes, that is the opposite of satire.

Not necessarily. Machiavelli certainly seems the type to play to the Medicis while simultaneously showing them up in a subtle manner.

Did he believe what he wrote in the Prince was noble or just? Probably not, based on his democratic tendencies.

Imagine if you wrote a send-up of Silicon Valley VCs (for example) and tried to be subtly ridiculous about it, but they took your work extremely well and even applied it. Is that not the most successful and hilarious satire of all?

This idea is popular, but controversial. After looking into it a bit with the help of historians on reddit, I no longer believe this conclusion, but I recommend everyone curious looks for themselves.

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