Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance.

He was for many years an official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He was a founder of modern political science, and more specifically political ethics.

He wrote his masterpiece, The Prince [in 1513], [h]owever the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death.

Even today the term “Machiavellian” is shorthand for “political ruthlessness”, and controversy about the work had arisen even in the years before it was officially published.

The Prince proposed an ethos that directly conflicted with the accepted Catholic doctrine of proper governing and the rights and responsibilities of rulership. Indeed, on its face the treatise appears outright sociopathic.

The descriptions within The Prince have the general theme of accepting that the aims of princes – such as glory and survival – can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends.

[T]he treatise is the most remembered of Machiavelli’s works and the one most responsible for bringing the word “Machiavellian” into usage as a pejorative. It also helped make “Old Nick” an English term for the devil.

There’s just one problem: By all contemporary accounts, Niccolò Machiavelli was no sociopath.

On the contrary, Machiavelli was generally considered to be strongly in support of the idea of some kind of free republic as opposed to the tyrannical and frankly bloodthirsty politics of Italy of his time.

The Prince recommends to rulers the ways to gain glory, along with the virtues of fear. The book was then, as now, frankly shocking to its readers, and it has been suggested that this may have been, well, the actual point.

In other words, it is entirely possible that The Prince was…satire?

The “virtues” extolled were supposed to sound horrific, base, and by unveiling them in their honesty he may have hoped to shame and expose them, exactly as Stephen Colbert does in his popular The Colbert Report.

Despite that most people took The Prince at as much face value as people sometimes embarrassingly take The Onion, the idea that The Prince was satire is far from a new one.

On the contrary, it was a common interpretation during the Enlightenment of the 18th century in Europe.

French philosopher Rousseau wrote in the Social Contract:

“[B]eing attached to the court of the Medici, [Machiavelli] could not help veiling his love of liberty in the midst of his country’s oppression. The choice of his detestable hero, Caesar Borgia, clearly enough shows his hidden aim; and the contradiction between the teaching of the Prince and that of the Discourses on Livy and the History of Florence shows that this profound political thinker has so far been studied only by superficial or corrupt readers.”

This is far from the only interpretation, of course. One of the more ingenious suggestions is that Machiavelli intended The Prince not as satire, but as a memetic worm. That is, that he intended it to be embraced by the people he loathed because it flattered their own instincts, and in their execution of the proscriptions of The Prince they would find their own undoing in the overreach of their own ends.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, Machiavelli’s ostensible primary audience, purportedly did not even read The Prince. Why? He didn’t trust Machiavelli, a consistently strong supporter of the concept of a republic.

(It should be remembered that after Machiavelli’s Florentine militia, whom he had helped to build into an effective force, was defeated by the Medici in 1512, Machiavelli was subjected to torture on accusations of conspiracy against the Medici family.)

So there you have it: Machiavelli: The Anti-Machiavellian Hero of the People!

Quoted text via Wikipedia.