2.6 Machiavelli:
Is Power More Important Than Morality?

Did you know? Machiavelli was tortured by the Medici family (Italy) after being suspected of involvement in a conspiracy against them. He later dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the nephew of Pope Leo X, in a failed attempt to regain political favor. His writings became so controversial that Machiavelli’s works were later placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559 under Pope Paul IV. Interestingly, while serving Florence, Machiavelli also worked with Leonardo da Vinci on a military engineering plan to divert a river and weaken an enemy.

If Augustine and Aquinas connected politics to morality and higher truth, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) took political thought in a much more unsettling direction. Instead of asking what a ruler ought to do in a morally perfect world, Machiavelli asked: what must a ruler do to survive in the real world?

Machiavelli lived during a time of political instability in Italy, when city-states faced corruption, foreign invasion, shifting alliances, and constant power struggles. In that environment, political failure could mean exile, conquest, or death. This shaped his view of politics as a dangerous and unstable arena where idealism alone was not enough.

He is best known for The Prince, a short but famous work on political leadership. In it, Machiavelli argued that rulers cannot always afford to act according to ordinary moral standards. A leader may need to use deception, force, manipulation, or cruelty at times in order to protect the state. For Machiavelli, the first duty of a ruler was not to be morally pure, but to maintain power and preserve political order. He is often associated with the idea that in politics, results matter more than moral purity.

This did not mean Machiavelli thought morality was meaningless. His point was that politics often places leaders in situations where conventional morality and political survival do not neatly align. A ruler who is always merciful, honest, and generous may be admired, but may also be defeated by rivals who are more ruthless. Because of this, Machiavelli argued that a wise ruler must learn how to act both morally and immorally when circumstances require it.

One of Machiavelli’s most famous arguments is that it is safer for a ruler to be feared than loved, if forced to choose between the two. Love is unstable because it depends on the feelings of others, but fear is more reliable if it is controlled carefully. At the same time, he warned that a ruler should avoid being hated, because hatred creates resistance and instability.

Machiavelli also cared deeply about appearances. A ruler did not need to actually possess every virtue, but he should appear virtuous, trustworthy, and strong. Politics, in his view, involves image as well as force. Public perception can help leaders gain loyalty, deter enemies, and preserve authority.

This made Machiavelli one of the most controversial thinkers in political history. Many people saw him as teaching rulers to be selfish, dishonest, and cruel. His name even became associated with manipulation and political scheming. But others argue that Machiavelli was not praising evil for its own sake. Instead, he was exposing the harsh realities of political life and forcing people to confront how power actually works.

Machiavelli helped shift political thought away from ideal moral order and toward realism, strategy, state survival, and the practical behavior of rulers. He treated politics as its own sphere, one that cannot always be judged by the same standards as private life.

At the same time, Machiavelli’s approach raises serious concerns. If rulers are allowed to ignore morality whenever it seems useful, what protects people from tyranny, abuse, and injustice? If success becomes the main standard, politics can easily become a world where power justifies almost anything.

Even so, Machiavelli changed political thought permanently. He forced later thinkers to wrestle with a question that never really goes away: can political leaders afford to be moral, or does survival require something harder and darker?

Next, in section 2.7, we will look at Thomas Hobbes, who also takes a darker view of politics, but for a different reason. Instead of focusing mainly on cunning rulers, Hobbes asks what human life looks like when there is no strong authority at all.