Nicholas Machiavel's Prince.

London: R. Bishop for William Hils, to be sold by Daniel Pakeman,, 1640. It is better to be feared than loved First edition in English of the defining and best-known manual for leadership, an influence on generations of rulers, the classical expression of the moral justification that the end justifies the means, and a refutation of centuries of Christian mirror-for-prince books which emphasized the primacy of truth, religion, and morality. Composed in Italian, The Prince was first distributed in manuscript in 1513 and published in Rome in 1532. The Prince appears to have been banned from publication in England during the Elizabethan period, though translations circulated in manuscript. It was so controversial that it had to wait for over a century and was the last of Machiavelli's great works to be published in English. Even then, the translator Edward Dacres found it politic to frame the book with moral reservations or "animadversions", though he did not allow them to seep into his text as did later translators Nevile and Farneworth; he also resisted more than they did the temptation to improve on Machiavelli's style by rhetorical embellishments. "Hitherto political speculation had tended to be a rhetorical exercise based on the implicit assumption of Church or Empire. Machiavelli founded the science of modern politics on the study of mankind... Politics was a science to be divorced entirely from ethics, and nothing must stand in the way of its machinery. Many of the remedies he proposed for the rescue of Italy were eventually applied. His concept of the qualities demanded from a ruler and the absolute need of a national militia came to fruition in the monarchies of the seventeenth century and their national armies" (PMM). Machiavelli viewed The Prince as an objective description of political reality. Because he viewed human nature as venal, grasping, and thoroughly self-serving, he suggested that ruthless cunning is appropriate to the conduct of government. Though admired for its incisive brilliance, the book also has been widely condemned as cynical and amoral, and "Machiavellian" has come to mean deceitful, unscrupulous, and manipulative. Duodecimo (143 x 81 mm). Rebound to style in later sheep, neatly rebacked and relined. Housed in a brown cloth flat-back box by the Chelsea Bindery. Title laid down and discreetly remargined with some loss to border supplied in skilful pen facsimile, small rust hole in margin of M12, minor peripheral paper flaw to N2 and O5 (the latter glancing text), a couple of light stains to fore edge. A very good copy. ESTC S111853; Printing and the Mind of Man 63 (first edition); STC 17168.