Chapters 1 and 2
Chapter I:
The Various Kinds of Government, and the Ways By Which They Are
Established.
Machiavelli
begins The Prince with a crucial distinction of political categories.
There are, he writes, only two ways in which a state can be organized:
as a republic, or as a monarchy.
After making this distinction, Machiavelli immediately, without a pause
or comment, simply drops the discussion of the “republic.”
This doesn’t mean that Machiavelli doesn’t like republics --
republics, after all, are the subject of his other major work of political
theory, The Discourses. Rather
than accuse Machiavelli of anti-democratic bias, we should note that in this
particular book, which meant to describe the proper conduct of a prince, any
discussion of princeless republics would be entirely irrelevant.
After bracketing the idea of a republic, then, Machiavelli moves on to
divide the category of “monarchy” into further sub-categories.
Monarchies, he writes, can be either hereditary and governed by the same
family for generations, or recently founded.
Again, Machiavelli follows one division with another.
Leaving aside hereditary monarchies for the moment, he distinguishes two
different kinds of recently founded monarchies
– those which are entirely new, and those which are new annexations of
territory added onto pre-existing hereditary monarchies.
As we might expect, within this latter category (the annexed state),
there are also two subcategories: Machiavelli
points out that some annexed states were previously subject to another ruler,
and some were formerly free. And
finally, there is yet another kind of subcategory within annexed states:
those which were conquered by a prince in war, and those which simply
fall to him through luck or skill.
Chapter II:
Of Hereditary Monarchies
This
chapter begins with Machiavelli’s apology for not discussing republics in this
book – in what seems to be an explicit reference to Discourses, Machiavelli
notes that he has “treated of them fully in another place.”
After making that disclaimer, he moves ahead with his discussion of how
the various kinds of monarchies are best governed and maintained.
He starts off with the hereditary monarchy.
This kind is pretty easy to handle, according to Machiavelli, because
political circumstances in such a monarchy have been relatively stable for a
long period of time, and subjects are used to the way things are under a ruling
family. All a prince has to do, if he inherits his state, is not to
change anything too violently. Even
if some “exceptional and excessive” force were to disempower the hereditary
monarch, the countervailing force of political habit would soon restore him to
power at the slightest opportunity. Machiavelli
gives the example of the Duke of Ferrara, who was able to withstand attacks by
Venice and Rome simply because he was part of a long-standing family of Dukes.
Unless such a ruler goes out of his way to alienate his people, they will
usually love and honor him as a part of their own traditional way of life.
