“Safer to be feared than to be loved”

This morning I listened via the BBC radio website “play it again” facility, to a translation of the infamous book “The Prince” by “Niccolo Machiavelli”.

This was last week's BBC Radio 4 “Book of the Week”. The “play it again” facility lasts a week, so you can still hear it in full until I suppose tomorrow morning’?

This version had been translated by Peter Constantine (Amazon £7.69) and was read by Peter Firth.

Machiavelli is someone who you hear being referred to quite often but no-one you know has ever read his books (or maybe no-one wants to admit it?). Cromwell apparently owned a manuscript; Napoleon had a copy of the book at the Battle of Waterloo, while Hitler boasted that he always had a copy on his bedside table.

Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" in 1513 after an illustrious career as a diplomat, courtier and soldier for the Italian Florentine republic. At the time of writing he was in exile after being wrongly accused of "conspiracy" and had even been tortured (by a particularly cruel process which involved deliberately dislocating both his shoulders). Despite experiencing such torture, Machiavelli thought that it was a perfectly legitimate political tool!

Nick Robinson, the BBC Political reporter (and blogger) introduced most of the readings and tried to draw comparisons to modern day British politics. While I enjoyed listening to the 5 programmes, it was clear that 16th century Italy was not a particularly pleasant place to live in and that there are not that many modern day lessons to learnt from his book.

Barbaric and unspeakable cruelty at the time was quite commonplace. Italy was a divided country of warring city states in almost constant bloody conflict. Surprisingly, Machiavelli was a voice of reason with regard to cruelty and warfare. While he supported rulers being cruel and ruthless when necessary, he wanted it to be quick and short lived. Afterwards, a ruler who wanted to survive should rely on being a fair and just Prince, rather than just a despot (and he should be mean and keep taxes low!)

I had until today always thought that the most famous quotation by Machiavelli was that it was “better to be feared than to be loved”. However the programme explained that his actual conclusion was that for a ruler it was “safer to be feared than to be loved”. Which I think is somewhat different.

A good historical rather than political read.