Exploring the conflict between ideas of justice and political expedience, The Prince challenges the use of conventional morality in public office, for example, the refusal to manipulate, assert, strong-arm. Machiavelli views conventional morality as something that more often causes civilisational decline rather than sustains it and saw the weakness of the Holy Roman Empire in comparison to the confidence of Ancient Rome and the freedom of citizens as indicative of an overemphasis on justice, especially divine justice. The Prince reads as a charter for rule that encourages any ambitious ‘New Prince’, to seek and emulate greatness. This in turn, he thinks, will uplift the obedient citizens beneath them and hand them real liberty. Living in turbulent 15th- and 16th-Century Florence as adviser to the power-accumulating Medici family, then in exile under Fransican zealot Savonarola, Machiavelli saw crises as opportune times for real virtue to emerge (virtue redefined as cleverness, ambition, and guile).

Leadership proves itself in measure to adversity, and if a ‘Prince’ can overcome a trial, a rival, an enemy and keep his authority, they gain in stature and build the power to deliver for their followers. They become the ‘prophet’ of their own ends. Continued navigation of crisis is the way a Prince can best advance himself and keep his followers ‘satisfied and stupefied’. Machiavelli frames power, greatness and might, as social goods in themselves, ones that incidentally end up providing more for citizens than a focus on righteousness and the common good ever could. Not democratic and explicitly anti-republican in its content – there is no popular sovereignty, no universal law, only popular and relational manipulation – but The Prince provides an alternative form of political participation and competition that democracy can define itself against – opportunism, self-aggrandizement, distraction, bellicosity, flooding the zone, ends (greatness) justifying the means (harm).