The ever-thoughtful, ever-ruthless political anti-hero who strides and feints through the pages of The Prince is precisely and potently, as the Marxist Antonio Gramsci recognised, mythic. Machiavelli was a dramatist - his Mandragola is the one Italian Renaissance comedy that can still raise laughs - and the Machiavel was to become a type on the Jacobean stage. Machiavelli's Prince is not a practical advice manual aimed at any specific individual - rather it creates a fantastic creature, a kind of armoured colossus bestriding (and in Machiavelli's precocious dream, uniting) Italy. Even today, the description Machiavellian is routinely used to denote any form of political action that challenges our quaint notions of good faith and moral authenticity. For centuries the author and his Prince were seen as antichrists and early editions of The Prince in English come with notes piously refuting his cynicism. In his 1513 work, Il Principe (The Prince), Machiavelli created a monster that has haunted politics ever since. A modern awareness that human affairs are not transparent, but devious, complex and unpredictable, dates from the Italian Renaissance with its mixture of ruthlessness, ambition, fantasy, failure and self-knowledge given voice by the first modern political thinker, Niccolò Machiavelli. T he art of politics is an Italian invention - politics as a self-conscious way of acting and thinking.
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