The Prince is a revolutionary political treatise by Machiavelli, sometimes considered to be one of the first works of modern political philosophy, that invoked extensive debate due to its controversial preferencing of reality’s truths above moral ideals. In this book, Machiavelli presents a series of claims about how a prince, a term in this setting generally used to mean any ruler or sovereign, should act in order to obtain glory, respect, and power. These claims have received widespread critical attention, namely because of his support for using, even needing to use, violent and often immoral actions in order to retain such power. He justifies this notion with the further claim that otherwise, without committing these immoral actions, a prince …show more content…
Some look at this term only when considering very large problems, such as the preservation of a community's continued existence, or the prevention of catastrophe. Others, however, like Machiavelli, explore the problem of dirty hands in more everyday terms, seeing acts of dirty hands as a frequent necessity, as a typical hazard of holding political power: for a prince, there will be constant situations in which something morally disagreeable is clearly required, not just rare and extraordinary circumstances of needing to defend one's state from imminent destruction. In Machiavelli’s eyes, especially, it seems to be even the opposite of that—dirty hands is not so much needed to protect a sovereign’s nation from destruction, but needed to protect a sovereign himself. Machiavelli claims that killing off political enemies, independent threats, and other even lesser dangers to the prince’s position is completely acceptable, and even