THE FOLIO SOCIETY

Ever since their publication nearly 500 years ago, Machiavelli's writings have been a scandal. The Jesuits called him 'the devil's partner in crime', Elizabethan dramatists turned his name into 'Make Evil' and Bertrand Russell thought The Prince a 'handbook for gangsters'. Yet to read Machiavelli is also to take a breath of fresh air, for he exposes realities normally sugared over with rhetoric. The scandal lies in the fact that Machiavelli himself is not scandalised by the bitter truth he tells.

Machiavelli stripped away sentimentality from words like honour, generosity and love - if they did not hold onto power, they were worthless. Living during the death-throes of the Florentine Republic, Machiavelli himself was tortured by the Medici for his Republican sympathies. For some, this suggests The Prince should be read, not as a pattern card for tyrants, but as an exposé, stripping away the velvet glove of spin to reveal the iron fist beneath.

Machiavelli's ideas remain at the heart of political controversy today. Do the ends justify the means? Should the welfare of the majority permit the persecution of a few? Such questions are not only relevant, but essential, to our political decisions. Few writers have presented them with such clear-eyed understanding or such biting prose as Machiavelli.