The Prince (Style)

Style

Point of View

Most of The Prince is written from the first-person point of view. In other words, the speaker of the work refers to himself directly, using the word "I." In this case, the speaker is the same person as the book's author, Niccoló Machiavelli.

In the "Dedicatory Letter" that opens the book, Machiavelli openly addresses Lorenzo de Medici, a member of the Florence ruling family. In the letter, Machiavelli states that what is written there will illustrate "my extreme desire that you arrive at the greatness that your future and your other qualities promise you." He addresses Lorenzo again near the end of the book, speaking directly of the current situation in Italy.

Throughout the book, though, he wrote with the formal "you," referring to a plural, a general readership, as modern readers might use the word in a statement like, "you need to take vitamins if you are going to stay healthy." As the English language uses one word, "you," for both the direct (singular) and general (plural) forms of address, it can be difficult to follow the subtle changes of point of view used by Machiavelli.

Structure

In presenting The Prince as a guidebook for new princes, Machiavelli rejected a conventional narrative structure and instead divided his book by issues of leadership. The textbook structure is based on logic: it starts with general types of political situations and examines them each for a few chapters before going on to a few chapters about how princes come to acquire new principalities, following that with a few chapters about war, then princes' styles and reputations, finishing with advice about the people who they keep close to them.

Overall, the structure of the book moves from general issues to specific issues. This structure also disguises the fact that Machiavelli is using the book as a resume; he is obviously auditioning for a job with Lorenzo de Medici.

Modernism

Critics often explore Machiavelli's pragmatic views by asserting that the Florentine author was a modernist born hundreds of years ahead of his time. In the late 1800s a movement within the Roman Catholic Church began to challenge the Church's teachings. Scholars who followed this movement — known as the modernist movement — sought to publish their own philosophical works without having to seek the approval of the church.

While Machiavelli did not directly question the authority of the church, the very fact that he talked about the church only as a political institution and did not claim that the Pope had absolute divine knowledge is enough to categorize him with the modern philosophers of the eighteenth century. In 1907 Pope Pius X issued a papal encyclical that deemed the movement a synthesis of all heresies, a charge reminiscent of those levied against Machiavelli, who was referred to as an agent of the devil when The Prince was published.

Although Machiavelli's style was familiar to readers of his day, the fact that he used a textbook on political education to cover broader ideas about morality might be considered a modernist technique, especially by those critics who assert that he was trying to be ironic in The Prince. Irony occurs when there is a distance between what a work says and what the author means, and it is common for modernist works to use old, familiar forms ironically.