Machiavelli's blunt handbook on how rulers gain and keep power, breaking with idealism to describe politics as it actually is. Its realism made 'Machiavellian' a byword for cunning statecraft.
Sources for Machiavelli — The Prince
Machiavelli — The Prince in Governance & Society
Held in the Governance & Society chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Aristotle — Politics (−350)
- Cicero — De Re Publica (On the Commonwealth) (−54)
- Cicero — De Legibus (On the Laws) (−52)
- Kautilya — Arthashastra (−300)
- Plato — The Republic (−380)
- Thomas Hobbes — Leviathan (1651)
- John Locke — Two Treatises of Government (1689)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Social Contract (1762)
- Thomas Paine — Common Sense (1776)
- Thomas Paine — Rights of Man (1791)
- Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America (1835)
- John Stuart Mill — On Liberty (1859)