ABSTRACT
Kenneth Burke selects The Prince what he calls "Administrative Rhetoric". Machiavelli's The Prince can be treated as rhetoric in so far as it deals with the producing of effects upon an audience. Machiavelli thought The Prince ought to rule for the common good, because he thought such rule to be the best rule. Some also think of The Prince and The Art of Worldly Wisdom, as masterpieces of irony. The great men of the social world are not only oracles of nobleness in themselves, but they surround themselves with a well-bred academy of worldly wisdom of the best and noblest kind. Bathasar Gracian, Rector of the Jesuit College at Tarragona, Spain, during the second quarter of the sixteenth century, believed, along with his fellow Jesuits, that monastic opposition to the world must be broken down. The way to bridge the gap between the monastery and the world was to make the world Christian by teaching Christians to become worldly.
