ABSTRACT
Readers may be surprised to find Machiavelli listed as one of history's losers. Isn't the author of The Prince best known today as the inventor of a world-beating recipe for success? As often happens, however, the popular image is misleading. Machiavelli was not only a failure in his high-flying political career; his failure was followed by dismissal from office, arrest, imprisonment, and torture. Worst of all in his own eyes was his banishment from involvement in Florentine politics. Yet personal loss in this case proved productive. Relegated to a ramshackle farmhouse in rural Tuscany, living in isolation from all he loved, Machiavelli refused to succumb to despair. Instead, he turned his solitude to account by reflecting on the reasons for his own failings and those of his contemporaries. Gradually those reflections took shape as a treatise on the art of governance, a work now universally known as The Prince.
