El príncipe

An immovable reference in the field of political philosophy for five centuries, an inexhaustible source of quotes and the most disparate interpretations, Machiavelli's masterpiece represents, above all, a fundamental line of demarcation between medieval and modern political thought. Written around 1513, at the darkest moment in the history of Italy, while the invading forces were fighting for the rich but weak regional states that emerged on the peninsula, this treatise condenses all the knowledge and experience that Machiavelli had accumulated during his fifteen years career as a senior official in the State administration. A sour and lucid work in which the Florentine thinker, in addition to drawing the profile of the ideal prince, analyzes the deep reasons for human behavior and discriminates for the first time between politics and morality. In 1559 The Prince was included in the index of books banned by the Church on charges of having contributed to the spread of political corruption and the breakdown of the nexus between ethics and action.