Back in 2006, I worked as an adjustment auditor for Citizens Property Insurance, reviewing and reconciling the hundreds of thousands of claims that were made and paid for during the aftermath of the traumatic ’04 hurricane season. It was a horrendously boring job, and I am not by nature a details person, but I am by nature someone who is good at creating order out of chaos so at least in that regard I was somewhat competent at it.
Did I mention boring? Because it was. As a way to distract and entertain myself, during short breaks I researched and wrote a short booklet investigating the aphorisms attributed to Machiavelli. I really love The Prince, Machiavelli’s great contribution to philosophy and politics, so it was a lot of fun to dig into it a bit more thoroughly. It led me to read his much more comprehensive Discourses on Livy; as I like to say, The Prince is really the Cliff (or Coles) Notes version of Discourses. The readings took me down the byzantine alleyways of Italian history as well as philosophical debate, and on that path I discovered the amazing theorist Isaiah Berlin.
All in all, a good time was had!
In the end, I had a short 10k word something filled with my notes and observations regarding a variety of maxims attributed to Machiavelli. With nothing better to do, I turned it into a PDF and let people take it if they wanted. Then I lost my website and that was that for a few years. I’ve now gone back and edited it a bit more carefully and reformatted it, so here it is, available once again, for the 1.723 people who actually might care or enjoy it: A Princely Primer (PDF file)
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