Remember Required Reading In High School? Machiavelli's "The Little Prince"

Don't know about anyone else, but reading this early 16th Century famous book really rattled my progressive advance-placement education - it was an eye-opener then and now timeless testimony to what we now call 'troubled times' . . . This and Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell are a lens on now  

What Machiavelli can teach us about Trump and the decline of liberal democracy

The infamous philosopher had a lot to say about why democracies fall.

Updated by Sean Illing@seanilling sean.illing@vox.com Jul 24, 2017, 12:10pm EDT

“I’d like to teach them the way to hell, so they can steer clear of it.”

The infamous Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli wrote those words in 1526, near the end of his life. He was warning citizens of the 16th-century Republic of Florence not to be duped by cunning leaders.

Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, is widely viewed as an instruction manual for tyrants, and it kind of is. But there’s more to Machiavelli than that. He taught rulers how to govern more ruthlessly, yes — but at the same time, he also showed the ruled how they were being led.

He was, in other words, giving both sides the handbook.

Machiavelli also had plenty to say about things that matter today. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts. . . "

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