The Art of War by Niccolo Machiavelli (1521)

This book is very foursquare to the floor in comparison to his famous The Prince. It eschews in the main the high-falutin' of the philosophy of control, and plumps instead for the down-home how-to. This is a blessing and a curse. It reads as much more thorough somehow, much more wedded to detail as it is. It's less of a wandering piece. But it also gets bogged down in that detail, passing from strong general discussion down into the nitty-gritty, and repeating the versions of it over and over and over. It's about how to construct, discipline and formulate an army with reference to the ancients, those being the Greeks and Romans. And it's also about how poor those elements are in the Italy of the time of this book, and how these lessons in the past will serve as a blueprint for a future military renaissance, to follow on from the current artistic and philosophical one. He takes us into this by means of a discussion/symposium between young enthusiasts and the author, where the author hands down all his accumulated military wisdom in the hope that Italy's future leaders will emulate it. The topics covered range across how to withstand a siege, or how to win out as a sieger; how to march your army into various types of territories and how the terrain will affect performance and strategy; how to discipline various types of insurrection and disaffection as well as maintain firm and positive standards across your force; and how to meet an enemy in many different circumstances and all the sorts of fighters and formations that might possibly arise (this is where he can get incredibly bogged down), among others. It's not an exciting book, like its more famous predecessor. But it can occasionally quietly inspire.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (1513)

The core question about this book is...which came first? Machiavellianism or expediency? I come firmly down on the side of the latter. It seems to me that Machiavelli simply put political necessity as it was then understood into words. The other crucial point being that that necessity had probably had this face for a few hundred years, and had had more or less like ones since human political thought began. I don't find it all that illuminating, and put that down to one of two things: either I'm a 'natural' Machiavellian (! - watch out those enemies) or he doesn't write particularly convincingly or excitingly about the topic. There are also a lot of misfires locked away in this old text - all sorts of self-contradictions. It could be seen as an amateur attempt, both in a good and a bad way. Having said all that, there are mildly interesting things littered through it, if the reader is not particularly well-versed in Italian history, as I am not. Warlike popes and intrigue in powerful families, and all the mechanisms of the management of power have an innate interest.