The Prince, written sometime in the early 16th century by Niccolo Machiavelli
             (1469-1527), is widely considered to be the first book written explicitly as an
             examination of political science. Among the most original thinkers of the Renaissance,
             throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries his name would be synonymous with
             cruelty, deviousness, and purposefully destructive rationality. No political thinker was
             ever more demonized or misunderstood than Machiavelli. The main source of this
             misunderstanding, as well as the source of debate that continues to this day among
             political thinkers and historians, is Machiavelli's most influential and widely read
             treatise on government, The Prince, a remarkably short book that attempts to lay out
             methods to secure and maintain political power. It seems that Machiavelli really had no
             strong political commitments, living more of the life of professional diplomat, working
             for whomever was in power at the time. When the Medici came to power, they never
             fully trusted him since he had been an important official in the former Republic. They
             imprisoned and tortured him in 1513 and eventually banished him to his country estate at
             San Casciano. It was during his exile in San Casciano, when he was desperate to get back
             into government, that he wrote The Prince for the express purpose of currying favor
             with and getting a job in the Medici government.
             Machiavelli was the first to discuss politics and social phenomena in their own
             terms without any thought toward traditional ethics or morals. In many ways you could
             consider Machiavelli to be the first major Western thinker to apply the strictly scientific
             method of the classical Greeks and Romans to politics. He did so by observing the
             phenomena of politics, studying as many of the writings on the subject as he could, and
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