From the act and historical circumstances

Machiavelli's writings have earned him fierce enmities. With the feature, remarkable that this hostility has continued through the centuries until today. His enemies have managed to impose in the vocabulary the term "Machiavellian" as a synonym for: treachery, treachery, unscrupulousness. Through this misleading use of his name, Machiavelli is therefore with a very bad reputation in history; privilege that only the Marquis de Sade shares with him for reasons equally unfair and untrue. But who are these bitter enemies and if that is found in almost every period since the publication of these writings? It is of course by reading Machiavelli, with the attention it deserves, found the answer. Because we then found that Machiavelli described with a taste for truth and extraordinary lucidity ignominy of power and domination, representatives of all categories and in all times; their manners, their ways of acting, their crimes. It is this radical unveiling of infamy powerful that has not been forgiven. This is why it is still people claiming historian attributing to "ideas of Machiavelli" the responsibility for what is nothing other than the practice of their masters and the evidence of their own servitude.
-the Character
For we must understand that Machiavelli because of the circumstances of the time, just would not have the slightest opportunity to appear a book "protest". But it burned him to highlight his understanding of manners of domination (by his job, he was extremely knowledgeable and he had no eyes in his pocket). He chose the only way that was possible to him by writing his book as a book for the edification of the princes and dedicating it to the Medici (the ruling family of Florence).
Which allowed him to tell everything. But it was of course not to the princes that he was speaking the truth, but to all those who might feel that these political logic there must stop, were not tolerable. In the Prince, it is therefore not "advice" but highlighting common practices of domination, of what was then everywhere in Italy (and elsewhere) in numerous principalities.
No cynicism so in Machiavelli, but rather a very serious risk taking!
Luckily, the Medici, who received the book, ostensibly in honor, received the same day a gift of a hunting pack of dogs who monopolized his attention and gave up the book into a corner. Thus "The Prince" could begin his brilliant career. There are different ways to tell the truth; it is also hoped that readers find use. Shortly after La Boetie wrote his "De voluntary servitude" which appeared 20 years after his death, and very quietly.
-the Context
Machiavelli lived in Florence, which was after all a small entity, constantly threatened by various enemies. There is in him a deep attachment to his city who was also at the time one of the main cultural center of Europe. This attachment is not a form of nationalism but rather a sense of community, of belonging to a whole. To this can be added a strong sense of historical, possible changes. Everything demonstrates that Machiavelli was not ambitious, at least in the sense petty and egotistical that is given to that term today. Only the possibility of acting matter to him; he is a full citizen in a sense that the mediocrity of our time makes it difficult to grasp.
That's when Florence was a republic it fully deploys its activity. He writes only when there is nothing better to do, when it is kept clear. For his intelligence worries that poor why keep it in secondary positions.
We must therefore also be considered as an act Prince, related to particular circumstances (the Medici in power) but hope to look beyond historically.
What are the possibilities of an era? How to act at some point by taking into account all of these circumstances? Just knowing that could very well end up murdered in a street corner, if you found some potentate too bulky or too clairvoyant. The anonymous publication of a book like The Prince wasnt in my opinion neither possible nor appropriate; because Machiavelli consciously aims beyond itself. This nest quen therefore giving it the shape that he could then push it as a new pawn in the same story.
With the Discourses on Livy, the tone will be very different, the desire Dagir on its all similar time.
For a remarkable contemporary illustration of this mode "to act," pretending to side with what one wishes to denounce, here: Truthful report on the last chances to save capitalism in Italy followed by "Evidence of absence Censor of its author "