What does it is better to be feared than loved mean?

Niccolò Machiavelli, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Niccolò Machiavelli answers

The question is put too simply, and the simplification has cost my readers five centuries of misreading. What I wrote in chapter seventeen of The Prince is not a general preference for terror over affection. It is a conditional judgment about which of the two, when one cannot have both, is the safer foundation for a prince who wishes to hold his stato.

The argument rests on a prior claim about human nature. Men are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders, evaders of danger, eager for gain; while you do them good they offer you everything, but when danger is close they revolt.1 Love, then, is held by a chain of obligation — and because men are wicked, that chain breaks at every opportunity for their own utility.

Fear is held by a dread of punishment that never forsakes you.2 The prince who builds his security on love has built it on something that belongs to his subjects, something they will surrender the moment it costs them. The prince who commands fear holds an instrument that remains in his own hands. But notice what I do not say. I do not say the prince should be hated.

Being feared and being hated can go together very well — provided the prince abstains from the property of his citizens and their women.3 Men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony, and causes for taking property are never lacking once a prince begins down that road.4 So the discipline required is precise: inspire the dread of punishment, but leave men their goods and their households, and hatred will not follow.

The Discourses extends the same observation into the military register, and there I am more careful about the limits. Hannibal held Italy through cruelty, violence, and faithlessness; Scipio held Spain through humanity and mercy; both produced comparable effects.5 The lesson is not that cruelty is superior to mercy but that neither mode, taken to excess, is safe.

He who desires too much to be loved becomes despicable; he who desires too much to be feared becomes hateful.6 What cancels those errors in a great captain is not a perfect balance — our nature does not consent to the middle way — but an extraordinary virtù that makes the excess forgivable.7 So the maxim, stripped of its qualifications, is a half-truth.

The full truth is this: found yourself on fear rather than love when you must choose, but govern the fear with enough restraint that it never tips into hatred, and cultivate enough virtù that the excess of whichever mode you employ does not destroy you.

Sources

  1. For one can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours, offering you their blood, property, lives, and children...but, when it is close to you, they revolt.
    The Prince, pp. 99–100
  2. love is held by a chain of obligation, which, because men are wicked, is broken at every opportunity for their own utility, but fear is held by a dread of punishment that never forsakes you.
    The Prince, pp. 99–100
  3. The prince should nonetheless make himself feared in such a mode that if he does not acquire love, he escapes hatred, because being feared and not being hated can go together very well. This he will always do if he abstains from the property of his citizens and his subjects, and from their women.
    The Prince, pp. 99–100
  4. men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony. Furthermore, causes for taking away property are never lacking, and he who begins to live by rapine always finds cause to seize others' property.
    The Prince, pp. 99–100
  5. one sees Scipio enter Spain and with his humanity and mercy at once make that province friendly to him...To the contrary, one sees Hannibal enter Italy and with modes all contrary—that is, with cruelty, violence, robbery, and every type of faithlessness—produce the same effect that Scipio had produced in Spain.
    Discourses on Livy, pp. 387–388
  6. he who desires too much to be loved becomes despicable, however little he departs from the true way; the other, who desires too much to be feared, becomes hateful, however little he exceeds the mode.
    Discourses on Livy, p. 388
  7. One cannot hold exactly to the middle way, for our nature does not consent to it, but it is necessary to mitigate those things that exceed with an excessive virtue, as did Hannibal and Scipio.
    Discourses on Livy, p. 388