I’ve spent much of the past few days putting online my book in which I assess and rewrite Niccolo Machiavelli’s famous (or infamous) work, The Prince, in a WordPress format. I wrote this book earlier this year, but was unable to find a publisher (I got distracted from my search). Maybe having it online will help.
The new site is here:
The book slightly tops 69,000 words, has more than 400 quotations from The Prince and other works by Machiavelli, as well as from many other authors including Robert Greene, Nietzsche, Cicero, Sun Tzu, Han Fei Tzu, Napoleon and more. The majority of these were also transferred to the quote widget displayed on the sidebar of the pages for the online version.
There are 26 chapters that parallel Machiavelli’s own book, with ten additional chapters (addenda) including a bibliography, biography, and maxims from his Art of War. I slightly revised the work while copying the content over.
I’ve done some minor tweaks to the CSS code for improved display purposes (might do a bit more this week), and have a couple of things to add (like a background image and some additional header images). but the majority of the work (the core text and quotes) is complete.
The online version is a bit longer than the original because this week I added a new addendum today, called The Ten Faults, based on a part of Han Fei Tzu’s work, that I had written as a blog entry back in 2007 (as a studied criticism of the former mayor’s leadership that factionalized the former council). I revised that post to present a more generic comment on municipal governance and leadership (another post I wrote, in 2009, about leadership is here).
I have plans to release The Municipal Machiavelli as an e-book, or PDF, perhaps on iTunes, in the coming weeks. Please let me know if you’re interested in a copy.
