Better Feared Than Loved: Machiavelli's Most Famous Argument, Fully Explained — The Prince

Machiavelli takes up cruelty and clemency before the famous fear-versus-love question. Every prince should wish to be thought clement, yet misused mercy destroys. Cesare Borgia was considered cruel, but his severities reconciled the Romagna and restored peace. Measured against the Florentines, who let Pistoia be destroyed to avoid a cruel name, Borgia was more merciful: a few executions that offend individuals can prevent disorders that murder and rob the whole people. New princes cannot escape the imputation of cruelty while states remain full of dangers.

Machiavelli then asks whether it is better to be loved or feared. One should wish both, but if forced to choose, it is safer to be feared. Men are ungrateful and fickle; they promise everything while success is distant and defect when need arrives. Love rests on obligation men break for advantage; fear rests on punishment that does not fail.

Still, fear must avoid hatred. A prince can endure being feared if he is not hated, which he preserves by keeping hands off subjects' property and women, executing only with manifest cause, and remembering that men forget a father's death sooner than the loss of a patrimony. With an army, cruelty becomes necessary to hold soldiers united.

Hannibal held a mixed army together abroad through inhuman cruelty joined to valour; without it his other virtues would not have sufficed. Scipio's excessive forbearance let his army rebel in Spain, earned rebuke from Fabius Maximus as corrupter of the soldiery, and left Locrian wrongs unpunished. Men love at their own pleasure and fear at the prince's; a wise prince builds on what he controls and strives only to avoid hatred.