The Influences of Selected Political Writings by...

But my hope is to write a book that will be useful . . . and so I thought it sensible to go straight to a discussion of how things are in real life and not waste time with a discussion of an imaginary world; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover he has been taught how to destroy himself, not preserve himself. -Niccolo Machiavelli Every person has a chance to leave a mark on this earth, and every person gets to decide how he or she will do that. Two men decided that they wanted to write about life and human actions that they noticed. Machiavelli wrote The Prince in an attempt to gain a political position in the new government that was being established in Italy by the Medici family. Although his book did not get him in to a governmental position like he was hoping for, the book he wrote would become very influential to many others. The One th ing that does set his book apart from other philosophers is that he wrote the book not on how things should be, but how things need to be in order for one to keep power and order. The writing of The Prince however, did overlap with his second greatest writing The Discourses. Machiavelli saw history as a learning tool and this can be seen in his writings of The Discourses. Thomas Hobbes wrote some of his best work because he grew up in a very chaotic time period. His writing of Leviathan was