Did Machiavelli write The Prince as a satire?

The standard explanation has been that in the corrupt conditions of sixteenth-century Italy only a prince could create a strong state capable of expansion. The trouble with this is that it was chiefly because they widened their boundaries that Machiavelli preferred republics. read more

The Prince is the first example of the scientific study of politics. While science starts with Aristotle, practical political science starts with Machiavelli. read more

There are scholars and readers who have suggested Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a satire, along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. That he was pointing out how leaders should not behave, a sort of tongue-in-cheek work. read more

A few years back I did some extensive research on Machiavelli, and found out that there's a strong current in contemporary Machiavelli-studies to read The Prince not as a single text, but complementary to The Discourses on Livy. read more