Teggan's Reviews > The Discourses

Yes, you had to read The Prince, because your professor had to fit something of Machiavelli's into the class, and so she chose the shortest of his works to keep the students bitching to a minimum. The Prince represents a small subset of Machiavelli's concept of government. The recommendations from The Prince are a necessary evil that must be tolerated for a short time. The Discourses are a more substantial analysis of the preferred type of government for the long term.
Thank your professor that she gave you more free time that semester for whatever it is you do with your free time, but curse her that she distorted your view of Machiavelli by recommending an extreme abbreviation of a much fuller concept. This is the same crap as when you just read the Grand Inquisitor and thought that you got everything of value out of the Brothers Karamavoz. The truth is you probably got the exact opposite of Dostoevsky's main theme. It is like reading literature in the same way that the bound prisoners in Plato's cave viewed the world- truncated.