The prince without subjects
On whether it is still better to be feared than loved
I. Of A Line That Has Outlived Its Author
All leaders, sooner or later, have heard that it is better to be feared than to be loved. Few have read the book the line came from. The line gets quoted; the qualifications do not.
It is quoted at leadership offsites and in management books. It is invoked by people trying to sound bracing about power. What Machiavelli actually said is more careful: that the prince should be both feared and loved at once; that fear is the safer fallback when forced to choose; that the prince above all must avoid being hated. The blunt instrument survived. The nuance did not.
“It is far safer to be feared than loved.”
This reading leaves out a crucial qualification.
“It is far safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.”
For five hundred years that sentence has done useful work for leaders who wanted the cover of a Florentine philosopher while behaving like a middle manager with a temper, and so inviting hatred.
II. Of The World For Which It Was Written
Machiavelli was writing for a prince. A prince held a city. The people of that city were his subjects. They could not, in any meaningful sense, leave. They could revolt. They could endure. Mostly they endured.
The prince’s subjects feared loss of livelihood, loss of standing, loss of liberty, sometimes loss of life. These were the consequences he could deliver. The stronger the consequence and the fewer the alternatives, the harder fear held. Machiavelli wrote for a world where the feudal lord oversaw peasants tied to the land. The pattern continued in the landlord with labourers in tied cottages on his estate, and then the factory owner who ran a company town. They could rule by fear because the door was closed, and everyone knew what was on the other side.
III. Of Subjects Who Can Leave On Monday
The prince’s subjects could not leave. The modern leader’s people can.
They can leave for the competitor down the road, the start-up they have been talking to for months, the firm that reached out to them following a recent meetup. They can leave the industry entirely. They can quietly become detached, staying at their desks and withdrawing the small acts of discretionary judgement that good work depends on. The disengaged employee is the prince’s subject who has quietly revolted.
Fear may keep people in place for a while, but in the end, it is not enough. What worked in a city of subjects fails in a market for collaborators.
IV. Of A Third Path Machiavelli Did Not Consider
The temptation, having argued against fear, is to argue for love. This would be a mistake. Machiavelli’s caution about love stands. He was sceptical of depending on it, because love is given at the pleasure of the giver and withdrawn at the same pleasure. People will say they love you and then ask a recruiter what else is open, especially if they’ve just had a hard quarter or a difficult conversation.
There is a third option. Machiavelli did not consider it because it was not available to him; his prince ruled subjects, not collaborators. That option is trust.
It is, in some sense, what he was reaching for when he said the prince should be both feared and loved. Durability without coercion. Commitment without sentiment. He could not name it as a single thing because it required a relationship his prince did not have.
Trust is harder than love and more practical than fear. It is asymmetric in a useful way; slow to build, fast to lose, near-impossible to fake at scale. It is earned through four things: transparency about what is true, follow-through on what was promised, consistency on hard days as well as easy ones, and willingness to be wrong when the evidence requires it. None of those are difficult to describe. All of them are difficult to sustain. That is why most leaders settle for being feared. Fear takes less work.
Trust on its own is not enough. Trust without consequences is the niceness that masquerades as kindness and produces neither. What durable trust requires is the modern cousin of what the prince had: clarity about what gets rewarded, clarity about what gets moved on, and the consequences of failure. It is not the opposite of trust; it is the foundation trust is built upon.
The leader who is trusted is told things. She is told things early, when they can be fixed. She is told things in detail, including the parts that reflect badly on the people doing the telling. She is told the things that her counterpart down the corridor, who runs on fear, will not learn until too late, and then he will look for someone to blame, other than himself.
V. Of A Book That Has Not Been Rewritten
It is well to remember that The Prince was advice. It was advice for a particular kind of person, holding a particular kind of power, over a particular kind of people. It was good advice, given those constraints.
Modern leaders do not hold cities. They hold the attention, for a while, of people who have their own options and aspirations. The book has not been rewritten for them. The bumper sticker has been kept; the careful original has been quietly retired.
Perhaps it is time the book was rewritten. A short chapter on fear, for completeness; a shorter one on love; the rest about trust and accountability. Trust is the currency that pays in a market the prince did not have to consider. The leader is something else, a prince without subjects.