Srinagar, April 14 -- Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, written in 1513, remains the most uncompromising treatise on power, a text that dismantled the moral frameworks of medieval politics and replaced them with a stark realism. Its influence has travelled far beyond Renaissance Italy, shaping doctrines of statecraft across centuries and continents. As Quentin Skinner argued in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Machiavelli's originality lay in grounding politics in necessity and human agency rather than divine sanction, a shift that inaugurated modern political realism. The audacity of this move was not simply intellectual but civilisational, for it redefined the very grammar of politics.

The essence of Machiavelli's counsel w...