Marcus Aurelius Meditations And Machiavelli's The Prince

“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be” (Carter). One of the first ladies of the White House, Rosalynn Carter, had very great views on what a leader should be. Throughout the history of the world, there has been many disagreements on this topic. Some even wrote pieces of work, answering this questions themselves. These published works about the ideal political leader, have been prominent in many modern leaders who try to model themselves after what they read, and agree, on what the ideal political leader is. Such pieces of literature are: Plato’s The Republic, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. Each leader has many great

One of the main differences between the two is that one talks about the real world, and the other talks about an imaginary world, or the ideal world. Machiavelli is the one who is more concerned about the real world and real politics. He virtually says that it is useless to dream of an ideal world or society, but rather to focus on the real world. Machiavelli says that in order to govern a body of people, one must study the history of politics and to learn what the history of leaders and empires has to teach. Throughout The Prince, Machiavellli examined many leaders’ characteristics and actions. “We Italians owe to the Church of Rome and to her priests our having become irreligious and bad” (The Prince). This was one such example of Machiavelli giving attribution to the past. T.P. Wiseman says about political history that: “it is essential to start with the history, to avoid anachronism and basic misunderstanding; and it is better to carry on with it too, so that when it comes to dealing with the enticing abstractions of policy and ideology, their smeary colours may not wholly obscure a clear picture of real people doing real things” (Wiseman). This leadership quality of Machiavelli looking to and learning from the past is something an ideal leader should