The Florentine diplomat, historian, and political theorist whose short treatise The Prince (1513) offered a ruthlessly unsentimental account of how political power is actually acquired and maintained — founding modern political science and generating five centuries of controversy about whether he was a realist, a cynic, a republican, or a teacher of evil.
Machiavelli did not invent political ruthlessness. He was the first person to describe it honestly — to write about power as it actually works rather than as it ought to work. That honesty made him the most controversial political thinker in European history.