The Prince, a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli is widely regarded as the single most influential book on politics-and in particular on the the politics of power-ever written. In this groundbreaking book, Philip Bobbitt explores this often misunderstood work in the context of the time. He describes The Prince as one half of a masterpiece that, along with Machiavelli's often neglected Discourses prophesies the end of the feudal era and describes the birth of the neoclassical-Renaissance State. Using both Renaissance examples and cases drawn from our current era, Bobbitt situates Machiavelli's work as a turning point in our understanding of the relation between war and law as these create and maintain the State.