> This whole book is rational.
But like, it literally _is not_. Most obviously an entire chapter is dedicated to how arming the general population is the best way of securing your noble estate, and that is objectively a bad idea for petty dictatorships. There's a reason the British governors of America outlawed guns, and why the US Constitution enshrined the right (and why the slave states did not afford blacks this right[1]).
Even the intro uses a flawed metaphor to explain its qualifications: he claims its easier for a painter to paint a mountain from the valley, because you can see the whole thing. But, as anyone living near the Italian Alps can point out, the mountain is often obscured by foothills, and if you want to see many examples of a mountain peak, climb to the top of one and look around.
He recommends sending your own troops into battle first, and avoiding alliances because they diminish your reputation. Taking that advice is a great way to lose your principality entirely. Without your own garrison, neighbors and mercanaries will have far greater leverage over you, and without alliances you will be at the mercy of those who do have them.
He advises a ruler be feared but somehow not hated or despised. If it were possible to achieve that, his examples laughably do not -- appointing a bastard to govern a city and then parading his head on a pike when that goes badly is not something the burghers will praise, any more than appointing a shitty middle manager who abuses staff and firing them six months later would. Everyone knows you picked the guy, and his failures rub off on you.
If readers today cannot pick this out, then perhaps it is because too much of the context is lost. We no longer live in the era of kings and cannons.
> what actually happens in the real world
I don't think you need to read a book to learn how sociopaths behave, and I don't think the sociopaths themselves need Machiavelli's help on being more sociopathic, and we shouldn't be handing them carte blanch to hang themselves with (nor does Machiavelli do so).
The rest of society deals in what Smith calls "man's desire to be loved and be lovely." We want to earn the respect and admiration of those around us, and we want to believe those are earned honorably, even when we think _everyone else_ is a bastard. Hence bankers arent greedy, they're just "efficiently allocating capital to its highest social value" and earning a small prize in the process. Machiavelli's chief advice of hypocrisy runs counter to this, and the stories we tell ourselves.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers...