“Il fine giustifica i mezzi”

The Story Behind It

Few Italian phrases have had a wider international impact than this one, which is almost universally — though somewhat inaccurately — attributed to Niccolò Machiavelli. In fact the precise formulation does not appear in Machiavelli's writings, but it is a fair summary of the political philosophy he expresses in Il Principe (1513), where he argues that a ruler must be willing to use harsh methods to maintain the state. The phrase became attached to Machiavelli's name through later commentators and became a shorthand for the amoral pragmatism associated with Italian Renaissance statecraft. The Jesuits, too, were accused of practicing this principle in their missionary work, and the phrase was widely debated in religious and ethical contexts throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In contemporary Italian the saying is almost always used critically or ironically, to describe someone who has done something unethical while claiming the result justified it. It is one of those rare proverbs that has itself become a moral touchstone: citing it is as much a reference to the debate about Machiavellianism as it is a use of the proverb itself.

Associated with Machiavelli's Il Principe (1513), though the exact phrase was formulated by later commentators; debated across Europe in religious and political contexts from the 1500s onward.

Examples in Use

Themes