The prince’s challenge is to ride the wave of fortuna, using virtu

From Machiavelli: Still Shocking after Five Centuries book review by Stewart Patrick.

At the dark heart of The Prince is an unsparing and unsentimental view of human nature. Most men, Machiavelli writes, are “ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, anxious to fear danger, and covetous of gain.” In such a world, the ruler who conducts himself according to Christian morality will fast come to grief. “The way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation.” He explains “Hence it is necessary that a prince who is interested in his survival learn to be other than good.”

There's an uncomfortable truth that lies at the center of many of our social debates.

“The way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation.”

Another Machiavelli quote.

“In all men’s acts, and in those of princes especially, it is the result that renders the verdict when there is no court of appeal”.

That bears chewing on. I would read that to mean that if there is no agreed standard by which to gauge the behavior and the process, in that absence, then one can only judge the results and not the process.

Further

Machiavelli explores the interplay between material forces and human agency through the concepts of fortuna and virtu. All princes (and indeed, all people) are subject to societal and natural factors larger than themselves. Still, “free will cannot be denied,” Machiavelli insists. “Even if fortune is the arbiter of half our actions, she still allows us to control the other half, or thereabouts.” Though fortune be capricious and history contingent, the able leader may shape his fate and that of his state through the exercise of virtu. This is not to be mistaken for “virtue”, as defined by Christian moral teaching (implying integrity, charity, humility, and the like). Rather, it denotes the human qualities prized in classical antiquity, including knowledge, courage, cunning, pride, and strength.

Machiavelli describes the relationship between fortuna and virtu in the The Discourses:

“For where men have but little virtu, fortune makes a great display of its power; and, since fortune changes, republics and governments frequently change; and will go on changing till someone comes along, so imbued with the love of antiquity that he regulates things in such a fashion that fortune does not every time the sun turns around get a chance of showing what it can do.”

The prince’s challenge is to ride the wave of fortuna, using virtu to direct it in the interest of the state, as necessity (necessita) dictates.

500 years later we are still arguing about this. Are an individual's life outcomes substantially the result of their knowledge, experiences, skills, behaviors and values (their virtu) or are the outcomes simply the result of luck, history and random circumstance (fortuna). I think Machiavelli's formulation is right, that both forces are in play and that the results arise from how well one's virtu allow one to ride the wave of fortuna.