Before giving tactical advice, Machiavelli states what he thinks worthy objectives look like. This is one of the few places in The Prince where the supposedly value-neutral political scientist makes an explicit normative claim. He ranks what kinds of human achievement deserve praise — and it is a strict hierarchy, not a flat list.
From The Prince, Wilson reads: "among all men who are praised the most highly praised are those who have been leaders and founders of religions." [PLAUSIBLE — consistent with historical record, read aloud by Wilson]1
Close behind: "those who have founded either republics or kingdoms."
Then: "those who placed at the head of armies have enlarged either their own realm or that of their native country."
Then: "men of letters who being of many types are each celebrated according to his level of accomplishment."
Then: everyone else — "infinite in number" — praised according to their profession and its practice. [PLAUSIBLE — consistent with historical record, read aloud by Wilson]1
The hierarchy reveals that the descriptive, ostensibly amoral Machiavelli has normative commitments. He doesn't think all paths are equally worth taking. Founding a new political order — a republic, a kingdom, a religion — is the highest thing. Military glory falls behind it. Letters are respectable but not at the top.
This is the context for why he wrote The Prince as a job application to the Medici rather than a philosophical work for posterity: he believed the Medici were positioned to do the second-highest thing (found a unified Italy on the Roman model), and he wanted to be part of it. The tactical advice in the rest of the book is in service of an aspiration that is, by his own hierarchy, among the highest things a human being can accomplish. [PARAPHRASED — Wilson]1
It also clarifies what is actually alarming about Machiavelli. The standard reading is that he is cynical — that he doesn't care about virtue, only power. The glory hierarchy contradicts this. He cares deeply about what power is for. Everything pragmatic in his writing is in service of a genuine project: the restoration of something like Rome, a state that can stand on its own arms and give Italy a political form worth having. The biologist who watches the lion hunt also has a view about which lion's hunt is worth watching.
History — History as Strategic Resource: The hierarchy implies that the founders of religions have the deepest pool of relevant exemplars, since they occupy the highest tier of what is praiseworthy. Machiavelli's own exemplar-imitation principle — aim at Caesar to reach your ceiling — applies most powerfully within the correct tier: founders imitate founders, military leaders imitate military leaders. The hierarchy tells you which class of exemplar to study if you want to know what you're actually aiming for.
History — Machiavellian Realpolitik: The standard reading of Machiavelli is that he is a pure descriptive realist with no normative commitments — just a biologist watching the lion. The glory hierarchy is the strongest evidence against that reading. He has a view of the good. He thinks founding a republic is more praiseworthy than military conquest, and both are more praiseworthy than being a skilled professional. The biologist has preferences about what the lion should be hunting.
Wilson on Machiavelli's hierarchy vs. Kautilya's bhaga model
Machiavelli's glory hierarchy is moment-based. The founder of a religion or republic occupies the highest tier because of the act of founding — the singular moment where a new political order comes into being. Military leaders rank below because their glory is reactive (responding to threats) rather than constitutive. Letters and professions rank lower still because they operate within existing orders rather than establishing them. The implicit metric is: how much new political reality did you bring into existence in your moment?N
Kautilya offers a fundamentally different metric. The bhaga model judges legitimate authority not by the founding moment but by the ongoing relationship — specifically, by whether the king is a genuine co-sharer (shad-bhagin) in the productive enterprises of his kingdom. The king takes one-sixth of agricultural production not because he founded the kingdom but because he is a continuing partner in the conditions of production: he maintains the irrigation, keeps the peace, runs the courts, defends the territory. His one-sixth is calibrated to his contribution. Strip the contribution and you strip the legitimacy of the share.
The two metrics produce sharply different evaluations of who counts as a great ruler. Caesar founded an empire — Machiavelli ranks him near the top. But Caesar's actual day-to-day governance was thin; the empire he founded had to be reconstructed institutionally by Augustus and stabilized by later emperors. The bhaga frame would rank the maintainers higher than the founder, because the maintainers actually performed the ongoing co-sharing the bhaga model rewards. The same logic applies to Alexander, Napoleon, and most of Machiavelli's heroes: dramatic founding moments followed by collapse because the founder couldn't sustain the productive relationship the institutions required.
The collision sharpens a question Machiavelli's framework can't quite address: when we evaluate modern leaders, are we using Machiavelli's metric or Kautilya's? The "founder" mythology around startup CEOs, political revolutionaries, and movement leaders applies Machiavelli's standard — celebrating the moment of disruption and the personality that drove it. The bhaga frame would refuse this evaluation until the next 20 years of sustained productive relationship are documented. By that standard, most "founding visionaries" we celebrate are reclassified as people who had a dramatic moment and didn't sustain what they built.
The reading-together insight: Machiavelli's hierarchy is honest about what Renaissance Florence valued. Kautilya's bhaga model is honest about what actually keeps regimes intact across generations. Both can be right about their own scope. The mismatch matters when we use Machiavelli's frame to evaluate questions Kautilya's frame should be answering — like which contemporary leaders deserve the title "founder" once the founding is over.
The Arthashastra also names what Machiavelli systematically leaves out: the rajarshi's daily self-discipline (six passions, four vices, ahimsa) without which the founder's project decays in the next generation. Founders without ongoing discipline produce successors who can't sustain the institutions (Prince Management Problem catalogs the predictable failure modes). Self-Control Doctrine is the daily practice that turns a founder into a maintainer — the move Machiavelli's framework underweights and Kautilya's foregrounds.
Pillai's Inside Chanakya's Mind names what the bhaga argument above only gestures at: the rajarshi (king-sage) is the explicit Indian alternative to the glory-seeking founder. Pillai foregrounds Kautilya's optimization function as sukha vs. hita — the king's pleasure versus the people's welfare. Kautilya's canonical formulation: "In the happiness of the subjects lies his happiness; in the welfare of the people, the king's welfare. The king's good is not in what pleases himself, but in what pleases his subjects."P3 See Sukha vs. Hita and Arthashastra — Kingship and the Rajarshi Ideal.
This is the move Machiavelli's hierarchy structurally cannot make. Machiavelli ranks rulers by what they founded (singular act, glory-bearing). Kautilya ranks rulers by whose welfare they optimized for, daily, across decades (continuous practice, glory-irrelevant). The rajarshi is not a tier above the founder in the same hierarchy — the rajarshi is a different optimization function entirely. Pillai writes that the rajarshi is "an enlightened person... a sthitha-prajna... established in knowledge and wisdom"P3 — someone whose reputation among his people is incidental to the work, not the work's purpose.
What this triangulation produces: Machiavelli's glory hierarchy is the optimization function of a culture (Renaissance Florence) that has no concept of the rajarshi. The Indian framework adds a third evaluative axis the Western canon largely lacks — judging rulers not by founding-glory (Machiavelli) and not by ongoing co-share (bhaga) but by whether the ruler is the kind of person who cannot pursue glory because their attention is already locked on the people's welfare. The rajarshi is below glory because they have walked off the field where glory is awarded. The Pillai-layer reframes the Live Edge: the question Machiavelli's framework cannot answer is not just "founder vs. maintainer" but "is the optimization function self-glory or other-welfare" — and the Indian tradition's answer is that this distinction matters more than tier-rankings within either function.
The hierarchy is stated, not argued. Machiavelli gives no philosophical justification for why founding a religion ranks above founding a republic, or why both rank above military glory. It reads as an assumed cultural consensus of Renaissance Florence, not a defended position. Whether the ranking reflects his genuine view or is strategic framing — placing "founders of republics" near the top to appeal to his republican intellectual audience — cannot be determined from The Prince alone. [GAP IN SOURCE]1