Machiavelli's The Prince: Views of A Leader In The Prince, Machiavelli offers his views on how a leader should rule his country based upon his past analysis of history. This advice was designed to help keep a ruler in power. Machiavelli had a very pessimistic, cruel, deceitful, and hypocritical view of how one should govern the world for he believed that it was the only way to govern men as they are. In Chapter XVII we can see clearly Machiavelli's exceedingly pessimistic view of man: he says "that they are ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, anxious to flee in danger and cov