We talked about Machiavelli in history class today, and the teacher said that she personally believes he wrote The Prince as satire, which initially made sense to me because I thought most of his ideas were absurd, but at the same time she has told me stuff that was straight up not true so I wanted to ask Reddit to confirm.
There's always room for more on this topic, but there's some good previous discussions on this topic in the FAQ on politics and philosophy featuring /u/CogitoErgoDoom on Why did Enlightenment philosophers try so hard to "redeem" Machiavelli's The Prince as republican satire? Were they right? and /u/tiako and /u/alvisefalier on Was Machiavelli a malevolent figure?