I presuppose three essential qualities in the person who wants to manage a prince’s finances: the first is to be a perfectly honorable man, stripped of all special interest views, full of a sense of justice and devotion to the public interest, which is (xi) inseparable from that of the prince; the second is to have complete knowledge of all the stations and occupations that make up the body the prince governs in order to know how to maintain harmony among them and their wealth in equilibrium; the third is to be imbued with the principles that I believe necessary to support this harmony.

All I imagine to be new in my book is the method. I looked for (vi) certain and sound principles, which can serve as rules and guides for everything one would like to undertake to manage a State’s economy. I tried to arrange them according to the natural order one should follow when writing about all kinds of sciences and connect them by necessary consequences.

Let me first apologize to the French for attempting to write in their language even though I am a foreigner. (1)  French is so valued by us that most persons of rank would rather read books in this language than in our own. I believed this choice would arouse their curiosity and encourage them to take note of the maxims that I am proposing whose subject is at least as (iii) interesting as that of the romances, plays, lettres galantes (2) and many such books found in their libraries.