The book ‘The Art of War’ was written by :

Correct — A, Niccolo Machiavelli. This question looks broken at first sight and is not. Almost every candidate associates The Art of War with Sun Tzu, the Chinese general of the fifth century BCE whose treatise is the most famous book of that name in the world — and Sun Tzu is deliberately absent from the options. What the item is actually testing is whether you know that Machiavelli wrote a work with the same title. Dell'arte della guerra, translated as The Art of War, was published in Florence in 1521; it is cast as a dialogue in the Orti Oricellari gardens, argues for a citizen militia over mercenary companies, and draws its models from Roman practice. It has a further distinction that makes it worth remembering: it was the only prose work by Machiavelli published during his lifetime, since The Prince and the Discourses both appeared posthumously in 1531-32. The other three names are all famous authors of other books entirely, so once Machiavelli's authorship is recalled the item resolves.

• (b)Thucydides — The Athenian general and historian of the Peloponnesian War, whose History of the Peloponnesian War is the founding text of political realism and the source of the Melian Dialogue. He wrote no book called The Art of War.
• (c)Thomas Hobbes — Author of Leviathan (1651), the great argument for sovereign authority as the escape from a state of nature that is 'solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short'. He also produced the first English translation of Thucydides, which is probably why the two appear together here.
• (d)J.S. Mill — The nineteenth-century liberal, author of On Liberty, Utilitarianism, Considerations on Representative Government and The Subjection of Women. Furthest of the four from military writing.

Several unrelated works share the title The Art of War: Sun Tzu's Chinese treatise of about the fifth century BCE, Machiavelli's Florentine dialogue of 1521, and Baron de Jomini's nineteenth-century Précis de l'art de la guerre. An examiner can therefore construct a legitimate question whose answer is not the famous one, simply by leaving the famous author off the list.

Machiavelli's argument in the book is continuous with his politics elsewhere. He had watched Italian states hire mercenary condottieri and be defeated by the French and Spanish, and he had organised a citizen militia for Florence himself in 1506. The Art of War is the sustained case for that experiment: soldiers with a stake in the republic will fight for it, hired ones will not. That connects it directly to The Prince, where mercenaries are called 'useless and dangerous'. For an exam, the pairing worth carrying is author to book — Machiavelli to The Prince, the Discourses and The Art of War; Thucydides to the History of the Peloponnesian War; Hobbes to Leviathan; Mill to On Liberty — because these four names recur across polity, philosophy and international-relations papers.

• Sun Tzu's The Art of War, the best-known book of that title, is not among the options.
• Machiavelli's Dell'arte della guerra was published in 1521 and was the only prose work he published in his lifetime.
• The Prince and the Discourses on Livy were both published posthumously, in 1532 and 1531.
• The Art of War argues for a citizen militia over mercenary troops, echoing The Prince's judgement that mercenaries are useless and dangerous.
• Hobbes produced the first English translation of Thucydides, published in 1629.

• Answering Sun Tzu reflexively and then, finding him absent, guessing at random. Check whether any listed author wrote a book of the same title.
• Assuming the most famous holder of a title is the only one. Jomini also wrote an Art of War.
• Attributing Leviathan to Machiavelli or The Prince to Hobbes — the two are often taught together as realists.

As an author-book pairing, sometimes with the famous author deliberately omitted so that the item tests a second, genuine attribution rather than the reflex answer.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following works by Machiavelli was published during his lifetime?

  • (a)The Prince
  • (b)Discourses on Livy
  • (c)The Art of War
  • (d)Florentine Histories

  Answer(c) The Art of War (1521) — The Prince and the Discourses both appeared posthumously.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The History of the Peloponnesian War was written by:

  • (a)Herodotus
  • (b)Thucydides
  • (c)Xenophon
  • (d)Polybius

  Answer(b) Thucydides — Herodotus wrote on the Greco-Persian wars and is called the father of history.