X
“[S]ince it is my intention to write something useful to those of understanding, it seems best to me to go straight to the actual truth of things rather than to dwell in dreams.”
—THE PRINCE, XV
MACHIAVELLI INSISTED HE WROTE THE PRINCE TO convince the new Medici rulers of Florence to offer him employment, but it is surely one of the most ill-advised job applications of all time. Attempting to ingratiate himself with his would-be bosses by offering to give them a quick tutorial in the secrets of statecraft was presumptuous and unlikely to win over even the most self-effacing lord. “[I]t is customary for those hoping to win the favor of a prince to present him with those things he values most, or that give him most delight,” Machiavelli begins, standards by which his own work fell woefully short. Not only is it plain and unadorned, as he himself admits, but it is chock-full of unpleasant truths and blunt assertions that no prince would welcome, no matter how much he might secretly agree with its conclusions. Unlike most of his predecessors, Machiavelli makes little effort to flatter his patron, assuming the brilliance of his insights will be sufficient to recommend his services.
The unsuitability of the manuscript to achieve his stated goals should absolve Machiavelli of the charge that he was a dishonest schemer, cynically manipulating those around him for his own ends. He would not, or could not, alter the substance of his thought even for the sake of salvaging his career. Machiavelli’s lack of guile in his own life stands in stark contrast to the course he urges on his patron, which is to practice the art of deception whenever honesty might prove inconvenient. In fact few works of political philosophy are more sincere than The Prince. Whatever one thinks of the analyses and prescriptions Machiavelli presents, they were not tailored to suit his audience but were instead the result of a compulsion to set down on paper ideas and attitudes that had long been brewing in his mind and that, in this moment of personal and professional crisis, he could no longer suppress.
Despite its tone of scientific objectivity, The Prince is a plea for a strong leader written by a man who was acutely aware of the precarious and humiliating situation he was in.i In a patriarchal society, inability to provide for one’s family was unforgivable, and Machiavelli felt keenly the shame of his poverty. Disappointed in his hopes, burning with unfulfilled ambition, he wrote a pugnacious work that makes a fetish of strength and oozes contempt for anything that smacks of weakness or vacillation. “I am wasting away and cannot continue on like this much longer without becoming contemptible because of my poverty,” he tells Vettori, words that show how much damage his enemies had been able to inflict.
But The Prince was not merely a response to personal disappointment. The humiliation he felt after his disgrace was just a particularly acute form of a chronic condition. As an impoverished gentleman, Machiavelli was dependent on the patronage of richer and more powerful men; his first extant letter was a defense of the “pigmy” Machiavelli against the “giant” Pazzi, who used their greater wealth and influence to ride roughshod over their neighbors. Throughout his years in the Chancery he was forced to bow to men who were his social superiors but intellectual inferiors. Feelings of inadequacy, a sense that he was barely hanging on to respectability, characterize Machiavelli from his youth. This insecurity was only exacerbated by his recent travails. Like most of the creative geniuses of the age, including Michelangelo and Leonardo, he belonged to the client class, and like them was conscious of his own gifts and chafed at his dependence on the largesse of his patrons. It is the client’s uneasy position that is reflected in The Prince, its belligerence compensating for feelings of impotence.
Though it would be unfair to dismiss Machiavelli’s book as the bitter ranting of a bitter man, it is clear that thwarted ambition gave added urgency to opinions that had long been gestating in his mind. The strength of his convictions came from the intellectual and emotional synergy between his particular circumstances as a marginal figure within the Florentine ruling class and Florence’s marginal position in the community of nations. The sting of personal failure combined with the often humiliating conditions he faced in foreign courts—where he was dismissed as an underpaid messenger of a second-rate power, Sir Nihil, as he put it—created in him a contempt for weakness and a worshipful attitude toward those who refused to cower beneath the blows of fortune.
The desire to land a job may have motivated Machiavelli to begin The Prince, but once he sat down to write, the form and content were determined by his own obsessions. The ruthless man of action he conjures offers the perfect antidote to his miserable existence. Casting himself in the role of adviser to the prince, he hoped to hitch his failing fortunes to another’s rising star.ii “Take, then, this little gift, Your Magnificence,” Machiavelli urges Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence, “in the spirit in which I offer it. Should you read diligently and consider it with care, you will discover therein my deepest desire, which is that You will rise to that greatness which fortune and your own qualities promise. And if Your Magnificence will, from the pinnacle on which you reside, cast from time to time a glance to these lowly places, you will know how unjustly I suffer from a great and continual malice of fortune.”
It is not surprising then that the image of the ideal prince he conjures in the pages of this book is characterized by superhuman strength of will, cunning, and ruthlessness—attributes he observed firsthand while serving at the court of Valentino and that stood in stark contrast both to the reality of his own life and of the republic he served for so many years. In The Prince Machiavelli seeks redress, or at least finds consolation, for failures both public and private. One might climb further into the thickets of Freudian analysis by claiming that in The Prince Machiavelli ritually slays his father, or at least replaces that feckless figure with a man his opposite in every way—strong, where he was weak; ruthless, where he was kind; able to bend the course of history to his will, while Bernardo could barely provide for his own family.
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The genius of Machiavelli transformed what could have been a narrowly focused appeal for a political messiah, a strongman to deliver Florence and the rest of Italy from the hands of foreigners, into a universal meditation on the nature of good and evil. Indeed, this slender volume penned by an obscure Florentine civil servant announces the coming of the modern world. Here is a radically new sensibility, one freed from the superstitions and unexamined assumptions that had governed civic life for thousands of years. InThe Prince Machiavelli sets forth a boldly original conception of history and of human society, with a disdain for conventional morality that scandalized his contemporaries and made his name infamous to future generations. Man, in Machiavelli’s formulation, was no longer inscribed within a divinely ordered universe but was, terrifyingly, thrown upon his own resources, forced to grope as best he could through an unforgiving and incomprehensible landscape.
Like all works of revolutionary impact, The Prince is a victim of its own success. Many of its most original insights have become commonplace; many of the battles Machiavelli waged against the orthodoxies of his own day seem trivial simply because he routed his enemies so decisively. Like any explorer charting unknown territory, Machiavelli made mistakes, mistakes that were seized upon and corrected by others who followed in his footsteps. But even his harshest critics were guided by the first crude map he had sketched. It is a testament to Machiavelli’s gifts as a writer and his penetrating analysis of human motives that a work born from the tangled geopolitics of sixteenth-century Italy can still be read with pleasure and consulted with profit.
The best way to measure the originality of The Prince is, paradoxically, to place it once again inside the familiar tradition to which it belonged. Far from being unique, The Prince actually adheres to a time-tested form. When Machiavelli sat down to write his book he had a long list of examples to fall back on. He was clearly familiar with his predecessors’ work, borrowing from them themes and even chapter headings like “How to Avoid Flatterers” and “Concerning Liberality and Parsimony.” Machiavelli’s purpose in writing this book was to offer a corrective to those who had come before him, to urge his patron not to be deceived by those philosophers who opined on subjects they knew nothing about and imagined worlds that never were.iii Instead, he admonished the young Medici lord, he should heed the advice of a man who had seen politics up close and knew how it really worked: “Since I know that many have already written on these matters, I do not wish to seem presumptuous in writing on them myself, particularly as I intend to depart substantially from what others have said. But since it is my intention to write something useful to those of understanding, it seems best to me to go straight to the actual truth of things rather than to dwell in dreams.” In sticking to “the actual truth of things” rather than dwelling “in dreams,” Machiavelli shatters cherished beliefs about man’s place in the world. He discounts, though he never actually denies, the existence of an immortal soul, focusing instead on flesh-and-blood creatures who lived and breathed, toiled and triumphed, suffered and died. Machiavelli was one of the first philosophers since ancient times to treat people not as children of God but as independent adults, forced to make choices without guidance from an all-seeing Father and to suffer the consequences of their mistakes.iv
Books purporting to offer a guide to young princelings on the rudiments of statecraft—a genre known as the specula principi (mirror of the prince)—had been a staple in Western literature since at least the time of Xenophon and Plato.v They survived the transition from the pagan to the Christian era with only a slight change in emphasis, reaching their apogee in the high Middle Ages when writers like Dante and Thomas Aquinas tried to reconcile Platonic and Aristotelian notions of government with a worldview based on the teaching of the Gospels. The tradition remained vital in Machiavelli’s own day, with distinguished thinkers like Erasmus and Thomas More offering their own variations on a time-honored theme.vi
The origins of the form can be traced back to Plato’s Republic, a work that, like all its successors until Machiavelli’s fundamental reworking of the genre, is less concerned with the nuts and bolts of governing than with providing readers a vision of the ideal state.vii Plato is not unaware of the kinds of arguments Machiavelli will make two thousand years later—he places many of them in the mouth of the pompous Thrasymachus, who declares, “I proclaim justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger”—but he quickly rejects them in favor of an idealism that bears little relation to the way men live. According to Plato, political science was “the knowledge by which we are to make other men good.” Machiavelli rejects this description. He insists the only sensible role for political science (a phrase he never uses), is to deal with men as they actually are.
Superficially at least, Machiavelli would seem to have more in common with Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, a far more down-to-earth philosopher who based his theories on the study of real states and constitutions. Aristotle criticized Plato as an impossible idealist, noting, sensibly enough, that “the good lawgiver and the genuine politician will have regard both to the ‘absolute best’ and to the ‘best in the circumstances.’ ” But despite this pragmatic beginning, neither he nor those who followed in his footsteps believed their job was to provide a how-to manual for the aspiring ruler, a task they would have regarded as either trivial or corrupt. Their treatises remained abstract exercises, meditations on the nature of good government. Even when they were written for a living prince, they contained little he could use in the day-to-day management of his affairs. Justice, not power, was their subject—a pointless exercise according to Machiavelli, who knew that a prince without power has no ability to dispense justice or anything else to his people.
Aristotle gave the classic formulation of the state “as an association of persons formed with a view to some good purpose.” Before Machiavelli, very few philosophers questioned the basic premise that man found his fulfillment in the well-run polity. Philosophers were willing to admit that governments often fell short of the ideal in practice, but they never doubted that the common good was the goal toward which human society was striving, and that it was the philosopher’s function to point the prince in the right direction. In their writings they define the nature of Justice, the meaning of the Good, and the blessings of Mercy, but ignore the actual conduct of real men and women. The discussion is removed from reality, the advice heavily moralistic and short on practical solutions. What should be receives far more attention than what is.
Erasmus’s Institutio principis Christiani (“Education of a Christian Prince”) provides perhaps the most useful comparison with The Prince. Not only is it almost exactly contemporaneous—written in 1516, it was dedicated to Charles I of Spain (soon to become the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V)—but as a typical, if atypically elegant, example of the form, it offers the strongest possible contrast to Machiavelli’s groundbreaking effort. “Wisdom is not only an extraordinary attribute in itself, Charles, most bountiful of princes,” Erasmus begins, “but according to Aristotle no form of wisdom is greater than that which teaches a prince how to rule beneficently.” From the first line Erasmus sets a high-minded tone for his book. It will deal with qualities like wisdom, clemency, piety, and so on that define the ideal prince; it will ignore the grubby details of actual governance. Had Charles wished to discover any practical advice on how to keep his throne, he would have leafed through its pages in vain.
Machiavelli’s approach couldn’t be more different. While he doesn’t dispense altogether with empty phrases lauding his master’s virtue, he insists his work should be useful to his patron, who, he strongly implies, is going to need all the help he can get. Unlike Charles, whose greatness is assured regardless of whether he studies the text set before him, Lorenzo will achieve his rightful place in history only by paying close attention to Machiavelli’s counsel: “Should you read diligently and consider [this book] with care, you will discover therein my deepest desire, which is that You will rise to that greatness which fortune and your own qualities promise.” For Machiavelli, the issue of greatness remains in question; it lies in the future. “[A]ll things,” he declares, “have conspired to show your greatness,” but, he insists, “[t]he rest you must do yourself.”
The world as pictured in The Prince is far more dynamic and uncertain than the one Erasmus contemplated. When he first told Vettori about his latest project, Machiavelli insisted that “it ought to be welcomed by a prince, and especially by a new prince”—that is, one who could not count on traditional allegiances or institutions but had to survive by his own wits, often against fierce resistance. Machiavelli had no interest in metaphysics, what he called “dreams,” but instead wished to offer sensible rules of thumb to a young lord who faced a difficult road ahead. As Machiavelli explained to his friend, his book will not only define the nature of princely government but will discuss how principalities “are acquired, how they are retained, and why they are lost”—topics that would not have occurred to those writing on behalf of monarchs securely seated on their thrones. To suggest to Charles, or any other monarch who believed himself appointed by divine right, that his rule was precarious would have smacked of treason. In Renaissance Italy, by contrast, such insecurity was the norm. Each despot lived in perpetual fear of the usurper, exhibiting a well-grounded paranoia that helps explain much of the cruelty of the age. As Pope Pius II observed: “In our change-loving Italy, where nothing stands firm, and where no ancient dynasty exists, a servant can easily become a king”—a state of affairs likely to whet the ambition of an impoverished orphan and cause the prince many a sleepless night. All Machiavelli’s experience told him that life was unpredictable, and politics—which is merely life played out on a greater stage and for higher stakes—even more so; that the best laid plans of princes and prelates often lead to disaster; and that well-meaning rulers (like Piero Soderini) might forfeit the confidence of their citizens while ruthless tyrants (like Valentino) could win the loyalty of theirs. Given this reality, what’s the point of meditating on situations that never arise and offering models of conduct for people too pure ever to have walked the face of the earth? “Many have imagined republics and principalities that never were,” he scoffs, dismissing such exercises as pointless speculation.
Erasmus starts with a basic premise: that the prince aspires to rule his subjects as well as he can, and that his instructor need only hold up a model of perfection for his eager pupil to be drawn to it like a moth to a flame.viii “Let the teacher paint a sort of celestial creature,” Erasmus urges the hypothetical tutor of a future king, “more like to a divine being than a mortal: yea, sent by the God above to help the affairs of mortals by looking out and caring for everyone and everything; to whom no concern is of longer standing or more dear than the state; who has more than a paternal spirit towards everyone; who holds the life of each individual dearer than his own; who works and strives night and day for just one end—to be the best he can for everyone.”
To Machiavelli such a picture is laughable. In the course of his career he met many rulers and none of them resembled the celestial creature Erasmus describes. Of course Erasmus’s essay doesn’t derive from a study of real-life princes but of revered authors, including Aristotle, who wrote in The Politics: “[W]e take it for granted that a good ruler is both good and wise, and wisdom is essential for one engaged in the work of the state.” Both the Greek philosopher and his Christian disciple predicate their philosophy on the assumption, so deeply held as to remain largely unexamined, that the universe is essentially rational; that it promotes virtue and punishes wickedness; that society yearns to achieve a more perfect union, no matter how far short it falls in practice.ix The prince plays a vital role in this divinely ordered universe as God’s representative on earth, a shepherd to his flock, a father to his children. As Aquinas expressed it: “The worthy exercise of the kingly office requires . . . excelling virtue and must be requited by a high degree of blessedness.” It is through the good prince that the order inherent in the universe is made manifest and the divine plan brought to fruition.
How different is the world Machiavelli conjures! Instead of a rationally ordered universe unfolding according to divine plan, he presents a world governed by caprice, filled with violence, subject to sudden, inexplicable transformations, plunged into chaos and inhospitable to man and all his works. “[A]ll human affairs are ever in a state of flux,” he declares, and a prince must be willing to change his course readily since “the things of this world are so variable.”x Having observed at close hand the meteoric careers of men like Savonarola and Valentino—not to mention the twists and turns of his own—Machiavelli was keenly aware that nothing is certain but change itself. It is foolhardy to bask in today’s success for it will almost certainly be followed by tomorrow’s calamity. Presiding over this anarchic muddle we call the world is the trickster goddess Fortuna, who “turns states and kingdoms upside down as she pleases,” and “deprives the just of the good that she freely gives to the unjust.” She is an “unstable and fickle deity [who] often sets the undeserving on a throne to which the deserving never attains.”xi
Faced with such a topsy-turvy world, the very notion of “the good prince” becomes problematic. To Thomas Aquinas, who wrote in his Commentary on Politics “No one can be called a good prince unless he is good in the moral virtues and prudent,” Machiavelli might well have responded: No one can be a considered a good prince, or any prince at all, who loses his kingdom through a foolish adherence to such platitudes. The very notion of a fixed morality is preposterous in a lawless world. The prince, he insists, “must be prepared to shift according to the winds of fortune and as changing circumstances dictate. And if possible, as I have already said, he must not depart from the good, but if compelled by necessity he must know the ways of evil.”
Necessity, not any abstract notion of the Good, must determine our behavior. The prince must play the hand he is dealt, for he who does not adapt to circumstances is doomed to failure. A prince is successful, Machiavelli says, “when he acts in harmony with the times, and similarly comes to grief when his actions are discordant with them.”xii While most writers asked themselves: What is the best form of government? Machiavelli ponders what he considers to be the only real question: What kind of government, if any, is possible? In a violent and unpredictable world there is no point in dreaming of societies that can never be. Indeed, he spends little time analyzing stable states with established dynasties or ecclesiastical states—which, he remarks with tongue in cheek, “are sustained by superior causes [and so] transcend human understanding”—but instead devotes his efforts to describing the kind of states that were familiar to him, petty principalities insecurely held by upstarts and freebooters. His heroes are those often illegitimate usurpers like Valentino who improvise on the fly and survive on their wits and their courage. They are the men who master capricious fortune. Only by the gravest exertions can we stave off, and then only temporarily, the forces of chaos, Machiavelli insists. Under the circumstances we would be far better served if instead of building models of perfection we concentrated our efforts on cobbling together a serviceable government for the moment, recognizing we must adapt our solutions to evolving circumstances.
Machiavelli was a true child of the Renaissance, shaped by both the values and pathologies of a creative and tumultuous age. His apparent indifference to traditional moral strictures was in large part a response to the chaos he saw all around him. In early-sixteenth-century Italy, kings and princes rose and fell with startling rapidity; conquering armies were quickly conquered in their turn and no state was secure from outside forces or from internal dissension. Nowhere were these lessons as stark as in Florence, whose history was a bloody parade of factional strife and political turmoil. The placid contemplation of ideal states seemed a luxury when governments were collapsing about one’s ears and marauding armies burned villages, laid waste the land, and raped and killed with impunity.
For Aquinas and Erasmus, accustomed to a more predictable course, what is at stake for the ruler is simply his virtue—whether he will follow the path of righteousness or of the tyrant. For Machiavelli what is at stake is the more fundamental question of whether or not he will hold on to power. The traditional “mirror of princes” assumes the ruler’s place in the hierarchy is secure, the only question being whether he discharges his duties with honor. The Prince begins with the assumption that his office and even his life are under constant threat, which makes his virtue rather beside the point. Most of the cruelty advocated in The Prince is a result of the insecurity of the ruler’s position. “Anyone who gains [new territories] and wishes to hold on to them must do two things,” Machiavelli enjoins in a typical passage; “the first is to extinguish the ancient lineage of the previous ruler; the other is to alter neither the law nor the taxes.”
This and similarly cold-blooded proposals have sent chills down the spines of generations of readers, but Machiavelli, who had seen close-up both the ruthlessness of princes and the far more devastating consequences of anarchy, cared only about results. “Cesare Borgia was considered cruel,” he points out, “yet his cruelty brought an end to the disorders in the Romagna, uniting it in peace and loyalty. If this is considered good, one must judge him as much kinder than the Florentine people who, in order to escape being called cruel, allowed Pistoia to be destroyed.” A ruler’s first responsibility is to rule, and whatever secures that end can be regarded as just, even if this demands the violation of ethical norms.
Indeed Machiavelli strongly implies that those concerned for their immortal souls might want to find a different line of work. After praising Philip of Macedon as the model of an effective ruler, Machiavelli admits that his policies of ethnic-cleansing were“infinitely cruel, and inimical to society . . . and every man should flee them, preferring to live as a private citizen than to live as a king with such ruin on his account.” One can either be a saint or a king, he implies, but not both. He follows with a characteristic warning against the dangers of splitting the difference, a spineless tactic so often pursued by his own government: “Nonetheless, for he who would not wish to follow that first path of goodness, desiring to hold on to what he has, it behooves him to follow the path of evil. But most men prefer to take the middle road, which is most harmful, since they know not how to be completely good nor completely bad.”xiii
In the beginning of his Ethics, Aristotle declares “that ‘the good’ is ‘that at which all things aim.’ ” Machiavelli’s universe bears little resemblance to the orderly mechanism proposed by Aristotle or the divinely inspired cosmos envisioned by Aquinas or Erasmus.xiv Fortune is so perverse that even Machiavelli, the most clear-sighted of guides, must on occasion throw up his hands in despair. After analyzing the career of his hero Valentino, Machiavelli admits the limitations of his prescriptions: “Having reviewed all the Duke’s actions, then, I would not know how to fault him. Indeed, it seems to me that . . . he should be held up as an example to all those who through fortune or the arms of others have seized the throne. He, possessing greatness of spirit and high ambition, could not have acted otherwise, and it was only the swiftness of Alexander’s death, coupled with his own illness, that foiled his designs.” If even such a giant as Valentino can come to grief, what hope is there for lesser men?
Such a worldview taken to an extreme would argue for fatalism; passivity is the only rational response to a universe in which the consequences of one’s actions are completely unpredictable.xv But Machiavelli rejects that conclusion. He had nothing but contempt for pious monks who retired from the world in order to prepare for the next, and little more respect for hedonists who responded to life’s travails by losing themselves in meaningless pleasures. He dismissed those who believed “that the prudence of men cannot manage [the affairs of the world], and indeed cannot improve them” and who thought “that there is no point in sweating much over these matters and that they should submit to chance instead.” Though the world is ruled by a fickle goddess, it remains in our power to improve the odds:
I believe that even if it is true that fortune governs half our lives, she still allows us to take control of the other half . . . . I compare fortune to one of those untamed rivers which, when enraged, floods the plains, uproots trees and topples buildings, and washes the soil from one place to another . . . . [I]n spite of everything, men can still prepare themselves in times of quiet, erecting dams and levees to channel the rising waters, so that when the torrent comes it will not prove as destructive.
Will and chance are in almost perfect balance. Or, to put it more accurately, the two are in constant and dynamic tension since, while equally matched, each force vies to expand its claim on the world. The great rulers—Moses, Alexander, Romulus, Lycurgus—increase their odds of success through boldness, but also through prudence; they are not afraid to take risks, but they leave as little to chance as possible. The wise prince “proves adaptable when unforeseen events occur,” a state of affairs, Machiavelli observed, so common as to be the norm.
For all its pessimism Machiavelli’s philosophy is ultimately empowering. He insists that man has the capacity, indeed the duty, to shape the course of his destiny. Though his options are limited by “Fortune in her furious onrush” who “shifts and reshifts the world’s affairs,” it is through the heroic struggle to give form to what is formless that immortality is achieved. Here the Renaissance belief in the worth of the individual is applied to real-world situations. “O great and wonderful happiness of man!” wrote Lorenzo the Magnificent’s friend Pico della Mirandola. “It is given to him to have that which he chooses and to be that which he wills.”xvi Machiavelli, who lived through more troubled times than Pico, watching as his people were humiliated and the states of Italy crushed beneath the boots of foreigners, struck a less hopeful tone, but he continues to urge ceaseless struggle with fate, even against long odds.
The force of character that allows a man to resist Fortuna Machiavelli refers to as virtù. The term is not to be confused with its English cognate “virtue,” since it does not imply goodness as it is usually understood. Rather, it is closer to “prowess,” the courage and the skill to impose one’s will on the world.xvii It was a quality that Valentino, with his “great spirit” and “lofty ambition,” possessed in full, though it was not sufficient to save him when abandoned by Fortune. In fact virtue and virtù are often incompatible since it is impossible to be an effective leader if one is too squeamish to do the dirty work necessary for achieving and maintaining power. Machiavelli’s ideal prince might well have echoed Hamlet in saying, “I must be cruel to be kind,” keeping in mind that there is no other judge of virtù but success.
“For where men have but little virtue, fortune makes great show of her power,” Machiavelli observes in The Discourses. Virtù is the masculine principle engaged in a perpetual struggle for supremacy with the feminine Fortuna. He makes an invidious comparison between the virtù of the ancient Romans, who mastered the known world, and the “effeminate” Italians of his own day, who, reared in the gentler ethos of the Gospels, allowed themselves to be mastered by others. The word derives from the Latinvir, man, and carries with it the associated ideas of strength and courage. For Machiavelli virtù stands for order against the forces of chaos; it is that which holds society together while fickle Fortuna seeks to tear it down. His conception does not resemble the static cosmologies typical of the Middle Ages, but embraces the notion of creative destruction as each principle gains a temporary advantage, only to be overcome by its opposite—a model of the world that reflects the dynamism and anxieties of the new age.
Though Machiavelli claimed to know nothing about making money, a trait that set him apart from his compatriots, his was a philosophy that came naturally to someone who grew up in a merchant culture driven by entrepreneurs and capitalist gamblers intimately acquainted with cycles of boom and bust. “Everywhere Ambition and Avarice penetrate,” he asserts, qualities he observed every day in the bustling markets of Florence. He accepts man for what he is, not condemning the natural drives that medieval philosophers tended to brand as sins. “It is only natural to desire gain,” Machiavelli observes, “and when capable men attempt great feats, they will be praised, or at least not blamed.”xviii Instead of measuring human behavior in terms of sin and virtue, Machiavelli proposes a different yardstick. “But if they cannot succeed and still persist, here they are in error and deserve to be censured.”
Success and failure, then, are the ultimate arbiters of good and evil in Machiavelli’s universe. “In all men’s acts, and in those of princes most especially,” he insists, “it is the result that renders the verdict when there is no court of appeal.” One can never judge an act in the abstract but only by observing its consequences in the real world. “[I]t’s the part of a prudent man to take the best among bad choices,” he said in another context. The Prince, filled with tentative solutions to particular problems, offers some guidance for the sensible monarch, while admitting that one can never plan for every contingency. It is predicated on a dynamic conception of society typical of the rags-to-riches-and-back-again economy of capitalism.xix
Machiavelli’s worldview—cynical, secular, and anticlerical—was widely shared among Renaissance Florentines, at least in intellectual circles where classical authors took up more space on a scholar’s bookshelves than the writings of the Church Fathers. A similar disdain for conventional attitudes appears in the writings of Machiavelli’s friend, the diplomat and historian Francesco Guicciardini. But while the younger man shared Machiavelli’s jaundiced view of the human animal (in fact he often chided Machiavelli for placing too much faith in the wisdom of the people), Guicciardini criticized his friend for going too far. In offering the earliest known critique of The Prince he demonstrates his more cautious, more conventional, cast of mind. “It is . . . necessary that the prince should have the courage to resort to extraordinary measures whenever they may be required,” Guicciardini acknowledges, “but he should also have the wisdom to neglect no opportunity of establishing affairs with humanity and benevolence, never accepting as an absolute rule the method prescribed by [Machiavelli] who always finds great delight in extraordinary and violent remedies.”
In pointing out Machiavelli’s love of “extraordinary and violent remedies,” Guicciardini captures something of his friend’s personality. In private Guicciardini was as irreverent as Machiavelli, but in his public writing he strikes a more diplomatic tone. Machiavelli was less discreet. He clearly meant what he said, but he never used moderate language when vivid phrases would better make his point. “[O]ne should note,” Machiavelli declares in a classic formulation, “that hatred may be acquired through good deeds as well as through bad. And so, as I said before, a prince wishing to hold on to his state is often forced to be other than good.” The shock provoked by passages like this owes as much to tone as to substance. Machiavelli was one of those tactless people who feel compelled to point out those truths that most are too polite to mention in public.
Of course what Guicciardini, like later critics, found unpalatable was not merely the tone but the substance of Machiavelli’s writing. He is particularly uncomfortable with Machiavelli’s embrace of the liar’s art. “It may also be disputed whether fraud is always a sure means of attaining greatness,” says Guicciardini, responding to one of Machiavelli’s central points, “because, although grand blows may be struck by deceit, yet the reputation of being a deceiver will afterwards prevent you from accomplishing your purpose”—to which Machiavelli himself would have replied that the best of all possible worlds would be to appear honest while yet harvesting the fruits of deception.
• • •
Despite the fact that The Prince is usually regarded as the despot’s handbook, one early critic dubbing it the guide to “Tyrannical science,” Machiavelli’s views are far less congenial to despotic rule than those of his more conventional predecessors. Indeed there is an inherent tension in The Prince between its stated purpose—which is to aid Lorenzo de’ Medici in fulfilling his glorious destiny—and the picture Machiavelli paints of a world teetering on the brink of anarchy. Had he been honest with his patron he would have admitted that the journey he was proposing was hazardous and the destination far from assured. “The universe is so constituted that we never flee one peril without finding ourselves in another,” he observes. “But prudence lies in understanding the nature of that peril, and in adopting the least bad as the good.” Such a world is inhospitable to absolutist rule predicated on divine right. How can God sanction the rule of one particular man or dynasty when “[n]ot a thing in the world is eternal” and a man “should every hour adjust himself to [Fortune’s] variation”? Divine right assumes an orderly hierarchy totally absent from Machiavelli’s conception. If God has a plan for this world, Machiavelli has a hard time discerning it.
Even in The Prince Machiavelli is not an apologist for despotism. When he calls on Lorenzo to “redeem [Italy] from barbarian insolence and cruelty,” he regards this as a short-term solution to a particular crisis. His prince will emerge, if at all, only through guile and struggle. Should he succeed he will need to protect his dominion by exercising constant vigilance and his triumph will only be temporary. Fortune’s wheel raises men up, only to plunge them back into the depths. No self-respecting prince would submit himself to such a dreary routine.
Thus despite appearances, and despite the fact that The Prince has been embraced by despots from Philip of Spain to Stalin and Hitler, the book offers only the most limited and contingent endorsement of dictatorship. In fact it was his predecessors, those “virtuous” men who have come down through history as saints and sages, who gave aid and comfort to tyrants. Following Aristotle, the tradition of the specula assumed that one-man rule was superior. “[G]overnment by one person, being the best, is to be preferred,” wrote Aquinas, a logical assumption since he believed earthly government should reflect the Kingdom of Heaven. Machiavelli, by contrast, notes that governments fall into two categories. “All states—all those dominions that once ruled or now rule over men—once were or are now either republics or principalities,” he asserts, remaining silent about his preference, clearly spelled out in The Discourses, for the former.xx Even in The Prince he provides only a limited endorsement of despotic rule, telling Lorenzo, “it seems to me that now so many factors point in favor of a new prince”—a statement that carries with it the not so subtle implication that in other times and in other circumstances a more representative form of government is called for. Machiavelli was a realist, willing to tailor his policies and prescriptions to a given situation. Self-government by a broad segment of the citizenry is preferable, he says, but given Italy’s debased condition only a strong leader can cure what ails her.
• • •
Machiavelli would not have become infamous had he merely been a reluctant pragmatist, advocating the path of virtue as long as he could while admitting that on occasion virtue must be put aside to avert a crisis. But Machiavelli went out of his way to challenge the prevailing wisdom. He took pleasure in scandalizing his readers, standing traditional nostrums on their head and demonstrating how following the recommendations of conventional moralists could lead to disaster. “Everyone knows how laudable it is,” he proclaimed with ill-concealed irony, “for a prince to keep his word and live with integrity instead of by trickery. But the experience of our own time shows us that the princes who have accomplished great things are those who cared little for keeping faith with the people, and who used cleverness to befuddle the minds of men. In the end, such princes overcame those who counted on loyalty alone.” Despite what “everyone knows,” that virtue will triumph and good men will always prosper, Machiavelli demonstrates that the reverse is true. Contemplating the success of Pope Alexander VI, he wrote “a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.” In the real world, honesty is praised but deception is rewarded; a place in heaven is reserved for the merciful prince, but only to compensate him for the worldly kingdom he will surely squander.
Not only, Machiavelli insists, does the universe punish the naively virtuous, but we ourselves extol conventional virtues even as we trample underfoot those who practice them. “[T]here is such a chasm between the way men live and the way they ought to live that he who abandons what is for what should be will soon ruin himself rather than secure his preservation. For a man who wishes to always do good will surely be ruined among so many who are not good. Thus it is necessary for a prince wishing to retain power to learn how not to be good, employing this art or not according to need.”
In condemning man as essentially wicked, Machiavelli echoes the Christian worldview he otherwise scorned. His harsh view of human nature and belief that only the coercive power of the state could repress humanity’s worst instincts mirror the grim assessment of many of the Church Fathers. “Surely, it is not without purpose that we have the institution of the power of kings,” Saint Augustine wrote, “the death penalty of the judge, the barbed hooks of the executioner, the weapons of the soldier, the right of punishment of the overlord, even the severity of the good father. All those things have their methods, their causes, their reasons, their practical benefits. While these are feared, the wicked are kept in bounds and the good live more peacefully among the wicked.” Machiavelli could not have stated the case for strong government any more boldly, but unlike Augustine and other Church Fathers—or prophetic figures like Savonarola—he did not incorporate humankind’s fallen nature into any larger redemptive scheme in which sin was merely the prelude to ultimate salvation.xxi
Though Machiavelli often uses terms like “evil” to describe people’s behavior, this seems more a matter of habit than conviction. Evil or wickedness implies a willful disregard of some higher law, but since Machiavelli is skeptical that such a universal standard exists against which we can measure how far short we have fallen, the term lacks the element of moral censure. In The Prince he often struggles to reconcile his natural revulsion against violence with his experience that the most effective leaders are often those who are least squeamish about employing it. One can sense his ambivalence as he recounts the life of Agathocles, a king of ancient Syracuse: “One cannot call it virtue [virtù] to murder one’s fellow citizens, to betray one’s friends, to live without faith, without piety, without religion,” he admits.
By such means one may win dominion but not glory. But if one considers Agathocles’ prowess [virtù] in first placing himself in peril and then escaping it, and his greatness of spirit in enduring and overcoming adversity, I cannot see why he should be judged inferior to any talented general. Nonetheless, his savage cruelty, inhumanity, and his infinite wickedness will not allow him to be included among those celebrated for their excellence. One should not, then, attribute to fortune or to virtue that which he accomplished without either.
While making an inventory of the tyrant’s many crimes, Machiavelli, in effect, praises Agathocles by damning him only faintly.
Machiavelli is most closely identified with the principle “the ends justify the means,” though the exact phrase never appears in his writing. The closest he comes is in a passage in The Discourses where he declares: “It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good . . . it always justifies the action.” One can argue that this formula is wrongheaded—it may never be possible to get good results from bad actions, since evil will only be met with evil—but not that it is amoral. The worst that one can say is that his morality is utilitarian, geared toward practical results in the here and now rather than obtaining the Kingdom of Heaven.
And what exactly are those ends toward which Machiavelli’s famously unpleasant means are pointing us? Over the centuries many have insisted that it is simply power: how to acquire it and how to secure it once acquired. But it is clear that power is not the “good” result for the sake of which Machiavelli is willing to condone “reprehensible actions.” This misunderstanding can be attributed to the fact that The Prince, his most famous book, focuses almost exclusively on means. It is intended to be a handbook for a practicing politician, and like all how-to manuals it assumes the ends are self-evident and sets them aside in order to concentrate on demonstrating the best way of achieving them.
When Machiavelli does turn to ends rather than means, it is usually to drive home the point that virtuous behavior often leads to bad outcomes, while brutality can sometimes contribute to human welfare. This is not a point of view favored by people of faith because they believe God’s plan must be universally good. Machiavelli’s philosophy, by contrast, embraces ambiguity and contradiction; it is empirical rather than faith-based, willing to accept the truth that good might come from bad.
The thrust of Machiavelli’s ethics is to rescue morality from the theologians. Having witnessed the suffering caused by weakness, corruption, and vacillation, he has nothing but contempt for those holy men who turn their backs on the world to contemplate the purity of their own souls. Though he praises men like Valentino who pursue their ambition openly, he abhors unnecessary cruelty. As always, Machiavelli applies a merchant’s calculus to morality, toting up the consequences of each action in neat columns of profit and loss: “[A] prince must not care whether he is considered cruel when attempting to keep his subjects loyal and united, because with a few examples he will have shown more mercy than those who, from excessive kindheartedness, allow disorders to continue from which arise murder and rapine. These cause universal suffering, while an execution ordered by the prince harms only one man.”
Right and wrong, then, are determined not in the individual conscience but in society, whose ultimate expression is the state and whose preservation, in peace and security, is necessary to human happiness. “It must be understood,” he says, “that a prince, especially a newly crowned prince, cannot observe all those things that give a man a reputation for goodness, it often being necessary, for the preservation of the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion.” The relevant question for Machiavelli is not whether one’s own soul is pure, but whether the choices one makes contribute in the long run to the collective good. Using this social calculus, Machiavelli discovers that many forms of behavior condemned by traditional moralists actually promote the general welfare. This is particularly true in judging the deeds of those entrusted with the care of the state. Murdering potential rivals may be wrong by traditional measures, but it may well spare the people the horrors of civil war. As Cosimo de’ Medici, the former strongman of Florence, once remarked: “states cannot be held with paternosters.”
Like Hobbes a century and a half later, Machiavelli justified drastic measures in the name of security since the alternative was far worse. A well-ordered polity provides a check on human appetites and ambitions that would otherwise run amok, causing untold misery.xxii “[W]hen the safety of one’s country wholly depends on the decision to be taken, no attention should be paid either to justice or injustice, to kindness or cruelty, or to its being praiseworthy or ignominious. On the contrary, every other consideration being set aside, that alternative should be wholeheartedly adopted which will save the life and preserve the freedom of one’s country.”
These and other similar pronouncements have earned Machiavelli the reputation as father of the concept raison d’état (reason of state). Since this doctrine has been deployed by many a regime to justify the suppression of individual liberties, Machiavelli has been accused of being complicit in tyranny. It is a valid criticism up to a point. Machiavelli considers almost any form of government, no matter how oppressive, as worthy of our sacrifice and entitled to our devotion. But the state is not an end in itself. Rather, the state demands our obedience because it is the vital bulwark against the forces of chaos.xxiii To the totalitarian, citizens exist to serve the state, while for Machiavelli the state exists to serve the citizens. His own experience had shown him that oppressive yet well-ordered governments produced far less suffering than permissive governments where neither person nor property was safe, but he also insists that in the long run the most stable and productive societies are those, like the Roman Republic, that promoted liberty and accepted a degree of civil strife as the price for that freedom.xxiv
Machiavelli is both cynical about and tolerant of human nature. All men may be “wicked,” as he asserts, but what he really means is that all men are animals who act according to their bestial natures. Where Aristotle declared that what distinguished man from the rest of creation was the exercise of reason,xxv Machiavelli stresses our kinship with the animals. All living beings are defined by unreasonable appetite, and humans are no exception. We are selfish and self-serving, cowardly, dishonest, and greedy, but Machiavelli refuses to pass judgment. “[I]t is impossible to go against what nature inclines us to do,” he says. He accepts our failings, just as he indulged his own vices, preferring to deploy wry humor rather than harsh censure. One vice he lacked was hypocrisy, the vice that justifies all other vices by refusing to recognize in oneself the sins attributed to others.
In the eyes of future generations Machiavelli’s greatest crime, the characteristic that has become most closely identified with the term Machiavellian, is his disdain for the cardinal virtue of honesty. Machiavelli himself contributed to this perception, boasting on occasion of his own duplicitous nature. Writing to Guicciardini about an elaborate practical joke the two of them were playing on the simple villagers of Carpi, he proclaims: “As for the lies of these citizens of Carpi, I can beat all of them out, because it has been a while since I have become a doctor of this art . . . so, for some time now I have never said what I believe or believed what I said; and if indeed I do sometimes tell the truth, I hide it behind so many lies that it is hard to find.” But this is little more than wishful thinking. Machiavelli may have been an admirer of cleverness in others, but he was in fact something of a naïf, offending those around him by telling them exactly what he thought. In fact Machiavelli was among the most honest—even tactless—of men. It is his brutal frankness, not his prevarications, that caused him so much trouble. What kind of liar would make such a confession or publicly announce his belief that deception is often the most effective strategy? It is the deceiver who conceals his art by playing the part of an honest man.
Even more than his advocacy of judicious cruelty, it is his promotion of judicious deceit that has made Machiavelli’s name synonymous with villainy. “[A] wise prince cannot keep his word when the situation alters to his disadvantage and when the basis on which he made the pledge no longer holds,” he insists. Anticipating in advance the abuse that will come his way, he returns to that critical distinction between the world as it should be, the “fancies” imagined by philosophers, and the world as it really is: “If all men were good, this precept would not be good, but since they are wicked and would not keep faith with you, you need not keep faith with them.”
Equally cynical is his contention that a prince who cannot afford to be virtuous must nonetheless appear to be so: “I know everyone agrees that it would be laudable for a prince to possess every good quality. But since it is not possible to possess them all, or subscribe to them completely—the human condition being what it is—it is necessary to be sufficiently prudent to avoid gaining a reputation for those vices which would cost him his state . . . . For, everything considered, he will discover things which, though seeming virtuous, will cause his ruin, and others which, though seeming wicked, will make him secure and promote his well-being.”xxvi
In noting the strategic uses of cruelty and deceit, Machiavelli dismisses millennia of ethical teaching as irrelevant to the way men and women actually live. The revolution achieved by The Prince is to engineer a radical shift in perspective away from the God-centered universe of previous thinkers to one in which the human animal takes his place alongside the other beasts in a perpetual struggle for security and the gratification of appetite. “[S]o great is man’s ambition that, in striving to slake his present desire, he gives no thought to the evils that in a short time will follow in its wake,” Machiavelli observes in a passage that is echoed a century and a half later in the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes.xxvii In The Discourses, he offers a similarly bleak assessment: “[H]uman appetites are insatiable, for by nature we are so constituted that there is nothing we cannot long for, but by fortune we are such that of these things we can attain but few. The result is that the human mind is perpetually discontented, and of its possessions is apt to grow weary.” The moral architecture of sin and redemption painstakingly constructed over the centuries by the Church has vanished, replaced by the empirical methodology of the laboratory. In this new setting the moralist gives way to the political scientist, whose job is not to condemn human nature but to describe it in order to minimize its most pernicious effects. Instead of the morally freighted concept of original sin, Machiavelli offers up the morally neutral concept of human nature, something that must be managed rather than atoned for.
• • •
Machiavelli abandons the pose of clinical detachment he has deployed throughout The Prince in the book’s stirring final chapter. In “An Exhortation to Free Italy from the Hands of the Barbarians,” all the passion that has been bubbling just below the surface erupts in a brilliant and stirring peroration in which he paints an abject picture of contemporary Italy and calls upon the Medici lord to embrace his destiny as the nation’s liberator:
Almost bereft of life, Italy waits for someone who can salve her wounds, put an end to the sacking of Lombardy, to the despoiling of Naples and Tuscany, and heal those sores that have for too long festered. See how she prays God to send someone who will rescue her from the cruel and insolent barbarian. See, too, how eager she is to rally to any banner, so long as there is someone who will raise it.
Many have discovered in this final chapter the key to Machiavelli’s own redemption. To those who accuse him of being the despot’s best friend, his defenders respond with this moving exhortation, as if to say that every uncomfortable recommendation that preceded it—every defense of violence, every attempt to justify deceit—can be forgiven (or at least explained) on the grounds that desperate times called for desperate measures, that only a leader as stone-hearted and ruthless as Machiavelli’s imaginary prince could save Italy from ruin.
To the extent that Machiavelli justified dictatorship, it is clear that he thought of it as a temporary expedient. Looking back on Roman history in The Discourses, he remarks: “I claim that republics which, when in imminent danger, have recourse neither to a dictatorship, nor some form of authority analogous to it, will always be ruined when grave misfortune befalls them.” Tyranny is not the ideal form of government, but sometimes there is no alternative. Now, Machiavelli would argue, is one of those moments when only a firm hand on the tiller can steer the nation to safety. With the states of Italy bowed beneath a foreign yoke, only a strong leader possessed of immense courage and foresight and granted extraordinary powers can set free a suffering people. “And although someone may already have given us a glimmer of hope that he had been ordained by God for our redemption,” Machiavelli says in an oblique reference to Valentino, “still we saw how at the critical moment he was abandoned by fortune.”
Only the house of Medici, he insists, can raise up the banner so recently laid down by the house of Borgia: “Nor at the moment can one see where one may place hope other than in your illustrious house,” he tells Lorenzo, “which, blessed by fortune and virtue, favored by God and by the Church, can place itself at the head of this campaign of redemption.” But in order to fulfill its glorious destiny, the ruling family of Florence must learn the lessons of history. Here Machiavelli turns to one of his favorite themes: the need for an army of citizen soldiers who fight not for pay but for love of country: “Should your house wish to emulate those great men who redeemed their countries, it will be necessary, above all other things, to furnish yourself with your own army, the foundation of every undertaking; for you cannot possess more loyal, truer, or better soldiers . . . . [C] ommanded by their own prince,” he concludes, “Italian valor will defend us from the foreigners.”
If Machiavelli were in need of absolution, this final chapter might provide some measure of grace. He was above all an ardent patriot and had nothing but scorn for those corrupt weaklings who had plunged their nation into the abyss. Though his loyalties are no longer parochially Florentine—encompassing now the broader conception of an as yet unrealized Italian nation—his passion for his country, however defined, provides the guiding principle of all his policies.xxviii Much of the apparent harshness of The Princestems from his realization that only a powerful lord, another Valentino, could rescue a people “more oppressed than the Hebrews, more enslaved than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians, without leaders, without order, beaten, despoiled, whipped, trampled, suffering every kind of ruin.”
But though Machiavelli’s view of the world was shaped by contemporary events, the principles of conduct he lays out in his book have a more universal application. More important than any particular prescription—since each is only tentative, to be adopted as long as it is effective and discarded as soon as it proves faulty—is his perspective, his willingness to face a world where mankind has been left to its own devices. He provides a new moral architecture to replace the tottering edifice based on Christian virtues that were everywhere espoused and nowhere obeyed. He insists that we deal with the world as it is, rather than the world as we wish it were, separating once and for all the role of the political scientist from the theologian, the sociologist from the metaphysician.xxix
One feature of the world that his predecessors largely neglected but that to Machiavelli was the very heart of the matter was the violent clash between opposing states. Medieval philosophers like Aquinas and Dante recognized that in the real world a prince might rule over limited territory and might be forced to take up arms against an unscrupulous colleague, but this was merely an unfortunate and temporary deviation from the ideal of a universal government sanctioned by God.xxx Machiavelli, by contrast, cannot conceive of government absent the state of war, calling it “the only art which is of concern to one who commands.” He can’t be bothered speculating about universal empires filled with happy subjects flourishing under the paternal care of a wise and serene monarch since it is the fact of man’s violent nature that makes government necessary in the first place. His is a Darwinian world where a prince must devour his neighbors before they have a chance to feast on him, where war is the normal condition and only the strong and cunning survive.
If critics have detected in Machiavelli a moral slipperiness—a discreditable tendency to tailor principle to circumstance—this is because what mattered to him was not the individual conscience (or soul, to use the term that had greater currency in his own day) but the result of any course of action.xxxi Sometimes he seems to advocate tyranny as the solution to Italy’s problems; at other times, particularly in The Discourses, he argues at length for republican rule. These are mere details. Machiavelli’s originality lies in the ease with which his philosophy—or, more accurately, his approach, since philosophy implies a consistency he never aspires to—can accommodate both systems. Experience is his guide and expedience his god. One must stick to the path of the good as long as possible, he agrees, but when pursuit of this chimera leads one into treacherous thickets, the ruler must be prepared to abandon this elusive goal and strike out in a different direction.
• • •
Machiavelli’s letter to Francesco Vettori dated December 10, 1513, indicates that, a mere ten months after his release from prison, he had almost completed his brief tract. But now that he was nearing the end doubts began to creep in: “I have discussed this little study of mine with Filippo [Casavecchia] and whether or not it would be a good idea to present it [to Giuliano], and if it were a good idea, whether I should take it myself or send it to you. Against presenting it would be my suspicion that he might not even read it and that that person [Piero] Ardinghelli might take credit for this most recent of my endeavors.” His fear that Ardinghelli, one of Giuliano de’ Medici’s private secretaries, would take credit for his work suggests that Machiavelli thought he had achieved something notable. In an age before copyright protection, literary theft was a common occurrence, and Machiavelli had every reason to worry that others might claim his ideas as their own.xxxii
In fact Machiavelli never sent the work to Giuliano, perhaps because Vettori’s response was discouraging. “When I have seen it,” Vettori told him, “I shall tell you my opinion about presenting it or not to the Magnificent Giuliano, as it may seem to me”—a less than ringing endorsement of the project. It may also have occurred to Machiavelli how unsuitable the text was for its intended recipient. In writing The Prince, Machiavelli had let his imagination and his hopes run away with him. Giuliano de’ Medici, the youngest son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, turned out to have been a man singularly ill adapted to play the role Machiavelli had assigned to him. He was cultured like his father but had none of the great man’s passion for statecraft. As one of the principal characters in Baldassare Castiglione’s popular The Courtier, a sixteenth-century guide to princely refinement and good breeding, Giuliano appears as an affable and sophisticated gentleman, hardly the ruthless leader Machiavelli was dreaming up in the pages of his book.xxxiii
Machiavelli was not the only one frustrated in his attempt to refashion the young Medici lord into a great prince. Pope Leo had similar ambitions for his younger brother, and grew impatient as he, too, saw his efforts fall short. Not long after ascending the papal throne Leo had named Giuliano Gonfaloniere of the Church, a position that Cesare Borgia had held before him; following the pattern set by the della Rovere family, he also made Giuliano a feudal lord by marrying him into the French nobility. Giuliano’s marriage to Philiberte of Savoy brought him the high-sounding title Duke of Nemours, but it could not light the fire of ambition in a man who preferred books and art to martial glory.
In the end the fun-loving Giuliano could not live up to his résumé. He never fulfilled his brother’s expectations as the man who would extend the Medici dominion over north and central Italy, and was even more disappointing to those like Machiavelli who imagined him as the founder of a unified Italian state with Florence as its capital. In 1516 Giuliano succumbed to syphilis, a disease that had been brought to Italy by the invading French army in 1494. He lives on in history through the work of others rather than for anything he himself achieved.xxxiv
When Machiavelli finally worked up the courage to send The Prince, he dedicated it to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Pope’s nephew, who now bore the hopes of the family as well as those of Florentine patriots. But Lorenzo proved no more capable than Giuliano. Leo’s attempts to create a strong principality in the heart of Italy ruled by the Medici family and strong enough to deter foreign armies foundered even more quickly than Alexander’s abortive efforts on behalf of his son. Machiavelli’s dream of a unified Italian state would have to wait more than three centuries until a generation of leaders—led by Garibaldi, Cavour, and Mazzini, with Vittorio Emmanuele taking up the mantle discarded by the Medici princelings—inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and fired by the patriotic exhortation of the Florentine civil servant, would drive the foreigners from native soil. As those nineteenth-century nationalists fought to liberate their nation from the Austrians, many marched into battle with the final words of The Princeringing in their ears:
Against barbarian rage,
Virtue will take the field; then short the fight;
True to their lineage,
Italian hearts will prove their Roman might.
i At the same time he was writing The Prince Machiavelli was at work on his other great political tract, The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius. Some of the harshness, or lack of balance, in The Prince can be attributed to this division of subject matter between two books, one of which deals with hereditary, or tyrannical, rule, the other with republics. Machiavelli clearly viewed his two books in some sense as companion pieces, and, while they are not contradictory, the fact that he wrote two such contrasting works raises a host of questions that I discuss later.
ii The dedication to Lorenzo was written after Giuliano’s premature death in 1516, but there is no reason to believe Machiavelli’s feelings had changed significantly in the interim.
iii In his play La Mandragola, the cuckolded husband is described as a man “who sits all day in his study, understands just books, and can’t manage practical affairs” (III, 2, in Chief Works, II, 795). Machiavelli disdained scholars with no real experience of the world.
iv Perhaps the greatest contrast is with his older compatriot Dante Alighieri, who in addition to writing the greatest poem of the Middle Ages, The Divine Comedy, was an important political theorist. In his De Monarchia (“On Monarchy”) he calls for the establishment of a universal empire based on divine law. “[T]he human race, by living in the calm and tranquillity of peace, applies itself most freely and easily to its proper work,” he declares, a vision completely at odds with Machiavelli’s conception of a world of ceaseless struggle for power. (De Monarchia, excerpted in Great Political Thinkers, 252.)
v Strictly speaking, the specula emerges in the Middle Ages, but these works were based on models like Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Isocrates’ To Nicocles. The philosophical framework was provided by works like Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics.
vi More’s Utopia, a fictitious account of a journey to an ideal state, follows many of the conventions and displays many of the attitudes typical of the form.
vii Plato did in fact attempt to put his notions of a philosopher king in practice by serving as an adviser to his former pupil Dionysus of Syracuse. Predictably, his attempts to replicate abstract philosophy on a messy real-world situation ended in disaster.
viii Erasmus, following Aristotle, makes a distinction between monarchy, which he regards as the best form of government, and tyranny, which is the worst. The good king or prince rules on behalf of his people, while the tyrant, the king’s corrupted twin, rules for his own sake. Machiavelli largely ignores this distinction.
ix Aristotle, while not subscribing to the Judeo-Christian conception of an all-powerful and perfect deity, believed that nature was rationally and benevolently ordered.
x Plato, by contrast, believed that change resulted from a profound corruption of the perfect and eternally static universe. “[A]ny change whatever, except from evil, is the most dangerous of all things,” he insisted. (The Laws, VII, quoted in Wolin, “Plato: Political Philosophy Versus Politics,” in Essays in the History of Political Thought, 7.)
xi Renaissance philosophers distinguished between Fortune and Providence. Fortune was random, perhaps even malicious, while Providence unfolded according to God’s plan. Fortune ruled this world, Providence the next. The difficulty came in explaining the relationship between the two.
xii Here he paraphrases a letter of September 1506 where he wrote: “The man who matches his way of doing things with the conditions of the times is successful; the man whose actions are at odds with the times and the patterns of events is unsuccessful” (Machiavelli et al., Machiavelli and His Friends, 135).
xiii Here Machiavelli shows himself to be the temperamental opposite of Aristotle, whose philosophy was based on “the golden mean.” “If we were right when in our Ethics we stated that Virtue is a Mean,” he wrote in The Politics (II, 10), “and that the happy life is life free and unhindered and according to virtue, then the best life must be the middle way, consisting in a mean between two extremes.” As an example of one such mean, Aristotle calls courage the mean between cowardice and rashness. A preference for moderation was antithetical to Machiavelli’s thought.
xiv In other works, like his famous In Praise of Folly, Erasmus seems to come much closer to Machiavelli’s conception of a world steeped in vice and wallowing in corruption, but the Dutch humanist always seems to have more faith in the possibility of ultimate redemption.
xv One of Machiavelli’s contemporaries, the mathematician Gerolamo Cardano, was also grappling with the unnerving fact that the future seemed unpredictable. A compulsive gambler, Cardano was the first man to systematically investigate the laws of probability. His Book on Games of Chance, like The Prince, seeks to discover a deeper order within apparent chaos. Cardano and Machiavelli found different ways to make sense of a world stripped of the comforting illusion of divine providence.
xvi The same idea is expressed in Shakespeare’s famous lines: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god” (Hamlet, II, ii).
xvii The precise meaning of the word virtù in Machiavelli’s writing is one of the most difficult and controversial issues for both translators and scholars. At times he appears to use it inconsistently—as with the case of the tyrant Agathocles whom he seems to describe, in alternate paragraphs (see Il Principe, VIII), as both devoid of virtù and an exemplar of the same—and at others merely in his own idiosyncratic way, deliberately contrasting it with the traditional Christian notion of virtue. My own sense of Machiavelli’s meaning is that he uses the term in a way that transforms it from a passive quality, a feature of one’s character, to an active quality, one that is manifest in action. “Prowess,” the ability to impose one’s will on the world, often comes closest to the mark, though “boldness” or “virility,” a word that shares the same root connoting manliness, are also reasonable variations. As always, Machiavelli is concerned with the result of an idea, not its abstract nature. Virtuous behavior that leads to bad outcomes cannot be condoned, nor should deeds normally described as evil be condemned when they promote the general welfare. Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that while Machiavelli seemed to be clear himself on what he meant, he often employed the term in the usual sense so that he could make a sharper contrast with his own views.
For an interesting discussion of these vexed issues, see Harvey C. Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Virtue, particularly Chapter 1. The topic has also been adressed by J. H. Whitfield in Machiavelli, especially Chapter 6, “The Anatomy of Virtue,” by Leo Strauss in his influential Thoughts on Machiavelli, and by Friedrich Meinecke in hisMachiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History.
xviii Thomas Hobbes echoes this notion: “The desires and other passions of men, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them: which, till laws be made they cannot know; nor can any law be made, till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it” (Leviathan, XIII, 83, quoted in Rauch, The Political Animal, p. 46).
xix In an era before social safety nets and sophisticated economic theory, the cycle of boom and bust was far more painful than it is now. Florentines still recalled with horror the collapse of the great banking firms of the Bardi and Peruzzi in the mid-fourteenth century, a calamity almost as great as the Black Death that followed.
xx See Discourses, III, 9. Even Machiavelli’s preference for democracy is practical rather than idealistic, since republics, being more broadly based, can more easily withstand the vicissitudes of Fortune.
xxi The Christian notion of man’s wickedness, derived from original sin, was a departure from the mainstream of Greek thought, particularly as expressed in the philosophy of Aristotle, whose views were essentially optimistic. “The function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle” (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 10998a, quoted in Bluhm, “Immanent Good: Aristotle’s Quest for the Best Regime,” in Essays in the History of Political Thought, p. 63). Aquinas revived Aristotle’s rationalistic philosophy in a Christian context. “Now the divine law,” he wrote, “which is founded on grace, does not abolish human law, which derives from natural reason” (quoted in A. P. D’Entrèves, “Thomas Aquinas,” in Essays in the History of Political Thought, 100).
xxii Even John Locke, a philosopher with a greater faith in man’s capacity for reasoned behavior, shared Machiavelli’s opinion: “if [human appetites] were left to their full swing, they would carry men to the overturning of all morality. Moral laws are set as a curb and restraint to these exhorbitant desires” (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, 3, p. 34).
xxiii Machiavelli’s views were echoed by many of the American Founding Fathers, including Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who wrote: “the mass of men are neither wise nor good, and virtue . . . can only be drawn to a point and executed by . . . a strong government ably administered” (John Jay letter to George Washington, June 27, 1786).
xxiv This might seem at first to be a contradiction, but it is in keeping with his belief that life is unpredictable. Political systems must be flexible, able to adapt to changing circumstances. This is the hallmark of mixed societies that have evolved through the creative clash among the classes. This theme is more fully developed in The Discourses, especially I, iv.
xxv Belief in man’s inherent rationality is the basis for Aristotle’s entire ethical and political system. “[A]ll associations aim at some good,” he begins his Politics, “that one which is supreme and embraces all others will have also as its aim the supreme good. That is the association we call the State, and that type of association we call political” (I, I). It is hard to imagine a less Machiavellian statement than this.
xxvi Machiavelli offers a variation on this notion in La Mandragola: “[M]any times one comes to harm by being too accommodating and too good, as well as by being too bad” (La Mandragola, IV, 6, in Chief Works, II, 810).
xxvii “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (Hobbes, Leviathan, XI, 64).
xxviii In fact Machiavelli never abandoned his Florentine bias. As the final chapter of The Prince amply demonstrates, he envisioned Florence as the capital of a newly unified Italian state. This happy outcome was far easier to envision now that a Florentine sat on the papal throne. After the reunification of Italy in the nineteenth century, Florence did serve briefly as the capital. If Machiavelli’s parochial Italian nationalism would not bear fruit for centuries, it was enormously influential in the wider context of sixteenth-century Europe, which saw the consolidation and expansion of the great nation-states of France, Spain, and England. By discarding the universalism of medieval philosophy in favor of a world-view that accepted as natural the violent clash of competing states, Machiavelli developed a working political science suitable for kings and diplomats.
xxix It is a startling coincidence that The Prince and Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) were written within a few years of each other. If More’s book is the culmination of a long tradition of imagining the ideal state that began with Plato, Machiavelli’s announces the birth of modern political science.
xxx Universal government was a more realistic prospect in the Middle Ages when the Holy Roman Emperor was the most powerful monarch in Europe. Dante’s De Monarchia is a passionate plea for the restoration of peace under the aegis of the heir of Caesar and Augustus.
xxxi Machiavelli often uses the word animo, meaning spirit (as in a spirited horse) but rarely, if ever, anima, meaning soul.
xxxii In fact this had happened with his First Decennale, which was printed in an unauthorized edition in Pistoia (see letter no. 110 in Machiavelli et al., Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 121).
xxxiii Ironically, the conversations that Castiglione invents in his book are set in the palace of the Duke of Urbino, the same palace where Machiavelli first encountered Cesare Borgia and where he developed his lifelong fascination with the ruthless man of destiny.
xxxiv Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo are famous for two things: it was to these two mediocrities that Machiavelli dedicated The Prince. They are also the residents of Michelangelo’s magnificent Medici Tombs in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence.