AUTHOR: NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI
DATE: 1532
Niccolò Machiavelli was a political operative who wrote his most famous, or infamous, work, The Prince, in a bid to curry favour with the powerful Medici family in his native Florence. It is arguably the founding document of realpolitik – in other words, politics based on practical objectives rather than ideals. It is in many ways the last word in pragmatism. Machiavelli was centuries ahead of his time, given that the term realpolitik was only coined by Ludwig von Rochau, a German statesman and writer, in the nineteenth century. Although Machiavelli never used the formulation, his central argument is often summarized as ‘the ends justify the means’ – an adage that has informed a host of subsequent political heavyweights (and many from other fields of endeavour as well) for better and worse.
MACHIAVELLIAN MACHIAVELLI?
Four years after The Prince, Machiavelli wrote Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy. But now his tone had changed somewhat. ‘The governments of the people are better than those of the princes,’ he wrote. ‘Only in those instances where there is insufficient social equality to establish a republic should a princedom be chosen.’ What must the Medici have thought? Was The Prince perhaps not the product of its author’s heartfelt convictions as much as a book designed to secure his own advancement? In other words, did Machiavelli practise a little disingenuousness to suit his own purposes? The Prince is itself an act of realpolitik …
Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, in the age of the all-powerful city-states in Italy. And few dynasties were more powerful than the Medici. They accumulated vast wealth and influence, coming to boast two popes so that their power base extended to the Vatican and incorporated the Church’s vast reach. Such levels of success demanded the ruthless execution of power. However, the family also had its foibles – not least a taste for debauched living and a tendency towards corruption that made them a target for rival families. In 1513, the Medici had recently returned to power after almost eighteen years in exile and Machiavelli, who had previously worked as an ambassador for them, was keen to get back into their good books. He wanted to share the benefit of his experience with his Florentine overlords, to encourage a mode of rule that was rooted in real conditions rather than rarefied, abstract notions of what a ruler ought to be. In his own words: ‘Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live …’
To this end, he decided to write a treatise on governance, which would become The Prince. He based it on the observations he had made of the formidable Cesare Borgia – the Duke of Valentinois and illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI – while working as a diplomat for the Medici over a decade earlier. Borgia had once been a cardinal but resigned from the Church to become a military general for France’s King Louis XII, going on to conquer several of the Italian city-states and create a mini-empire of his own. Machiavelli had closely watched Borgia for several months and was struck by his changeability. One moment, he could be playful and charming, the next, moody, secretive and angry. He also managed to combine a talent for planning with an instinct for opportunism. Crucially, he could be utterly ruthless too. For all that Borgia was intimidating, Machiavelli admired him.
Taking Borgia as his model, Machiavelli contends that ‘the Prince’ (or indeed, any ruler) is morally free to do whatever is required to achieve his goals, however unpalatable those actions might be. He argued that a prince might resort to any action – even deception and murder – if by doing so he maintains the stability and security of his realm. If peace demands lying, then that is an acceptable price to pay. Such statements were an apparent repudiation of the Church’s moral teachings and prompted uproar in Renaissance Italy, where Catholicism ruled supreme, leading the book to be banned until after Machiavelli’s death.
Of course, he was not suggesting an automatic default to deception or brutality. He positively encouraged demonstrations of compassion and generosity to endorse public morality and as a means of consolidating support, thus reducing the likelihood of unrest. But he was clear that the prince’s desire to be loved by his subjects ought to be secondary to his desire to be feared: ‘it would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved … Love endures by a bond which men, being scoundrels, may break whenever it serves their advantage to do so; but fear is supported by the dread of pain, which is ever present.’
While the Medici warmly embraced the book, others were appalled. Francis Bacon wrote in his Meditationes Sacræ (1597) that the work ought to be read so that good people might defend themselves against evil:
We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do. For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with the columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent; his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil. For without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced. Nay, an honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked, to reclaim them, without the help of the knowledge of evil.
The Prince continues to resonate as a philosophical work that forensically examines certain long-held ethical assumptions within a starkly realist context. After all, Machiavelli was telling what most of us understand – that many of those who attain and wield power are not benevolent but are prepared to do much (if not absolutely anything) for their own ends and for the benefit of their realm. It signposted the way towards the philosophical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James by several centuries in its argument that good leadership is reflected not in the good intentions of the leader but in the practical outcomes of their action. It may also be seen as distinctly utilitarian in its willingness to sacrifice the unhappiness of a few in the interests of the many (as represented by the state). Better, it might be argued, the extrajudicial deaths of ten conspirators than the loss of thousands of lives in a civil war.