PART ONE
THE EARLY Italian reception of The Prince and the Discourses shows that, from the outset, Machiavelli’s readers recognized and responded to his distinctive rhetorical flair. They were shocked (or pretended to be) by his brutal examples of practical politics; they resented his exposure of the inefficacy of the traditional virtues. They saw that the dramatic effect of Machiavelli’s work depended on his subversion of the conventions of humanist treatises on politics.1 And some, like Guicciardini, recognized that, precisely because of this, Machiavelli was more of a humanist than he would have his reader believe.
Writing to Benedetto Varchi in 1549, in what was probably a retrospective act of myth making, Giovan Battista Busini described the outrage which, he believed, many Florentines felt twenty years earlier when they discovered that the second chancellor of the republic had written The Prince. According to Busini, many of Machiavelli’s contemporaries saw him as a Machiavel—a religious heretic and instructor in tyranny—whose fault did not lie in rhetorical indirection but in not being indirect enough:
everyone hated him on account of The Prince; to the rich, it seemed that his Prince was a document for teaching the duke how to steal their possessions, to the poor their liberty. To the piagnoni [followers of Savanorola] he seemed a heretic, to the good dishonorable, to the wicked more wicked or more clever than they: so that everyone hated him.2
Francesco Guicciardini, in contrast, saw both the idealistic and the offensive sides of Machiavelli’s work. He also saw how they were related. In a now famous passage in his Considerazioni on Machiavelli’s Discourses, Guicciardini noted Machiavelli’s frequent, shocking examples of force and fraud; yet he went on to imply that Machiavelli’s inordinate fondness for such examples was motivated as much or more by a love of dramatic effect as by political concerns. In Guicciardini’s view, Machiavelli’s penchant for spectacular violence amounted paradoxically to political naiveté, even to an idealism of grand gestures. And he advised the prince not to take “for an absolute rule what Machiavelli says, who is always excessively pleased by unusual and violent remedies.”3 Elsewhere in his Considerazioni, he recast Machiavelli’s naiveté as bookish idealism, remarking that some of the examples Machiavelli adduced of tyrants and monarchs giving up their power “are more easily portrayed in the books and the imaginations of men, than they are accomplished in reality” (21). And in the Ricordi, in maxims later readers have taken to refer to Machiavelli, he linked political naiveté with the humanist rhetoric of exemplarity when he complained, “How wrong it is to cite the Romans at every turn”; “To judge by examples is very misleading.”4 For Guicciardini, Machiavelli’s shocking recommendations of force and fraud were perfectly compatible with bookish idealism and a humanist fondness for ancient Roman examples.
Guicciardini and Busini represent the two poles of the reception of Machiavelli in the Renaissance. While Busini recorded the views of those who failed to understand how the second chancellor of the Florentine republic could write a handbook for the Medicean “new prince,” Guicciardini expressed the views of those who doubted that a commentary on Livy could revive the Florentine republic after its fall in 1512. On the one hand, Machiavelli was accused of being a Machiavel; on the other hand, he was represented as an idealistic humanist and republican thinker. In the following chapters I argue that we can make sense of both these responses—and of a wide range of intermediate positions—once we recognize, as Renaissance readers did, Machiavelli’s debt to and criticism of the humanist rhetorical tradition.
Scholars of Machiavelli are now generally agreed about the humanist dimension of his education and of his cultural milieu. From his father Bernardo’s diary and from his own works, we know that Machiavelli received an education in rhetoric, poetry, and the other “studia humanitatis.” His prose style is often deliberately Latinate in syntax and lexicon, as though to declare his literary qualifications for public office.5 And it is probably the case that his education did help him to gain his position in the second chancery.6 We also know that Machiavelli was ambivalent about, even at times hostile to, the humanist culture of his day: in writing The Prince, Machiavelli broke with humanist treatises on princely conduct; just as in the Discourses, he took issue with the dominant humanist rhetoric of consensus in contemporary Florentine political discussion.7 Yet, in both works Machiavelli adopts humanist rhetorical strategies in order to criticize the pieties of humanist political theories. In both works Machiavelli stages his innovation in political theory as a rhetorical innovation, as an immanent critique of humanist rhetorical theory.8
My aim in providing the following rhetorical analysis of The Prince and the Discourses is to highlight the conventions of interpretation shared by Machiavelli and his Renaissance readers, and to lay the groundwork for a recuperation of the reception of Machiavelli as Machiavel and rhetorician in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.9 I focus on those passages and issues of key concern to the Renaissance reader conversant with the humanist rhetorical tradition, who encountered Machiavelli’s works in the decades following their publication in the early 1530s. Like the modern reader of The Prince, the sixteenth-century reader was particularly struck by the example of Cesare Borgia in chapter 7 and the recommendation that the prince imitate the fox and the lion in chapter 18. Unlike many modern readers, however, the Renaissance reader also noted Machiavelli’s ironic treatment of Moses in chapter 6 and the example of Agathocles the Sicilian tyrant in chapter 8. He was less interested in the depiction of Fortune as a woman—a holdover from medieval allegorizing after all—than in Machiavelli’s habits as a reader of ancient history. He saw both The Prince and the Discourses as providing a storehouse of ancient and modern examples that could be put to new uses by the reader. He was made nervous by Machiavelli’s use of the humanist vocabulary of imitation and exemplarity because he recognized that their traditional moral connotations were being subverted from within. He was disturbed by Machiavelli’s preference for conflict over consensus, because he saw the challenge to the humanist ideal of social harmony through dialogue. Finally, he recognized in Machiavelli’s work a set of topics or problems, such as the uses of imitation and the relation of force to popular consent, means to ends, and virtue to success.10 This is the reader whose experience will guide the rhetorical analysis of Machiavelli’s work in chapters 1 and 2, and whose own comments on and uses of Machiavellian rhetoric are the main subject of this book.
In chapter 1 I analyze Machiavelli’s critique of the humanist notion of imitation and the humanist pedagogy of examples in The Prince, and show how the topics that figure in the Renaissance reception of Machiavelli emerge from this critique. In chapter 2 I argue for the similarity between The Prince and the Discourses, while focusing in particular on Machiavelli’s attack on the humanist rhetoric of consensus. Both chapters demonstrate that the problems of political innovation in the realm of contingency that the new prince encounters are rhetorical problems: problems that cannot be resolved by applying fixed moral principles on the one hand or mere force on the other, problems whose solutions are inextricable from the use of imitation, representation, and persuasion. Thus rhetoric is not simply an instrument of virtù but is also analogous to virtù in the sense that both are faculties for responding to the realm of contingency or fortune; and virtù is rhetorical because what counts as virtù is produced from within a rhetorical analysis of the circumstances at hand and varies accordingly. Political innovation proves to be inseparable from rhetorical invention.11
ONE
MACHIAVELLI scandalized his Renaissance reader not because he advised the prince to use force and fraud but because he refused to cloak his advice in the rhetoric of scholastic or Christian humanist idealism. Instead, he insisted that the prince acts in a world in which there are “no prefigured meanings, no implicit teleology,”1 in which order and legibility are the products of human action rather than the a priori objects of human cognition. To recognize this, he argued, is to acknowledge the truth of power, as opposed to an idealistic notion of truth conceived in terms of representation, as correspondence to some a priori standard of judgment or moral ideal. Machiavelli accordingly declared his divergence from the idealistic tradition of reflection on political affairs in the famous opening to chapter 15:
Ma, sendo l’intento mio scrivere cosa utile a chi la intende, mi è parso piú conveniente andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa, che alla immaginazione di essa. E molti si sono immaginati repubbliche e principati che non si sono mai visti ne conosciuti essere in vero; perche elle è tanto discosto da come si vive a come si doverrebbe vivere, che colui che lascia quello che si fa per quello che si doverrebbe fare, impara piú tosto la ruina che la preservazione sua. (65)
Since I intend to write something useful to an understanding reader, it seemed better to go after the real truth of the matter than to repeat what people have imagined. A great many men have imagined states and princedoms such as nobody ever saw or knew in the real world, for there’s such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn how to accomplish his ruin, not his preservation. (44)
We should note, however, that while Machiavelli criticized the idealistic moral philosophy of some humanists, he borrowed from the more flexible pragmatism of others, according to which truth is governed by the rhetorical and ethical standards of prudence, decorum, and consensus. Only when we recognize Machiavelli’s imitation of and final divergence from this humanist rhetorical tradition will we be able to understand and appreciate the way Machiavelli was read and what he came to signify in the later Renaissance.
In the following pages I argue that Machiavelli offers an immanent critique of humanist imitation and the humanist pedagogy of examples in The Prince: he does not so much abandon the resources of humanist rhetoric as use them against humanism itself. Faced with the dilemmas of contingent action, Machiavellian virtù responds not only with a rhetorical analysis of options—through argument on both sides of a question—but also with a rhetorical critique of the usual humanist approach to, or the dominant ideology of, politics. Specifically, the humanist technique of argument on both sides of a question becomes a mode of dialectical thinking, in which positive terms are logically implicated in and give rise to their opposites. Machiavelli thus insists on what humanists had always known and feared: faithful imitation inevitably involves the possibility of feigning; what appears to be virtue may in practice turn out to be vice. Machiavelli’s rhetorical view of politics is thus inseparable from his use of rhetoric as a critique of ideology: for in showing the reader how to think rhetorically—on both sides of a question—about notions such as imitation, virtue, and the good, Machiavelli exposes the ideological nature of all such positive terms. In so doing, he presents the humanists’ prudential rhetoric as insufficiently rhetorical and flexible, as itself a version of instrumental thinking or idealism.2
The logic of such dialectical analysis leads Machiavelli to try to incorporate as resources within imitation and rhetoric that which the humanists would ordinarily exclude: physical force, misrepresentation, and conflicting interests.3 It also leads him to suggest in chapters 8 and 9 of The Prince that the superiority of republics emerges out of a rhetorical and dialectical analysis of principalities. The rhetorical considerations that make the prince a theatrical Machiavel, a hypocrite and fraud, may also lead in Machiavelli’s analysis to republicanism. Yet, precisely because there is a rhetorical and dialectical link between the new prince and the republican, there is no necessary connection between the two. Machiavelli’s critique of humanist imitation and rhetoric thus gives rise to a series of topics concerning the vexed relation of virtù and success, force and persuasion, means and ends, tyranny and republicanism.
Finally, I argue that Machiavelli’s rhetorical, dehypostatized virtù is a source of both analytical strength and weakness. On the one hand, it exposes as ideological the humanist’s claim to link virtue and rhetoric, ethics and effectiveness, while excluding force and fraud; on the other hand, in taking the realm of contingency and the practical conception of rhetoric more seriously than humanism itself, it runs the risk of merely reproducing the problem it set out to solve. Here, as Pocock has remarked, virtù “is not merely that by which men control their fortunes in a legitimized world; it may also be that by which men innovate and sodelegitimize their worlds” (MM, 166). The final section of this chapter examines Machiavelli’s response to this dilemma in chapters 25 and 26 of The Prince. As we will see, although Machiavelli’s rhetorical analysis of the realm of politics avoids the ethical domestication of virtù on the one hand, it threatens to allegorize, reify, or demonize virtù on the other, thus finally undermining the flexible political skill that the rhetoric of The Prince was designed to encourage. In the end, The Prince dramatizes both the dangerous instability and demonic aspect of rhetorical politics that later readers of Machiavelli would personify in the Machiavel.
Imitation and Misrepresentation
From the very beginning of The Prince it is clear that Machiavelli is drawing on the humanist notions of imitation and exemplarity.4 Like the humanists, he wants to educate his reader’s practical judgment, the faculty of deliberation that allows for effective action within the contingent realm of fortune; like them he recognizes that such education must therefore offer particular examples for imitation rather than the general precepts appropriate to theoretical reason. Furthermore, Machiavelli is concerned, as the humanists were, to criticize an unreflective relation to past examples, one that would take the form of slavish imitation or of a one-to-one correspondence. In fact, it is precisely in not perfectly imitating the exemplar that the humanist prince or poet finds both the room to exercise his own will and the measure of his own achievement. Correct imitation accordingly involves a flexible principle of prudential judgment or rhetorical decorum. This in turn gives rise to texts designed to dramatize and inculcate such judgment, texts whose rhetoric is therefore not ornamental but strategic.
Thus, in the prefatory letter to The Prince, Machiavelli justifies his gift to Lorenzo de’ Medici by suggesting that the latter will be a more effective ruler if he learns to imitate the double perspective, the reflective distance, offered in The Prince: “To know the people well one must be a prince, and to know princes well one must be, oneself, of the people” (14, 3). And in chapter 14, “Military Duties of the Prince,” Machiavelli makes the humanist claim for textual imitation even more forcefully by comparing skill in government to skill in reading, by making the ruler’s landscape into a text and the text into a realm of forces. The prince is advised to learn to read the terrain (“imparare la natura de’ siti”) and to “read history and reflect on the actions of great men.” Here, to imitate great men means to imitate imitation, that is, to “take as a model of conduct some great historical figure who achieved the highest praise and glory by constantly holding before himself the deeds and achievements of a predecessor” (64, 43).
Notoriously, however, imitation is not an ethical practice for Machiavelli; the orator is not necessarily a good man. This point is brought home with particular irony in those passages where Machiavelli invites the prince to pretend to imitate. For example, in chapter 6 he notes:
camminando li uomini quasi sempre per le vie battute da altri, e procedendo nelle azioni loro con le imitazioni, né si potendo le vie d’altri al tutto tenere, né alla virtù di quelli che tu imiti aggiugnere, debbe uno uomo prudente intrare sempre per vie battute da uomini grandi, e quelli che sono stati eccellentissimi imitare, acciò che, se la sua virtù non vi arriva, almeno ne renda qualche odore: e fare come li arcieri prudenti, a’ quali, parendo el loco dove disegnono ferire troppo lontano, e conoscendo fino a quanto va la virtù del loro arco, pongono la mira assai piú alta che il loco destinato, non per aggiugnere con la loro freccia a tanta altezza, ma per potere, con lo aiuto di sí alta mira pervenire al disegno loro. (30)
Men almost always prefer to walk in paths marked out by others and pattern their action through imitation. Even if he cannot follow other people’s paths in every respect, or attain to the virtù of his originals, a prudent man should always follow the footsteps of the great and imitate those who have been supreme. His own virtù may not come up to theirs, but at least it will have a sniff of it. Thus he will resemble prudent archers who, seeing how far away the target lies, and knowing the virtù of their bow, aim much higher than the real target, not because they expect the arrow to fly that far, but to accomplish their real end by aiming beyond it. (16; translation modified)
The goal here is not so much imitation as it is the prudent pretense of imitation, as though the deferential practice of following in the footsteps of the great will serve to camouflage one’s “real end by aiming beyond it.” In making the agent an actor who is capable of (mis)representation and in arguing that such fraudulent representation is a means to power, Machiavelli exposes the hypocrisy, force, and fraud, that are the demonic underside of the humanist notion of imitation. At the same time he alters the meaning of prudence from the humanists’ practical reason, informed by moral considerations, to the calculating, potentially amoral faculty of judgment appropriate to the man of virtù. In typical Machiavellian fashion, he also dramatizes such prudent misrepresentation in his own treatment of Moses in the following paragraph.5
Renaissance readers of this chapter were particularly disturbed by the inclusion of Moses among those who became princes “by their own virtù.” They could not help noticing Machiavelli’s ironic deference to Moses’s “teacher” and his sly imputation that Moses had feigned divine favor:
Ma, per venire a quelli che per propria virtù e non per fortuna sono diventati principi, dico che li piú eccellenti sono Moisè, Ciro, Romulo, Teseo, e simili. E, benché di Moisè non si debba ragionare, sendo suto uno mero esecutore delle cose che li erano ordinate da Dio, tamen debbe essere ammirato solum per quella grazia che lo faceva degno di parlare con Dio. Ma consideriamo Ciro e li altri che hanno acquistato o fondato regni: li troverete tutti mirabili; e, se si considerranno le azioni e ordini loro particulari, parranno non discrepanti da quelli di Moisè, che ebbe sí gran precettore. (30–31)
Turning to those who have become princes by their own virtù and not by accident, I would say that the most notable were Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and a few others. And though we should not consider Moses, because he was simply an agent sent by God to do certain things, he still should be admired, if only for that grace which made him worthy of talking with God. But let us turn to Cyrus and the others who acquired or founded kingdoms. You will find them all deserving of admiration; and if you consider their individual actions and decrees, they will be found not much different from those of Moses who had such a great teacher. (16)
In these remarks Machiavelli conflates the language of divine providence with that of princely virtù, and so negates the distinction between Moses and Cyrus even as he insists on it: Moses may have been taught by God, but God is an “ordinatore” like Cyrus and others who established new “ordini”; conversely, Cyrus and the others are described as “mirabili”—not only admirable but wondrous, as though they too had been favored by grace. Machiavelli’s claim that we should admire Moses “if only for that grace which made him worthy of talking with God” clearly suggests that Moses had the wit—or grace—to feign grace. In case we should miss the point, in the next paragraph Machiavelli explicitly calls attention to the similarity of Moses and Cyrus: “It was necessary for Moses to find the children of Israel in Egypt, enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians, so that they should be disposed to follow him. . . . It was necessary that Cyrus should find the Persians unhappy with the rule of the Medes, and the Medes soft and effeminate from years of peace” (32, 17). Like Cyrus, Moses knew how to make the most of the occasion by means of his own virtù.
Chapter 6’s redefinition of imitation as ruse and thus as power is an aim of The Prince as a whole, but it finds a particularly forceful articulation in chapter 18, in which Machiavelli criticizes the humanist equation of honestas and utilitas, the faith that rhetoric and prudence are inseparable from moral virtue.6 Machiavelli begins this chapter by distinguishing between human law and bestial force, but he then abandons the first pole of his binary opposition and proceeds to locate the range of political invention and imitation within the second term of force. In doing so, however, he redefines force to include craft or fraud as well:
Sendo adunque uno principe necessitato sapere bene usare la bestia, debbe di quelle pigliare la golpe et il lione; perché il lione non si defende da’ lacci, la golpe non si defende da’ lupi. Bisogna adunque essere golpe a conoscere e’ lacci, e lione a sbigottire e’ lupi. Coloro che stanno semplicemente in sul lione, non se ne intendano. Non può per tanto uno signore prudente, né debbe, osservare la fede, quando tale osservanzia li torni contro, e che sono spente le cagioni che la feciono promettere. (72–73)
Since a prince must know how to use the character of beasts, he should pick for imitation the fox and the lion. As the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves, you have to be a fox to be wary of traps, and a lion to overawe the wolves. Those who try to live by the lion alone are badly mistaken. Thus a prudent prince cannot and should not keep his word when to do so would go against his interest, or when the reasons that made him pledge it no longer apply. (50)
In making force, in the inclusive sense of force and fraud, the object of imitation, Machiavelli implicates force in the narrow sense of brute strength in questions of discretion and representation. A rhetoric of force is different from the simple application of force—“Those who try to live by the lion alone are badly mistaken”—since at times such rhetoric will involve the representation of and appeal to what is conventionally accepted as virtue.7
A uno principe, adunque, non è necessario avere tutte le soprascritte qualità, ma è bene necessario parere di averle. Anzi, ardirò di dire questo, che avendole et osservandole sempre, sono dannose, e parendo di averle, sono utile; come parere pietoso, fedele, umano, intero, relligioso, et essere; ma stare in modo edificato con l’animo, che, bisognando non essere, tu possa e sappi mutare el contrario. Et hassi ad intendere questo, che uno principe, e massime uno principe nuovo, non può osservare tutte quelle cose per le quali li uomini sono tenuti buoni, sendo spesso necessitato, per mantenere lo stato, operare contro alla fede, contro alla carità, contro alla umanità, contro alla relligione. E però bisogna che elli abbi uno animo disposto a volgersi secondo ch’e’ venti e le variazioni della fortuna li comandono. (73–74)
In actual fact, a prince may not have all the admirable qualities we listed, but it is very necessary that he should seem to have them. Indeed, I will venture to say that when you have them and exercise them all the time, they are harmful to you; when you seem to have them, they are useful. It is useful to appear merciful, truthful, humane, sincere, and religious; it is useful to be so in reality. But you must keep your mind so disposed that, in case of need, you can turn to the exact contrary. This has to be understood: a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot possibly exercise all those virtues for which men are called “good.” To preserve the state, he often has to do things against his word, against charity, against humanity, against religion. Thus he has to have a mind ready to shift as the winds of fortune and the varying circumstances of life may dictate. (50–51; translation modified)
Here representation becomes ruse in order to present an illusion to the people that will at the same time be effective for the prince. In response to the humanist ideal of a rhetoric that is grounded in morality and also effective, Machiavelli demonstrates that even those practical “virtues for which men are called ‘good’” are insufficiently attuned to the rhetorical concerns of effective political action. This immanent critique leads Machiavelli to redefine the antithesis of representation and force. Correct or successful imitation is no longer constrained by the humanist exercise of self-knowledge and moral discretion8 but has itself become a rhetorical topic of invention to be manipulated in the interests of power. Conversely, however, power becomes in part, if not entirely, a rhetorical effect of imitation: for the prince must appear to be good, virtuous, and so on, not only in order to deceive his enemies but also to satisfy his people and to maintain his power.
As the preceding remarks suggest, Machiavelli’s immanent critique of humanist imitation follows from his recognition of the intrinsic irony of politics, or of action within the contingent realm of human affairs: “If you look at matters carefully, you will see that something resembling virtue, if you follow it, may be your ruin, while something resembling vice will lead, if you follow it, to your security and well-being” (66, 45).9 But this formulation also allows us to see that Machiavelli wants to control this irony, or rather that he conceives of the man of virtù as someone who can use the ironies of political action to achieve political stability.10 This recognition of the irony of politics leads in turn to a revision of humanist argument in utramque partem. The humanists, following Aristotle, believed that one needs to be able to argue on both sides of a question, not so that one might actually defend a false position but so that one might anticipate and thereby more effectively rebut one’s opponent. Machiavelli, however, argues that the prince will actually have to oppose what may appear to be good at a given moment. In fact, in Machiavelli’s view, it is the humanists who are guilty of trying to accommodate in a single moment contrary qualities or arguments when they claim that the good and the useful are always compatible (see chaps. 16 and 17). Knowledge in utramque partem is necessary according to Machiavelli because “the conditions of human life simply do not allow” one “to have and exercise” only morally good qualities (65, 45). Rather, the conditions of human life require the ruses of imitation and persuasion—and the amoral, flexible faculty of judgment—that Machiavelli calls virtù.
Examples of Virtù
For hyperbole is a virtue [virtus], when the magnitude
of the facts passes all words, and in such circumstances our
language will be more effective if it goes beyond the
truth than if it falls short of it.
—Quintilian
It is precisely the intrinsic irony of politics—the gap or lack of a correspondence between intention and result—that both allows for and requires solutions that seem extreme from the perspective of the humanist ideal of mediocritas.11 Hence the place of hyperbole and exaggeration in Machiavelli’s examples of virtù. On the one hand, the examples of great men will always seem hyperbolic or excessive to—beyond the reach of—the imitator. On the other hand, Machiavelli argues, this hyperbole has a rhetorical and pedagogical function. If we return to the example from chapter 6 of the archer shooting beyond his target, we see that Machiavellian examples do not correspond to things as they are but to what they might be; they are figures of action rather than perception, of desire rather than cognition or representation. Hyperbole as a mode of speech or behavior is thus the proper response to the irony of politics: it is predicated on a recognition of one’s distance from the situation one would like to create, but it also involves the recognition that such distance is itself a precondition of considered action. Finally, hyperbolic action is often ironic according to the classical definition of irony because it involves saying or doing one thing in order to arrive at its opposite.12 In short, the world of Machiavellian politics is intrinsically ironic, and often the most effective mode of acting—and of teaching—in such a world is theatrical and hyperbolic.
Given Machiavelli’s dramatic and rhetorical view of the world of politics, it is not surprising that he offers us no substantive or thematic definition of virtù. This is not simply a failing of analytical skill but a sophisticated rhetorical strategy, the aim of which is to destabilize or dehypostatize our conception of political virtue, for only a destabilized virtù can be effective in the destabilized world of political reality.13 In this context the most effective critique of humanist assumptions will be one that stages or dramatizes this lack of conceptual stability, rather than simply stating it as a fact. An analysis of the examples of Cesare Borgia and Agathocles in chapters 7 and 8 will serve to illustrate this point. Together, these chapters exemplify the most prominent features of Machiavelli’s strategic rhetoric—his dichotomizing mode of argument, hyperbolic and theatrical style, apparent contradictions and deliberately failed examples. At the same time, they should also help us to see how Machiavelli’s own rhetorical virtuosity dramatizes the virtù of his ideal prince. Chapters 7 and 8 stage a characteristically Machiavellian coup de théâtre, in which Machiavelli’s rhetorical force and fraud are central to his innovation in political thought.
Chapter 7 on Cesare Borgia has long been recognized as Machiavelli’s most notorious example of the “new prince.” Sandwiched between chapter 6, in which Machiavelli discusses those who founded states or introduced “nuovi ordini” by virtù—that is, by their own energy and force of arms (32, 18)—and chapter 8 on those who acquired power by crime, Borgia seems designed above all to illustrate the ordinary case of virtù in the realm of politics. In contrast to Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus in chapter 6, Borgia rose to power by fortune and the arms of others. Nevertheless, he had “so much natural virtù that [he] quickly prepared himself to preserve what fortune had showered on [him]” (34, 19). For this reason, Machiavelli tells us, there is no “better advice to give a new prince than the example of his actions” (34–35, 20). Precisely because Borgia is the Machiavellian prince par excellence and because he is explicitly contrasted to the criminals Agathocles and Oliverotto da Fermo in the next chapter—a contrast most readers have taken at face value—this example needs to be analyzed closely.
Unlike the mythical founders of new orders in chapter 6, who had only to impose form on unformed matter, Borgia confronted an already formed matter. His effectiveness in dealing with this situation seems to have been due to his uncommon ability to use fraud as a means to power. Having put down the “disorders” caused by the Orsini in the Romagna,
né si fidando di Francia né di altre forze esterne, per non le avere a cimentare, si volse alli inganni; e seppe tanto dissimulare l’animo suo che li Orsini, mediante el signor Paulo, si riconciliorono seco; con il quale el duca non mancò d’ogni ragione di offizio per assicurarlo, dandoli danaro, veste e cavalli; tanto che la simplicità loro li condusse a Sinigallia nelle sua mani. Spenti adunque questi capi, e ridotti li partigiani loro amici sua, aveva il duca gittati assai buoni fondamenti alla potenzia sua. (36)
he put no further trust in the French [who had assisted him], nor in any other outside forces, since he found them too risky; so he turned to trickery. And he was so skillful in disguising his intentions that the Orsini themselves sought to be reconciled with him through the mediation of Signor Paolo [Orsini], whom the duke tried to placate in every way conceivable, giving him money, fine clothes, and horses. Thus the simple-mindedness of the Orsini brought them to Sinigaglia, and into the duke’s hands. And when he had killed all the leaders, and won over their followers to be his friends, the duke had laid excellent foundations for his power. (21)
Yet, if Borgia is an example of the necessity of relying on one’s own power, including the ruses of representation, he is also, as Machiavelli recognized and as later Renaissance readers were quick to point out, a powerful illustration of the intrinsic irony of fortune. For while Borgia “acquired authority through his father’s fortune,” he also “lost it in the same way” (34, 19). The chapter thus enacts the dilemma that Pocock ascribes to The Prince as a whole: virtù is not only an attempt to control fortune but a source of the fortuitous and uncontrollable consequences of action as well (MM, 166).
In contrast to Borgia, Agathocles is presented in chapter 8 as a man who rose to power not by fortune but by crime. Yet few modern readers have noticed that Agathocles is presented as a counterexample to Borgia in another way as well. For while Borgia ruled over the Romagna for a month, Agathocles had a long and successful reign. Thus, ironically, Borgia is an example of failure to maintain control over the innovations he set in motion, while Agathocles is an example of success. If chapter 7 shows Borgia’s use of representation as ruse and thus the mutual implication of representation and force, chapter 8 stages its own forceful misrepresentation in pretending to distinguish between virtù and crime. And it does so in order to suggest a possible response to the ironies of innovation dramatized in the example of Borgia. As we will see, the longevity of Agathocles’s reign is related to a different sort of ruse of representation, according to which the exigencies of representing oneself to one’s subjects prove to be a forceful constraint on tyrannical power.
Modern readers of The Prince have tended to interpret the example of Agathocles in one of two ways. In this narrative, some argue, Machiavelli registers his own discomfort with the notion of virtù he has been elaborating: it does violence to his sense of morality, as well as to his reader’s. While some critics speak of Machiavelli’s condemnation of Agathocles14 others see the story as an illustration of a cruel but effective use of violence. The interpreters who fall into this camp then differ as to whether this use of violence is immoral or amoral.15 But in neither case is Machiavelli’s own interpretation of Agathocles as one who rose to power by crime subject to scrutiny.16 Thus, although the proponents of the first interpretation note Machiavelli’s qualification of Agathocles’s actions (“non si può ancora chiamare virtù ammazzare li sua cittadini” [42]), they read this qualification as a simple pun (“It certainly cannot be called ‘virtue’ to murder his fellow citizens” [26]) and so save Machiavelli from the charge of failing to make moral distinctions. The second group of interpreters, in accepting the story of Agathocles as an illustration of the uses of crime rather than of virtù, make an analogous moral distinction between the excessive cruelty of Agathocles and the politic restraint of the man of virtù. Following from the story of Cesare Borgia in chapter 7, the next chapter serves, in these readings, to correct the reader who had begun to think virtù identical with crime: in chapter 8 Machiavelli reassures the reader by acknowledging a difference between the two.
Yet, there is hardly a less reassuring experience of reading in The Prince than that of chapter 8. And it is a chapter whose disturbing effect increases as we read on: although in chapter 6 Machiavelli describes the relation of virtù and fortuna as a dialectical one, he goes further in chapter 25 when he claims that fortuna and virtù divide the world of events between them. How, then, we wonder, could crime be a third term in Machiavelli’s analysis of the way princes rise to power?
In spite of the title and the first paragraph of chapter 8, Machiavelli’s introductory remarks about Agathocles seem to confirm the polar opposition of chapter 25. He tells us that Agathocles “joined to his villainies such virtù of mind and body that after enlisting in the army he rose through the ranks to become military governor of Syracuse” (41, 25). And a little further on he reiterates that Agathocles’s success was due to virtù: “Considering the deeds and virtù of this man, one finds little or nothing that can be attributed to fortune” (41, 26). But then, anticipating his reader’s objections, he quickly adds:
Non si può ancora chiamare virtù ammazzare li sua cittadini, tradire li amici, essere sanza fede, sanza pietà, sanza relligione; li quali modi possono fare acquistare imperio, ma non gloria. Perché, se si considerassi la virtù di Agatocle nello intrare e nello uscire de’ periculi, e la grandezza dello animo suo nel sopportare e superare le cose avverse, non si vede perché elli abbia ad essere iudicato inferiore a qualunque eccellentissimo capitano. Non di manco, la sua efferata crudeltà et inumanità, con infinite scelleratezze, non consentono che sia infra li eccellentissimi uomini celebrato. Non si può adunque attribuire alla fortuna o alla virtù quello che sanza l’una e l’altra fu da lui conseguito. (42)
Yet it certainly cannot be called virtù to murder his fellow citizens, betray his friends, to be devoid of truth, pity, or religion; a man may get power by means like these, but not glory. If we consider simply the virtù of Agathocles in facing and escaping from dangers, and the greatness of his soul in sustaining and overcoming adversity, it is hard to see why he should be considered inferior to the greatest of captains. Nonetheless, his fearful cruelty and inhumanity, along with his innumerable crimes, prevent us from placing him among the really excellent men. For we can scarcely attribute to either fortune or virtù a conquest [quello] which he owed to neither. (26)
How are we to make sense of the vertiginous distinctions in this paragraph? Russell Price has suggested that Machiavelli is differentiating in this passage between the virtù and glory won by military leaders and the political virtù and glory that are attributes of “the really excellent men.”17 Of the former he writes:
It seems that [Agathocles] . . . deserves credit for his martial spirit and deeds (that is, as a capitano) after he became ruler; what blackens his reputation is how he became ruler, because he treacherously slaughtered his friends and fellow citizens. Trickery and violence are to be condemned in a ruler or an aspiring ruler. . . . The stain he incurred by the way he seized power is indelible like original sin. (611)
As we will see, however, Agathocles is a shifty rhetorician and although the stain might be “like” original sin in ways that will be discussed more fully in part 2 of this book, no stain in this world of shifting shapes and meanings is indelible. Price’s analysis fails to take account of the fact that Borgia also used trickery and violence to secure his power but is nevertheless not offered as an example of one who rose to power by crime. Furthermore, although Borgia is not condemned by Machiavelli, neither is he described as one of the really excellent men, a phrase, as Pocock reminds us, that refers to legislators rather than new princes (MM, 168).
A more sophisticated version of Price’s analysis is presented by Claude Lefort, who argues that the introduction of the theme of glory in chapter 8 signals a turning point in the argument of The Prince. Whereas the earlier chapters were concerned with the necessary exercise of violence in the acquisition of power, chapter 8 introduces the necessity of favorably representing oneself to the people in order to hold on to one’s power. And, whereas Machiavelli had previously emphasized the self-sufficiency of the prince, he now places the actions of the prince in the social context in which they acquire their real significance (380–81). In Lefort’s reading, virtù is neither identical with nor exclusive of crime, but it does require glory, which eventually induces the prince to moderate his behavior and take a greater interest in the welfare of his people. Because Machiavelli refuses to ascribe glory to Agathocles, he cannot really be considered a man of virtù.
In the end, if Lefort is not as reassuring as those readers who claim that Machiavelli is asserting a clear-cut distinction between crime and virtù, he nevertheless claims that there is a distinction between Borgia and Agathocles, one that does not lie in the nature of their deeds, since both were guilty of criminal behavior, but rather in the fact that the deeds of the latter “were committed without justification, or without pretext, by a man whom nothing, except his ambition, destined to reign . . . a man—Machiavelli took the trouble to point out—di infima e abjetta fortuna, the simple son of a potter” (380). It is not so much the crimes of Agathocles that constitute his original sin, according to Lefort, as his lowly birth. But this interpretation trivializes both the notion of representation and that of fortune in The Prince, neither of which, as Lefort elsewhere recognizes, is a static concept according to which the bad fortune of lowly birth would forever restrict Agathocles’s possibilities for acquiring glory or representing himself in a favorable light.18 In fact, by the end of the chapter, Agathocles is offered as an example of someone who used cruelty well rather than badly, and who consequently was “able to reassure people, and win them over to his side with benefits” (44, 28). It would seem, then, that far from excluding Agathocles from the category of representative men of virtù, Machiavelli goes out of his way to stress his inclusion. That he refuses to ascribe glory to Agathocles may then suggest that Machiavelli is playing on gloria in much the same way that he plays on virtù: unlike Moses in chapter 6, Agathocles was not favored with heavenly glory but he was successful nonetheless.
As we have seen, most readings of chapter 8 respond to the pressure to make distinctions that is implicit in the apparently contradictory reiteration of virtù. But it is important to see that clear-cut or permanent distinctions finally cannot be made. Throughout The Prince Machiavelli sets up concepts in polar opposition to each other and then shows how the opposition is contained within each term so that the whole notion of opposition must be redefined.19 Thus in chapter 25 he begins by telling the reader that “fortune governs one half of our actions, but that even so she leaves the other half more or less in our power to control.” Fortune is then presented as a natural force, a torrential stream against which men can take countermeasures “while the weather is still fine.” But this opposition is a generalization that undergoes startling revision when we come to “the particulars.” For a man’s ability to take countermeasures—his virtù—turns out to be a fact of (his) nature and thus a potential disaster over which he has no control:
se uno che si governa con respetti e pazienzia, e’ tempi e le cose girono in modo che il governo suo sia buono, e’ viene felicitando; ma se li tempi e le cose si mutano, rovina, perché non muta modo di procedere. Né si truova uomo sí prudente, che si sappi accomodare a questo; sí perché non si può deviare da quello a che la natura l’inclina, sí etiam perché, avendo sempre uno prosperato camminando per una via, non si può persuadere partirsi da quella. (100)
If a prince conducts himself with patience and caution, and the times and circumstances are favorable to those qualities, he will flourish; but if times and circumstances change, he will come to his ruin unless he changes his method of proceeding. No man, however prudent, can adjust to such radical changes, not only because we cannot go against the inclination of nature, but also because when one has always prospered by following a particular course, he cannot be persuaded to leave it. (71)
In this more particular view, human nature is itself a torrential stream that cannot redirect its course with dikes and restraining dams: the favorable constraints are instead introduced by fortune. The purely formal virtù that is the ability to “adjust one’s behavior to the temper of the times”—and that is precisely not constancy of character—is not a quality that can be attributed once and for all: it is rather a generalization that designates only the fortunate coincidence of “nature’s livery and fortune’s star.” Or, as Machiavelli writes of men of virtù in chapter 6, “Without the opportunity their virtù of mind would have been in vain, and without that virtù the opportunity would have been lost” (31, 17).
If we now return to chapter 8, we can begin to see why Machiavelli cannot call Agathocles’s crimes virtuous. In the light of chapter 25 it seems we should place an even stronger emphasis on called: neither in the case of Borgia nor in the case of Agathocles can crime be called virtù, because virtù cannot be called any one thing. In short, once the temporal dimension of circumstance is introduced, the fact that crime cannot necessarily be called virtù means also that it can be called virtù. The danger of the preceding chapter 7 is not only that we might identify Borgia’s murder and treachery with virtù but also that we would identify virtù with any particular act—criminal or not. The aim of the passage in chapter 8 is to dehypostatize virtù, to empty it of any specific meaning. For virtù is not a general rule of behavior that could be applied to a specific situation but rather, like prudence, a faculty of deliberation about particulars.
This reading is borne out by the end of chapter 8, where Machiavelli makes a distinction between two sorts of cruelty—between cruelty used well or badly—thereby placing the distinction between crime and virtù within cruelty itself:
Bene usate si possono chiamare quelle (se del male è licito dire bene) che si fanno ad un tratto, per necessità dello assicurarsi, e di poi non vi si insiste dentro, ma si convertiscono in piú utilità de’ sudditi che si può. (44)
Cruelty can be called well used (if it’s permissible to speak well about something that is evil in itself) when it is performed all at once, for reasons of self-preservation; and when the acts are not repeated after that, but rather are turned as much as possible to the advantage of the subjects. (27–28; translation modified)
Once again the emphasis is on chiamare (“Bene usate si possono chiamare”), but here the temporal dimension is explicit, as is the consequent and necessary making of distinctions within cruelty. And once again, in the parenthetical remark Machiavelli speaks to the reader’s moral sensibility—but he has answered the implied question even before it has been posed. Cruelty can be called “well used” because Machiavelli has just done so in the preceding clause. The adverbial bene then takes on some of the paronomastic color of the earlier paragraph on virtù. The reader wonders if it is permissible to speak good words (bene) about evil, while Machiavelli replies by speaking well (bene).20
These lines are important because they contain in miniature Machiavelli’s critique of humanism. The humanist’s assumption that honestas is compatible with utilitas, reflected in the maxim that the good orator is necessarily a good man, is politically useless to Machiavelli, however it is interpreted. When the goodness of the orator is interpreted to mean in conformity with ethical goodness (honestas), then the maxim is a stoic tautology and the question of the orator’s effectiveness (utilitas) need not enter in. When the orator’s goodness is interpreted to mean persuasiveness, as well as moral rectitude, then the claim that the orator is a good man is a synthetic judgment that is also idealistic and unfounded. One has only to look to experience to see that many morally good men have been politically ineffective. Here the criterion of correct action is not moral goodness or the intrinsically moral judgment of prudence but the functional excellence or effectiveness of virtù: a virtù we might say, parodying Aristotle, that demonstrates its own excellence in being effective.21 In speaking well rather than speaking good words, Machiavelli both dramatizes and thematizes this functional virtuosity. He shows that virtù is not a substance but a mode of action (not a noun, but an adverb) by speaking well about acting well.
The linguistic play of this paragraph and the earlier one on virtù are thus part of a rhetorical strategy to engage the reader in a critical activity that will allow him to discover not the content of “what should be” but the formality of what in any particular situation “can be.”22 If the reader’s “natural” disposition to make moral distinctions (“everyone agrees”) may be compared to the natural force of the river which serves as a metaphor for fortune in chapter 25, Machiavelli’s prose is the countermeasure that attempts to channel or redirect this course by introducing the element of reflection. Because his goal is to make the reader deliberate more effectively about the realm of practical political action, he duplicates on the rhetorical level the practical problem of judgment that the prince will have to face—that of applying the rule of virtù to the particular situation at hand. Or, as Roland Barthes has written of Machiavelli’s work, “The structure of the discourse attempts to reproduce the structure of the dilemmas actually faced by the protagonists. In this case reasoned argument predominates and the history [or discourse] is of a reflexive—one might say strategic—style.”23
Theatricality
That Machiavelli’s style is strategic means not only that the prince may learn something about strategy by reflecting on Machiavelli’s prose (the syntax, structure, and vocabulary of his examples) but also that the actual strategies he recounts may tell us something about Machiavelli’s strategy as a writer. This reciprocity in turn allows us to read the example of Agathocles in the light of Machiavelli’s earlier remarks on Borgia. As a number of critics have remarked, Machiavelli’s position as a counselor is in some ways analogous to that of the new prince. Both are “student[s] of delegitimized politics” (MM, 163), and for both the problem is how to impose a new form not only on matter but on an already informed matter. But Machiavelli’s virtù as a writer is not simply, as some readers have suggested, to dramatize in The Prince the resourcefulness and inventiveness of the effective ruler but also to manipulate his audience in much the same way that the prince must manipulate his subjects.24 In the first case, imitation involves the cultivation of a purely formal flexibility of judgment or disponibilità; in the second, that judgment is tested by the appearances of the text itself. Thus in chapter 7 Machiavelli proposes Borgia’s behavior in the Romagna as an example worthy of imitation, and in chapter 8 he imitates it in order to test whether the reader has learned the lesson of chapter 7. In short, there are striking analogies not only between the careers of Borgia and Agathocles but also between the effect of Borgia’s behavior on his subjects in the Romagna and Machiavelli’s effect on the reader in chapter 8.
When Borgia took over the Romagna he discovered that “the whole province was full of robbers, feuds, and lawlessness of every description” (37, 22). His way of “establish[ing] peace and reduc[ing] the land to obedience” was to counter lawlessness with lawlessness: “He named Messer Remirro De Orco, a cruel and vigorous man, to whom he gave absolute powers. In short order this man pacified and unified the whole district, winning great renown” (37, 22). But like Agathocles, Borgia knew that excessive authority can become odious:
e proposevi uno iudicio civile nel mezzo della provincia, con uno presidente eccellentissimo, dove ogni città vi aveva lo avvocato suo. E, perché conosceva le rigorosità passate averli generato qualche odio, per purgare li animidi quelli populi e gaudagnarseli in tutto, volle monstrare che, se crudeltà alcuna era seguíta, non era nata da lui, ma dalla acerba natura del ministro. E, presa sopr’a questo occasione, lo fece mettere una mattina a Cesena in dua pezzi in sulla piazza, con uno pezzo di legno et uno coltello sanguinoso a canto. La ferocità del quale spettaculo fece quelli populi in uno tempo rimanere satisfatti e stupidi. (37)
so he set up a civic court in the middle of the province, with an excellent judge and a representative from each city. And because he knew that the recent harshness had generated some hatred, in order to clear the minds of the people and gain them over to his cause completely, he determined to make plain that whatever cruelty had occurred had come, not from him, but from the brutal character of the minister. Taking a proper occasion, therefore, he had him placed on the public square of Cesena one morning, in two pieces, with a piece of wood beside him and a bloody knife. The ferocity of this scene left the people at once stunned and satisfied. (22)
This story provides us with two examples of cruelty well used. The first is De Orco’s, the second Borgia’s. The function of the first is primarily destructive and repressive: to pacify his subjects; the function of the second is theatrical and cathartic: this, too, pacifies the subjects but by the theatrical display of violence rather than its direct application to the audience. The first example reestablishes justice from the perspective of the ruler; the second stages this reestablishment from the perspective of and for the ruled. As this theatrical display suggests, the story also provides us with two examples of representation well used. In the first case, there is an element of representation insofar as Borgia delegates his power, but this delegation is ultimately a way of concealing the fact of representation (that is, representation has become ruse) so that he can deny responsibility for De Orco’s cruelty—as he does so effectively by means of (and this is the second example) his theatrical representation in the square of Cesena.
The example of Agathocles in chapter 8 is just such a theatrical display on the part of Machiavelli. Like Borgia, Machiavelli is concerned to make distinctions between virtù and crime—not because they are mutually exclusive but because they are not identical. And like Borgia, he sets up a court with the reader as judge. “He determined to make plain that whatever cruelty had occurred [in the example of Agathocles] had come, not from him, but from the brutal character of his minister” (that is, of his example). The reader is morally satisfied or reassured by Machiavelli’s supposed condemnation of Agathocles, just as the people of the Romagna were by the dramatic and brutal disavowal of Remirro’s brutality. But the reader who is taken in by this excuse is in the position of a subject rather than a prince—for Machiavelli has not presented the example of Agathocles in order to pacify his readers but rather to try them. In short, Agathocles is proposed as an example for the prince who might need to follow him, and the ability to determine that necessity is also the virtuous ability to make discriminations about what constitutes virtù with respect to any given situation. The example of Agathocles is a test of virtù.
Force and Persuasion: Agathocles as Machiavel and Proto-Republican
As the preceding analysis has demonstrated, if Agathocles is the archetypal Machiavel, using force and fraud, so is Borgia: in this regard there is no difference between them. The difference lies rather in the longevity of their reigns, for while Borgia ruled over the Romagna for a month, Agathocles the Sicilian ruled over Syracuse until the end of his life. And he did so in part because of his greater rhetorical flexibility, his ability to respond to circumstances and to change with the times. Agathocles knows what the reader comes to learn through Machiavelli’s dehypostatizing rhetoric: virtù cannot be simply equated, once and for all, with violence or deception or what we would call crime. For if the goal of the prince or tyrant is to “mantenere lo stato” (maintain his power), he will eventually have to moderate his use of force and fraud and take into account the interests of his subjects.
We can now see that Machiavelli stages the distinction between virtù and crime not only to test the reader’s acceptance of his demoralized politics but also to highlight the difference between cruelty used well or badly, for it is this difference that explains “how it happened that Agathocles and others of his ilk, after they had committed so many acts of treachery and cruelty, could live long, secure lives in their native cities,” while “other princes were unable, because of their cruelty, to maintain their power” (44, 27). The rhetorical strategy that undermines the simple distinction between virtù and crime by stressing the rhetorical criterion of good usage (“bene usate”) also shows the link between tyranny and republicanism. The exercise of force must be governed by rhetorical circumstances of occasion and the exigencies of persuasion; like glory, these considerations will lead the prince to modify his 'margin-top:12.0pt;margin-right:17.0pt;margin-bottom: 0cm;margin-left:17.0pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal'>Onde è da notare che, nel pigliare uno stato, debbe l’occupatore di esso discorrere tutte quelle offese che li è necessario fare, e tutte farle a uno tratto, per non le avere a rinnovare ogni dí, e potere, non le innovando, assicurare li uomini e guadagnarseli con benificargli. Chi fa altrimenti, o per timidità o per mal consiglio, è sempre necessitato tenere el cotello in mano; né mai può fondarsi sopra li sua sudditi, non si potendo quelli per le fresche e continue iniurie, assicurare di lui. . . . E debbe sopr’a tutto uno principe vivere con li sua sudditi in modo, che veruno accidente o di male o di bene lo abbia a far variare: perché, venendo per li tempi avversi, le necessità, tu non se’ a tempo al male, et il bene che tu fai non ti giova, perché è iudicato forzato, e non te n’è saputo grado alcuno. (44)
We may add this note that when a prince takes a new state, he should calculate the sum of all the injuries he will have to do, and do them all at once, so as not to have to do new ones every day; simply by not repeating them, he will thus be able to reassure the people, and win them over to his side with benefits. Whoever believes otherwise, either through fearfulness or bad advice, must always keep his knife in hand, and he can never count on his subjects, because their fresh and recurring injuries keep them suspicious of him. . . . Above all, a prince should live with his subjects on such terms that no accident, whether favorable or unfavorable, can force him to change his conduct. When misfortune strikes, harsh measures are too late, and the good things you do are not counted to your credit because you seem to have acted under compulsion, and no one will thank you for that. (28)
The prince who is forced to use force or forced to do good things has lost the rhetorical control that allows him to choose force as a means of persuasion. He has become a creature of necessity rather than master of it. Conversely, it is precisely the concern with maintaining power that persuades the prince to change his conduct, to substitute persuasion—reassuring the people and winning them over to your side—for brute force. Once force is seen as one weapon among many in the prince’s rhetorical arsenal, it is no longer simply opposed to persuasion and consent but logically—that is, dialectically—related to them. The concern with persuasion thus becomes a check upon the exercise of force at the same time that it holds out the promise of controlling the process of innovation (“non le innovando”) that the prince has set in motion. If chapters 7 and 8 (among others in The Prince) provide an immanent critique of the humanist ideals of imitation and persuasion by showing that a truly flexible political rhetoric includes the previously excluded resources of crime, chapter 8 also provides an immanent critique of tyranny by showing how the same flexible rhetoric may lead the tyrant to alter the foundations of his power. If the tyrant’s concern is to maintain his power and keep his subjects obedient, he will in the long run have to take into account— represent and respond to—the interests of his subjects. Chapter 8 thus looks forward to the discussion of civil principalities in chapter 9, in which Machiavelli insists that “the prince must have people well disposed toward him” (47, 30). It also anticipates the argument for republicanism in the Discourses.
Virtù and Success, Ends and Means
The paired examples of Borgia and Agathocles are illustrative in another way as well. While chapter 8 shows the rhetorical considerations that lead from tyranny to republicanism, the example of Borgia’s failure in chapter 7 serves to remind us that success—including the successful transition from tyranny to a republic—is not a necessary consequence of virtù. It is because success is not guaranteed that virtù can be attributed both to Cesare Borgia, who failed to achieve his ultimate goal, and to Agathocles, who succeeded.
This uncertainty concerning the relation of virtù to success is reflected in Machiavelli’s claim to be guided by the “verità effettuale della cosa.” On the one hand, he means that he will approach politics realistically, rather than idealistically, by beginning with things as they are. On the other hand, implicit in the claim to be guided by the “verità effettuale” is the assumption that such an approach will prove to be effective: that one does not simply imitate necessity but that one can manipulate it—effect it—to one’s own advantage. Yet, while Machiavelli argues in chapter 15 that virtù involves knowledge that is useful or effective, he does not want to claim that virtù guarantees success. To make this claim would be to fall into a version of the equation of honestas and utilitas that he condemns in the same chapter. If virtù always yielded success, then there would be no fortune or contingency; but contingency is precisely what makes room for virtù—indeed, what makes virtù necessary in Machiavelli’s eyes. Still, a virtù that never resulted in success would be patently absurd. Thus Machiavelli claims early in The Prince that if we follow the examples of virtù that he presents, success will usually or most often result (12, 11).
Once we understand the contingent relation between virtù and success, we are in a better position to understand Machiavelli’s revision of the humanists’ prudential rhetoric, as well as his critics’ reduction of such rhetoric to the justification of the means by the end. Machiavellian virtù is structurally like the classical and humanist notion of prudence or practical reason, as opposed to technical or instrumental reason. Whereas the former involves an activity of deliberation which is an end in itself, the latter involves deliberation about the best means to a given end. Those many critics who argue that virtù is a technical skill are right if they mean by this that the prince is concerned with results, but wrong if they equate virtù with the result rather than with deliberative skill and energy in action. Virtù is not completely technical because technical skill must result in a product (however much that product may reflect a compromise with one’s original conception of the object), while virtù does not have to produce something else in order to be virtù. Or, as Martin Ostwald observes, “Practical wisdom is itself a complete virtue or excellence while the excellence of an art depends on the goodness or badness of the product” (NE, 154 n. 20). Like prudence, virtù implies practical success but does not guarantee it. Unlike prudence, however, it implies nothing whatsoever about the compatibility of the practical wisdom of virtù with ethical norms.
In his demoralization of prudence, Machiavelli implies that the humanist view of politics is not rhetorical enough. For all the humanist emphasis on prudence as a faculty of deliberation about particulars, the insistence that prudence also be ethical amounts to a refusal to admit that to be ethical in every case is harmful and impractical. A truly rhetorical view of politics does not simply consider rhetoric as a means to realizing some extrinsic ethical norm; rather, as Felix Gilbert remarked in a different context, “the measure of worth of a political figure [is] . . . formed by his capacity to use the possibilities inherent in the political situations; politics [has] its own criteria to be derived from existing political opportunities.”25 Thus Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics confounds the usual distinctions between means and ends because it involves a mode of action that both is an end in itself and aims at success.26 Virtù is the rhetorical and prudential faculty that allows one to maintain power but is not identical with success in doing so.
From the perspective of his critics, however, virtù seems to involve the simple justification of the means by the end. Like the critics of rhetoric, critics of virtù charge it with substituting expediency for morality, the goal of success for that of virtue, and thus sanctioning the use of immoral means for the end of maintaining the state. It is a striking feature of The Prince that Machiavelli takes into account this interpretation of his work. In fact, he ascribes this interpretation to the moralizing masses who would appear to condemn it. Thus in chapter 18, “The Way Princes Should Keep Their Word,” Machiavelli seems first to invite the reading of virtù in terms of means and ends when he advises the prince to feign the virtues in order to preserve his state. Yet in the next paragraph he characterizes the masses as follows:
E li uomini in universali iudicano piú alli occhi che alle mani; perché tocca a vedere a ognuno, a sentire a pochi. Ognuno vede quello che tu pari, pochi sentono quello che tu se’; e quelli pochi non ardiscano opporsi alla opinione di molti, che abbino la maestà dello stato che li difenda: e nelle azioni di tutti li uomini, e massime de’ principi, dove non è iudizio da reclamare, si guardaal fine. Facci dunque uno principe di vincere e mantenere lo stato: e’ mezzi saranno sempre iudicati onorevoli, e da ciascuno laudati; perché el vulgo ne va preso con quello che pare e con lo evento della cosa; e nel mondo non è se non vulgo. (74)
Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few dare not take a stand against the general opinion, supported by the majesty of government. In the actions of all men, and especially of princes who are not subject to a court of appeal, we must always look to the end. Let a prince, therefore, win victories and uphold his state; his methods will always be considered worthy, and everyone will praise them, because the masses are always impressed by the superficial appearance of things, and by the outcome of an enterprise. And the world consists of nothing but the masses. (51)
In this passage Machiavelli anticipates one prominent interpretation of his work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, at the same time, makes this interpretation a topic of invention for the successful prince. It is the people who justify the means by the end, who are incapable of appreciating examples such as that of Borgia, a man of virtù who failed to maintain his power. So the prince should incorporate this common opinion into his repertoire of political argument but he should not confuse it with virtù.
Irony and Allegory
Irony descends from the low mimetic: it begins in realism and
dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily
towards myth, and dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying
gods begin to reappear in it.
—Northrop Frye
As I have argued in the preceding pages, Machiavelli’s reflection on the political uses of imitation is tied to his revision of the humanist concept of prudential action. The prince is powerful to the extent that he diverges from a naive or moral concept of prudence, but he also maintains his power by “naively” imitating—or representing himself as faithfully reproducing—the conventional virtues. As in chapter 18, power is in part, if not entirely, the effect of the rhetorical illusion of truth. But, as the case of Agathocles demonstrates, the exigencies of persuasion, conceived of now as the means or the ability to generate the consensus and support of the people, also finally prove to be a forceful constraint on the abuse of power (see chap. 18:74, 51; D, 2.23, 3.19–23). Cruelty will be well used if “it is performed all at once, for reasons of self-preservation; and when the acts are not repeated after that, but rather turned as much as possible to the advantage of the subjects” (chap. 8:44, 27–28). The prince must in the long run please his audience if he is to maintain his rule. In the end, the use of the rhetorical topic of virtue proves to involve an ironic version of the ethical constraint that the humanists located in custom and consensus. More than this, it proves to generate consensus itself. This constraint also helps us to see how the analysis of power in The Prince logically gives way to that of the Discourses: if the prince is to be a man of virtù in the long run, he must found a republic, because republics are capable of greater longevity and greater virtù than principalities. The understanding reader will see that when representation and force are mutually implicated, when representation becomes a means of power, and thus when power is mitigated by the exigencies of persuasion, the short-lived individual self-aggrandizement of the prince gives way to communal glory, and the prince becomes a fellow citizen.27
This is the optimistic way to read the self-destructing rhetoric of The Prince, and I will pursue such a reading in the following chapter on the Discourses. But, as most readers have noted, there is a way in which the analysis of virtù undermines itself and Machiavelli’s pedagogy in The Prince: for a perfectly dehypostatized virtù threatens to turn into its opposite, a virtù of demonic or allegorical stability. Here, as we will see, Machiavelli’s text anticipates Milton’s linking of the Machiavel’s rhetorical flexibility with the “fixed mind” of Satan (PL, 1.97).
As Machiavelli tells us again and again, there are no general rules for virtuous behavior, and there is no guarantee that the skill one practices in the interpretation of particular examples will enable one to respond appropriately in the next situation (e.g., chap. 20:85, 59). This is, of course, as it should be. As Machiavelli writes in chapter 21, “No leader should ever suppose he can invariably take the safe course, since all choice involves risks. In the nature of things [nell’ordine delle cose] you can never try to escape one danger without encountering another; but prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the nature of the different dangers and in accepting the least bad as good” (92, 65). But the essential emptiness of the concept of virtù receives a rather different and potentially devastating articulation in chapter 25, where the role of fortune in the individual’s ability to act virtuously seems to deprive the individual of any initiative whatsoever. As we saw, Machiavelli begins this chapter by discussing the relation of fortune and virtù in general terms. On this level he gives fortune a certain stability, as though fortune were something external to virtù that the latter had only to resist. When he descends to particulars, however, fortune has no stability whatsoever. The irony of politics becomes so great—the possibility of action so compromised—that the distance constitutive of reflection finally collapses altogether. To recognize which situations require which kinds of imitation finally necessitates that the prince imitate the absolute flexibility of fortune itself. But one’s ability to learn is itself a function of the fortune of one’s natural disposition and is necessarily limited by it. In thus conflating the agent of virtù with the realm of nature, Machiavelli runs the risk of reducing virtù to the mere repetition—that is, the willed acceptance—of necessity.28 In so doing, he also risks substituting for the equation of honestas and utilitas that of virtù and success. It is not surprising, then, that Machiavelli should at this moment invoke the personified figure of Fortune as a woman in a desperate, inconsequential attempt to redeem the possibility of action by relocating it in an interpersonal context.29 Thus he writes in the famous conclusion to chapter 25, “But I do feel this: that it is better to be rash than timid, for Fortune is a woman, and the man who wants to hold her down must beat and bully her” (101, 72).
A few remarks about the allegorical tendency of The Prince may help to clarify this point. According to Angus Fletcher, the allegorical hero confronts a world of contingency, a world in which the individual has little control over the consequences of his actions, and in which there often seems to be little causal connection between events.30 Narrative sequence is threatened by parataxis but restored on the level of cosmic, often magical necessity.31 As a result, the hero also seems not simply at the mercy of external events but in the control of some external power. In fact, the allegorical hero could be said to operate in a world of demonic powers, a world in which functions have been compartmentalized and personified. The hero, too, becomes depersonalized, no longer a person but a mere personification of a function. In a world of Fortuna, in short, the hero becomes, of necessity, the embodiment of Virtù.
In such a world, the virtues no longer seem to be attributes of individual agents; rather, they recover their original sense of powers or forces, of virtù. As Fletcher remarks, “Like a Machiavellian prince, the allegorical hero can act free of the usual moral restraints, even when he is acting morally, since he is moral only in the interests of his power over men” (68). To redefine virtue as virtù is thus “to rediscover a sense of the morally ambivalent power in action” (an advance one might say in the direction of realism) but it is also, ironically, to run the risk of doing away with free will. Although the intention behind Machiavelli’s various examples of virtù is to help the reader understand the formal, innovative character of this faculty, and the role of the will in determining what constitutes virtù in any particular situation, the quasi-allegorical status of the man of virtù, or of the prince as a personification of Virtù, suggests that the individual is not at all in control of his behavior—a suggestion that, as we have seen, becomes explicit in chapter 25. The way Machiavelli chooses to combat this demonization or personification of the person is to repersonalize what was becoming an increasingly abstract and unmanageable concept of fortune by introducing the figure of Fortune as a woman. In a kind of parody of humanist rhetoric in utramque partem, allegory is used to fight the allegorization or reification of the prince’s virtù.
In light of these remarks, one can also see how the allegorical tendency of The Prince is manifest in the sublime rhetoric of the concluding chapter. Fletcher calls our attention to the structural similarity between allegory and the sublime. Simply stated, the experience of the sublime begins with the failure of the imagination to comprehend sensuous experience. This failure leads to the demand for comprehension on the part of reason and thus to an awareness of reason as a higher faculty and as proof of a destiny that transcends mere nature. This discrepancy between sensuous experience and the higher claims of reason is analogous to the separation between the sign and signified in the allegorical text. Furthermore, as Longinus reminds us, allegory is not only analogous to the sublime but can itself have a sublime effect, an ideological or epideictic force, when it “incites to action.” But, as the epigraph to this section suggests, allegory and the sublime can also have an ironic effect, by suggesting that the principle of authority or meaning or virtù (e.g., reason, God) is infinitely removed from the world of sensuous immediacy.32 Chapter 26 supports both optimistic and pessimistic or ironic readings of its sublime rhetoric.
Machiavelli obviously intends the rhetoric of his concluding chapter to function as the best of all hyperboles: to incite the Medici to action. Thus he argues that the opportunities facing the Medici in Italy are analogous to the occasions that allowed the exemplary figures of Moses, Cyrus, and Theseus to exercise their virtù. And he presents the Medici as the providentially destined saviors of Italy:
Né ci si vede al presente in quale lei possa piú sperare che nella illustre casa vostra, quale con la sua fortuna e virtù, favorita da Dio e dalla Chiesia della quale è ora principe, possa farsi capo di questa redenzione. (102)
There is no figure presently in sight in whom she [Italy] can better trust than your illustrious house, which, with its fortune and its virtù, favored by God and the Church of which it is now the head, can take the lead in this process of redemption. (73)
In these lines Machiavelli wittily conflates the fortune of the Medici with divine providence and the Church, and thus simultaneously debases religion and confers a certain grandeur on the rulers of Florence.33 As this formulation should suggest, here and in the following paragraph Machiavelli also flatters the Medici by ironically exposing such providential rhetoric as a ruse of political necessity. Commenting on the exemplary figures of virtù—Moses, Cyrus, and Theseus—he writes:
E benché quelli uomini sieno rari e maravigliosi, non di manco furono uomini, et ebbe ciascuno di loro minore occasione che la presente: perché l’impresa loro non fu piú iusta di questa, né piú facile, né fu a loro Dio piú amico che a voi. Qui è iustizia grande: iustum enim est bellum quibus necessarium, et pia arma ubi nulla nisi in armis spes est. (102–103)
Men of this sort are rare and wonderful, indeed, but they were nothing more than men, and each of them faced circumstances less promising than those of the present. Their cause was no more just than the present one, nor any easier, and God was no more favorable to them than to you. Your cause is just: “for war is justified when it is necessary, and arms are pious when without them there would be no hope at all.” (73)
Here Machiavelli suggests that the Medici have the opportunity to be like Moses, who should be “admired, if only for that grace which made him worthy of talking with God” (30, 16), especially if—like Moses and Machiavelli—they know how to dress up necessity as providence. He also intimates that “providential justification” will follow upon political necessity—approval upon success. As Machiavelli writes in chapter 18, a prince’s “methods will always be considered worthy, and everyone will praise them . . . because the masses are always impressed . . . by the outcome of an enterprise” (74, 51).
In its divine justification of the Medici as the redeemers of Italy, chapter 26 is the final, brilliant example of Machiavelli’s theatrical overshooting of the mark, of a rhetoric that is neither constrained by logic to represent the truth nor guided by practical reason in its achievement of ethical decorum but that aims rather to produce the effect of truth—and to achieve success. Yet the obvious alternative reading of the lines quoted above is that the rhetoric of providential justification is mere hyperbole—a desperate gesture to respond to the dilemmas of chapter 25 that paradoxically amounts to a sublime exposure of the inefficacy of human reason and virtù.34 In this way, the collapse of the distance and difference necessary for action in chapter 25 turns out to anticipate the providential rhetoric of chapter 26, a rhetoric that appears to have been designed precisely to recoup the losses of the preceding chapter. In this concluding chapter it seems that exaggeration may not free itself “from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine it.”35 In a final ironic twist, Machiavelli’s providential rhetoric then seems to suggest that only God can save us from such ironies. In some situations, however, republicanism also proves to be an inspired response to the ironies of political action.