But did Machiavelli really mean what he said? He was a master of irony who wrote plays about behaviour so revoltingly immoral that they could make men good. His book for rulers is full of contemporary examples of monarchs of ill repute, whom many readers would have despised: yet they are portrayed as models to imitate with deadpan insouciance. The hero of the book is Cesare Borgia, a bungling adventurer who failed to carve out a state for himself, and whose failure Machiavelli excuses on grounds of bad luck. The catalogue of immoralities seems as suited to condemn the princes who practise them as to constitute rules of conduct for imitators. The real message of the book is perhaps concealed in a colophon, in which Machiavelli appeals to fame as an end worth striving for and demands the unification of Italy, with the expulsion of the French and Spanish ‘barbarians’ who had conquered parts of the country. It is significant that The Prince explicitly deals only with monarchies. In the rest of his oeuvre, the author clearly preferred republics and thought monarchies were suited only to degenerate periods in what he saw as a cyclical history of civilization. Republics were best because a sovereign people was wiser and more faithful than monarchs. Yet, if The Prince was meant to be ironic, a greater irony followed: it was taken seriously by almost everyone who read it, and started two traditions that have remained influential to this day: a Machiavellian tradition, which exalts the interests of the state, and an anti-Machiavellian quest to put morals back into politics. All our debates about how far the state is responsible for welfare, health, and education go back to whether it is responsible for goodness.40
More, perhaps, than Machiavellianism, Machiavelli’s great contribution to history was The Art of War, in which he proposed that citizen armies were best. There was only one thing wrong with this idea: it was impracticable. The reason why states relied on mercenaries and professional soldiers was that soldiering was a highly technical business; weapons were hard to handle well; experience was essential seasoning for battle. Gonzalo de Córdoba, the ‘Great Captain’ of the Spanish armies that conquered much of Italy, invited Machiavelli to instruct his troops: the result was a hopeless parade-ground tangle. Still, the citizen might be a superior soldier in some ways: cheaper, more committed, and more reliable than the mercenaries, who avoided battle and protracted wars in order to extend their employment. The result was a ‘Machiavellian moment’ in the history of the Western world, where yeomanries and militias of dubious efficacy were maintained for essentially ideological reasons, alongside regular, professional forces.
Machiavelli’s influence in this respect contributed to political instability in the early modern West: armed citizenries could and sometimes did provide cannon fodder for revolution. By the late eighteenth century, however, the game had changed. Technically simple firearms could be effective even in ill-instructed hands. The impact of large masses of troops and intense firepower counted for more than expertise. The American Revolutionary War was a transitional conflict: militias defended the revolution with help from professional French forces. By the time of the French Revolution, newly liberated ‘citizens’ had to do all their fighting for themselves. ‘The Nation in Arms’ won most of its battles, and the era of mass conscription began. It lasted until the late twentieth century, when rapid technical developments made large conscript forces redundant, though some countries kept ‘national service’ going in order to maintain a reservoir of manpower for defence or in the belief that military discipline is good for young people. Another, apparently ineradicable relic of the Machiavellian moment is that peculiar institution of the United States: the loose gun laws, which are usually justified on the grounds that tight regulation of the gun trade would infringe the citizen’s constitutional right to bear arms. Few US citizens today realize that they are admiring a doctrine of Machiavelli’s when they cite with satisfaction the Second Amendment to the Constitution: ‘A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’41
Machiavelli was, in one respect, a faithful monitor of his own times: the power of states and of rulers within states was increasing. The ideal of Western political unity faded as states solidified their political independence and exerted more control over their inhabitants. In the Middle Ages, hopes of such unity had focused on the prospect of reviving the unity of the ancient Roman Empire. The term ‘Roman Empire’ survived in the formal name of the group of mainly German states – the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. When the king of Spain was elected to be Emperor Charles V in 1519, the outlook for uniting Europe seemed favourable. Through inheritance from his father, Charles was already ruler of the Low Countries, Austria, and much of Central Europe. His propagandists speculated that he or his son would be the ‘Last World Emperor’ foretold by prophecy, whose reign would inaugurate the final age of the world before the Second Coming of Christ. Naturally, however, most other states resisted this idea, or tried to claim the role for their own rulers. Charles V’s attempt to impose religious uniformity on his empire failed, demonstrating the limits of his real power. After his abdication in 1556, no one ever again convincingly reasserted the prospect of a durable universal state in the tradition of Rome.
Meanwhile, rulers eclipsed rivals to their authority and boosted their power over their own citizens. Though most European states experienced civil wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monarchs usually won them. Cities and churches surrendered most of their privileges of self-government. The Reformation was, in this respect as in most others, a sideshow: Church yielded to state, irrespective of where heresy or schism struck. Aristocracies – their personnel transformed as old families died out and rulers elevated new families to noble status – became close collaborators in royal power, rather than rivals to it, as aristocrats had been so often in the past. Offices under the crown became increasingly profitable additions to the income that aristocrats earned from their inherited estates.
Countries that had been difficult or impossible to rule before their civil wars became easy to govern when their violent and restless elements had been exhausted or became dependent on royal rewards and appointments. Ease of government is measurable in yields from taxation. Louis XIV of France turned his nobles into courtiers, dispensed with representative institutions, treated taxation as ‘plucking the goose with minimal hissing’, and proclaimed, ‘I am the state.’ England and Scotland had been particularly hard for their monarchs to tax in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, which its aristocratic leaders represented as a blow against royal tyranny, actually turned Britain into Europe’s most fiscally efficient state. In place of a dynasty committed to peace, the revolution installed rulers who fought expensive wars. Taxation trebled during the reign of the monarchs crowned by the British revolutionaries.
Along with the growth of the power of the state, the way people thought about politics changed. Traditionally, law was a body of wisdom handed down from the past (see here and here). Now it came to be seen as a code that kings and parliaments could endlessly change and recreate. Legislation replaced jurisdiction as the main function of government: in Lithuania a statute of 1588 actually redefined the nature of sovereignty in those terms. In other countries, the change simply happened without formal declaration, though a French political philosopher, Jean Bodin, formulated the new doctrine of sovereignty in 1576. Sovereignty defined the state, which had the sole right to make laws and distribute justice to its subjects. Sovereignty could not be shared. There was no portion of it for the Church, or any sectional interest, or any outside power. In a flood of statutes, states’ power submerged vast new areas of public life and common welfare: labour relations, wages, prices, forms of land tenure, markets, the food supply, livestock breeding, and even, in some cases, what personal adornments people could wear.
Historians often search for the origins of the ‘modern state’, in which the authority of the aristocracy shrank to insignificance, the crown enf
orced an effective monopoly of government jurisdiction, the independence of towns withered, the Church submitted to royal control, and sovereignty became increasingly identified with supreme legislative power, as laws multiplied. Instead of scouring Europe for a model of this kind of modernity, it might make better sense to look further afield, in the terrains of experiment that overseas imperialism laid at European rulers’ feet. The New World really was new. The Spanish experience there was one of the biggest surprises of history: the creation of the first great world empire of land and sea, and the only one, on a comparable scale, erected without the aid of industrial technology. A new political environment took shape. Great nobles were generally absent from the Spanish colonial administration, which was staffed by professional, university-trained bureaucrats whom the crown appointed and paid. Town councils were largely composed of royal nominees. Church patronage was exclusively at the disposal of the crown. With a few exceptions, feudal tenure – combining the right to try cases at law along with land ownership – was banned. Though Spaniards with rights to Native American labour or tribute pretended to enjoy a sort of fantasy feudalism, speaking loosely of their ‘vassals’, they were usually denied formal legal rights to govern or administer justice, and the vassals in question were subject only to the king. Meanwhile, a stream of legislation regulated – or, with varying effectiveness, was supposed to regulate – the new society in the Americas. The Spanish Empire was never efficient, because of the vast distances royal authority had to cover. One should not demand, as Dr Johnson recommended of a dog walking on its hind legs, that it be well done, but applaud the fact that it could happen at all. Remote administrators in American hinterlands and Pacific islands could and did ignore royal commands. In emergencies, locals extemporized sui generis methods of government based on ties of kinship or of shared rewards. But if one looks at the Spanish Empire overall it resembles a modern state because it was a bureaucratic state and a state governed by laws.
China already displayed some of the same features – and had done for centuries, with a tame aristocracy, subordinate clergies, a professional administrative class, a remarkably uniform bureaucracy, and a law code at the emperor’s disposal. These features anticipated modernity but did not guarantee efficiency: magistrates’ jurisdictions were usually so large that a lot of power remained effectively in local hands; administration was so costly that corruption was rife. In the mid-seventeenth century, China fell to Manchu invaders – a mixture of foresters and plainsmen, whom the Chinese despised as barbarians. The shock made Chinese intellectuals re-evaluate the way they understood political legitimacy. A doctrine of the sovereignty of the people emerged, similar to those we have seen circulating in the late Middle Ages in Europe. Huang Zongxi, a rigid moralist who devoted much of his career to avenging his father’s judicial murder at the hands of political enemies, fled into exile rather than endure foreign rule. He postulated a state of nature where ‘each man looked to himself’ until benevolent individuals created the empire. Corruption set in and ‘the ruler’s self-interest took the place of the common good … The ruler takes the very marrow from people’s bones and takes daughters and sons to serve his debauchery.’42 Lü Liuliang, his younger fellow exile, whose distaste for barbarians dominated his thinking, went further: ‘The common man and the emperor’, he said, ‘are rooted in the same nature … It might seem as though social order was projected downwards to the common man’ but, from the perspective of heaven, ‘the principle originates with the people and reaches up to the ruler’. He added, ‘Heaven’s order and Heaven’s justice are not things rulers and ministers can take and make their own.’43
In the West, this sort of thinking helped to justify republics and generate revolutions. Nothing comparable happened in China, however, until the twentieth century, when a great deal of Western influence had done its work. There were plenty of peasant rebellions in the interim, but, as throughout the Chinese past, they aimed to renew the empire, replacing the dynasty, not ending the system by transferring the Mandate of Heaven from monarch to people. Unlike the West, China had no examples of republicanism or democracy to look to in history or idealize in myth. Still, the work of Huang, Lü, and the theorists who accompanied and followed them was not without practical consequences: it passed into Confucian tradition, served to keep radical criticism of the imperial system alive, and helped to prepare Chinese minds for the later reception of Western revolutionary ideas.44
Nor did Chinese scholars need to think about international law, which, as we shall see in a moment, became a focus of obsessive concern in the early modern West. ‘Middle Kingdom’, or ‘Central Country’, is one of the most persistent names Chinese have given their land. In a sense, it is a modest designation, since it implicitly acknowledges a world beyond China, as certain alternative names – ‘All under Heaven’, ‘All Within the Four Seas’ – do not. But it conveys unmistakable connotations of superiority: a vision of the world in which the barbarian rim is undeserving of the benefits and unrewarding of the bother of Chinese conquest. ‘Who’, asked Ouyang Xiu, an eminent Confucian of the eleventh century, ‘would exhaust China’s resources to quarrel with serpents and swine?’45 Orthodox Confucianism expected barbarians to be attracted to Chinese rule by example: awareness of China’s manifest superiority would induce them to submit without the use of force. To some extent, this improbable formula worked. Chinese culture did attract neighbouring peoples: Koreans and Japanese largely adopted it; many Central and South-East Asian peoples were deeply influenced by it. Conquerors of China from the outside have always been seduced by it.
The Zhou dynasty, which seized control of China towards the end of the second millennium bce, is generally said first to have adopted the term ‘Middle Kingdom’. By then, China constituted all the world that counted; other humans, in Chinese estimations, were outsiders, clinging to the edges of civilization, or envying it from beyond. From time to time the picture might be modified; barbarian kingdoms might be ranked in greater or lesser proximity to China’s unique perfection. At intervals, powerful barbarian rulers exacted treaties on equal terms or attracted titles of equal resonance. From Chinese emperors willing to purchase security in response to threats, foreign powers could often extort tribute due to patrons of equal or even superior status, though the Chinese clung to the convenient fiction that they paid such remittances merely as acts of condescension.
In what we think of as the Middle Ages, the name of the Middle Kingdom reflected a world picture, with Mount Chongshan in Henan Province at the exact centre, the true nature of which was much disputed among scholars. In the twelfth century, for instance, the prevailing opinion was that, since the world was spherical, its centre was a purely metaphorical expression. In the most detailed surviving maps of the twelfth century the world was divided between China and the barbarian residue; the image persisted. Although in 1610 Matteo Ricci, the visiting Jesuit who introduced Western science to China, was criticized for failing to place China centrally in his ‘Great Map of Ten Thousand Countries’, this did not mean that Chinese scholars had an unrealistic world view, only that the symbolic nature of China’s centrality had to be acknowledged in representations of the world. Cartographic conventions do, however, tell us something about the self-perception of those who devise them: like the fixing of the Greenwich meridian, which makes one’s distance from the capital of the British Empire one’s place in the world, or Mercator’s projection, which exaggerates the importance of northerly countries.46
Japanese political thought was heavily dependent on the influence of Chinese texts and doctrines, and was therefore also largely indifferent to the problems of how to regulate interstate relations. From the first great era of Chinese influence in Japan in the seventh century ce, Japanese intellectuals submitted to Chinese cultural superiority, as Western barbarians did to that of ancient Rome. They absorbed Buddhism and Confucianism from China, adopted Chinese characters for their language, and chose Chinese as the language of the literature th
ey wrote. But they never accepted that these forms of flattery implied political deference. The Japanese world picture was twofold. First, in part, it was Buddhist and the traditional world map was borrowed from Indian cosmography: India was in the middle, with Mount Meru – perhaps a stylized representation of the Himalayas – as the focal point of the world. China was one of the outer continents and Japan consisted of ‘scattered grains at the edge of the field’. Yet at the same time, this gave Japan a critical advantage: because Buddhism arrived late, Japan was the home of its most mature phase, where, so Japanese Buddhists thought, purified doctrines were nourished.47
Second, there was an indigenous tradition of the Japanese as the offspring of a divine progenitrix. In 1339, Kitabatake Chikafusa began the tradition of calling Japan ‘divine country’, claiming for his homeland a limited superiority: proximity to China made it superior to all other barbarian lands. Japanese replies to tribute demands in the Ming period challenged Chinese assumptions with an alternative vision of a politically plural cosmos and a concept of territorial sovereignty: ‘Heaven and earth are vast; they are not monopolized by one ruler. The universe is great and wide, and the various countries are created each to have a share in ruling it.’48 By the 1590s, the Japanese military dictator Hideyoshi could dream of ‘crushing China like an egg’ and ‘teaching the Chinese Japanese customs’.49 This was a remarkable (though not a sustained) reversal of previous norms.
Out of Our Minds Page 29
