The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  But it is one thing to accept something in practice, another to justify it rationally. Machiavelli’s ‘scandalous’ writings begin the latter process. This was a major turning-point, and its intellectual consequences, wholly unintended by its originator, were, by a fortunate irony of history (which some call its dialectic), the bases of the very liberalism that Machiavelli would surely have condemned as feeble and characterless, lacking in single-minded pursuit of power, in splendour, in organisation, in virtù, in power to discipline unruly men against huge odds into one energetic whole. Yet he is, in spite of himself, one of the makers of pluralism, and of its – to him – perilous acceptance of toleration.

  By breaking the original unity he helped to cause men to become aware of the necessity of having to make agonising choices between incompatible alternatives in public and in private life (for the two could not, it became obvious, be genuinely kept distinct). His achievement is of the first order, if only because the dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light (it remains unsolved, but we have learnt to live with it). Men had, no doubt, in practice, often enough experienced the conflict which Machiavelli made explicit. He converted its expression from a paradox into something approaching a commonplace.

  The sword of which Meinecke spoke has not lost its edge: the wound has not healed. To know the worst is not always to be liberated from its consequences; nevertheless it is preferable to ignorance. It is this painful truth that Machiavelli forced on our attention, not by formulating it explicitly, but perhaps the more effectively by relegating much uncriticised traditional morality to the realm of Utopia. This is what, at any rate, I should like to suggest. Where more than twenty interpretations hold the field, the addition of one more cannot be deemed an impertinence. At worst it will be no more than yet another attempt to solve the problem, now more than four centuries old, of which Croce at the end of his long life spoke as ‘Una questione che forse non si chiuderà mai: la questione del Machiavelli’.108

  1 The full list now [1972] contains more than three thousand items. The bibliographical surveys that I have found most valuable are P. H. Harris, ‘Progress in Machiavelli Studies’, Italica 18 (1941), 1–11; Eric W. Cochrane, ‘Machiavelli: 1940–1960’, Journal of Modern History 33 (1961), 113–36; Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton, 1965); Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli anticristo (Rome, 1954), trans, into English as Machiavelli (New York, 1967; London, 1968); De Lamar Jensen (ed.), Machiavelli: Cynic, Patriot, or Political Scientist? (Boston, 1960); and Richard C. Clark, ‘Machiavelli: Bibliographical Spectrum’, Review of National Literatures 1 (1970), 93–135.

  2 His habit of putting things troppo assolutamente had already been noted by Guicciardini. See ‘Considerazioni intorno ai Discorsi del Machiavelli’: book 1, chapter 3, p. 8 in Scritti politici e ricordi, ed. Roberto Palmarocchi (Bari, 1933).

  3 Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres (London, 1585), book 3, chapter 9, pp. 101–2.

  4 Garrett Mattingly, ‘Machiavelli’s Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?’, American Scholar 27 (1958), 482–91.

  5 Tractatus politicus, chapter 5, section 7.

  6 Social Contract, book 3, chapter 6, note: p. 1480 in Oeuvres complètes (op. cit., p. 195 above, note 2), vol. 3.

  7 I sepolchri, 156–8: ‘che, temprando lo scettro a’ regnatori, / gli allòr ne sfronda, ed alle genti svela / di che lagrime grondi e di che sangue …’.

  8 Luigi Ricci, preface to Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (London, 1903).

  9 Allan H. Gilbert, Machiavelli’s Prince and its Forerunners (Durham, North Carolina, 1938).

  10 op. cit. (p. 269 above, note 1).

  11 Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950).

  12 e.g. the Spaniards Pedro de Ribadeneira, Tratado de la religión (Madrid, 1595), and Claudio Clemente (pseudonym of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg), El machiavelismo degollado (Alcalá, 1637).

  13 Giuseppe Toffanin, La fine dell’umanesimo (Turin, 1920).

  14 Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Niccolò Machiavelli (Rome, 1954), trans. by Cecil Grayson as The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli (London and Chicago, 1963).

  15 The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. and ed. Leslie J. Walker (London, 1950).

  16 Felice Alderisio, Machiavelli: l’Arte dello Stato nell’azione e negli scritti (Turin, 1930).

  17 As quoted by Prezzolini, op. cit. (p. 269 above, note 1), English version, p. 231.

  18 op. cit. (note 3 above), English version, p. 235.

  19 Croce ascribes to Machiavelli ‘un’austera e dolorosa coscienza morale’, Elementi di politica (Bari, 1925), p. 62. The idea that Machiavelli actually wishes to denounce naked power politics – what Gerhard Ritter in a volume of that name has called Die Dämonie der Macht – goes back to the sixteenth century (see L. Burd’s still unsuperseded edition of The Prince (Oxford, 1891), pp. 31 ff.).

  20 op. cit. (note 8 above), p. 66; see Cochrane’s comment, op. cit. (p. 269 above, note 1), p. 115, note 9.

  21 For references see Cochrane, ibid., p. 118, note 19.

  22 ‘The Swiss are most free [liberissimi] because the best armed [armatissimi].’ The Prince, chapter 12.

  23 Vittorio Alfieri, Del principe e delle lettere, book 2, chapter 9: pp. 172–3 in Opere, vol. 4, ed. Alessandro Donati (Bari, 1927).

  24 op. cit. (p. 271 above, note 2).

  25 Eric Vögelin, ‘Machiavelli’s Prince: Background and Formation’, Review of Politics 13 (1951), 142–68.

  26 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (London and New Haven, Connecticut, 1946), chapter 12.

  27 Augustin Renaudet, Machiavel: étude d’histoire des doctrines politiques ([Paris], 1942).

  28 Leonardo Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist (Berkeley, California, 1945).

  29 W. K. Hancock, ‘Machiavelli in Modern Dress: An Enquiry into Historical Method’, History 20 (1935–6), 97–115.

  30 Karl Schmid, ‘Machiavelli’, in Rudolf Stadelmann (ed.), Grosse Geschichtsdenker (Tübingen/Stuttgart, 1949); see the illuminating review of Leonard von Muralt, Machiavellis Staatsgedanke (Basel, 1945), by A. P. d’Entrèves, English Historical Review 62 (1947), 96–9.

  31 In his original article of 1925 – ‘Del “Principe” di Niccolò Machiavelli’, Nuova rivista storica 9 (1925), 35–71, 189–216, 437–73; repr. as a book (Milan/Rome/Naples, 1926) – Chabod develops Croce’s view in a direction closer to the conclusions of this article. See the English collection of Chabod’s essays on Machiavelli, Machiavelli and the Renaissance, trans. David Moore, introduction by A. P. d’Entrèves (London, 1958), pp. 30–125 (‘The Prince: Myth and Reality’), and Scritti su Machiavelli (Turin, 1964), pp. 29–135.

  32 op. cit. (p. 272 above, note 3), Italian version, p. 364.

  33 Vittorio de Caprariis, review of Renaudet, op. cit. (p. 273 above, note 7), Rivista storica italiana 60 (1948), 287–9.

  34 Gennaro Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli (Naples, 1958).

  35 If Machiavelli’s Prince is viewed in its historical context – of a divided, invaded, humiliated Italy – it emerges not as a disinterested ‘summary of moral and political principles, appropriate to all situations and therefore to none’, but ‘as a most magnificent and true conception on the part of a man of genuine political genius, a man of the greatest and noblest mind’ (Die Verfassung Deutschlands, in Schriften zur Politik und Rechtsphilosophie (Sämtliche Werke, ed. Georg Lasson, vol. 7), 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1923), p. 113). See p. 135 of the same work for Hegel’s defence of ‘die Gewalt eines Eroberers’ conceived as a unifier of German lands. He regarded Machiavelli as a forerunner in an analogous Italian situation.

  36 Especially Tommasini in his huge compendium, La vita e gli scritti di Niccolò Machiavelli nella loro relazione col machiavellismo (vol. 1, Rome/Turin/Florence, 1883; vol. 2, Rome, 1911). In this connection Ernst Cassirer makes the valid and relevant point that to value – or justify – Machiavelli’s opinions solely as a mirror of their times is one thing; to maintain that he was himself consciousl
y addressing only his own countrymen and, if Burd is to be believed, not even all of them, is a very different one, and entails a false view of him and the civilisation to which he belonged. The Renaissance did not view itself in historical perspective. Machiavelli was looking for – and thought that he had found – timeless, universal truths about social behaviour. It is no service either to him or to the truth to deny or ignore the unhistorical assumptions which he shared with all his contemporaries and predecessors. The praise lavished upon him by the German historical school from Herder onwards, including the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, for the gifts in which they saw his strength – his realistic sense of his own times, his insight into the rapidly changing social and political conditions of Italy and Europe in his time, the collapse of feudalism, the rise of the national State, the altering power relationships within the Italian principalities and the like – might have been galling to a man who believed he had discovered eternal verities. He may, like his countryman Columbus, have mistaken the nature of his own achievement. If the historical school (including the Marxists) is right, Machiavelli did not do, and could not have done, what he set out to do. But nothing is gained by supposing he did not set out to do it; and plenty of witnesses from his day to ours would deny Herder’s assertion, and maintain that Machiavelli’s goal – the discovery of the permanent principles of a political science – was anything but Utopian; and that he came nearer than most to attaining it.

  37 Herbert Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (London, 1955).

  38 Raffaello Ramat, ‘Il Principe’, in Per la storia dello stile rinascimentale (Messina/Florence, 1953), pp. 75–118.

  39 Lauri Huovinen, Das Bild vom Menschen im politischen Denken Niccolò Machiavellis (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, series B, vol. 74 (Helsinki, 1951), No 2).

  40 ‘We are much beholden to Machiavelli and other writers of that class, who openly and unfeignedly declare and describe what men do, and not what they ought to do.’ Bacon goes on to qualify this by explaining that to know the good one must investigate the evil, and ends by calling such approaches ‘corrupt wisdom’ (De augmentis, book 7, chapter 2, and book 8, chapter 2: quoted from The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding and others (London, 1857–74), vol. 5, pp. 17 and 76). Compare Machiavelli’s aphorism in a letter to Guicciardini, No 179 in Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere familiari, ed. Edoardo Alvisi (Florence, 1883): ‘io credo che questo sarebbe il vero modo ad andare in Paradiso, imparare la via dell’Inferno per fuggirla’. A. P. d’Entrèves kindly drew my attention to this characteristic passage; so far as I know there is no reason for supposing that Bacon had any knowledge of it. Nor, it may be, had T. S. Eliot when he wrote ‘Lord Morley … intimates that Machiavelli … saw only half of the truth about human nature. What Machiavelli did not see about human nature is the myth of human goodness which for liberal thought replaces the belief in Divine Grace’ (‘Niccolò Machiavelli’, in For Lancelot Andrewes (London, 1970), p. 50).

  41 Traiano Boccalini, Ragguagli di Parnaso, centuria prima, No 89.

  42 Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, 2nd ed. (Munich/Berlin, 1927), trans. by Douglas Scott as Machiavellism (London, 1957).

  43 René König, Niccolo Machiavelli: Zur Krisenanalyse einer Zeitenwende (Erlenbach-Zurich, 1941).

  44 Renzo Sereno, ‘A Falsification by Machiavelli’, Renaissance News 12 (1959), 159–67.

  45 ibid., p. 166.

  46 The Prince, dedication (trans. by Allan Gilbert in Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, 3 vols (Durham, North Carolina, 1965), vol. 1, p. 11: all quotations in this essay from Machiavelli’s writings are given in this version, unless otherwise stated).

  47 For an extended modern development of this, see Judith Janoska-Bendl, ‘Niccolò Machiavelli: Politik ohne ldeologie’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 40 (1958), 315–45.

  48 The only extended treatment of Machiavelli by a prominent Bolshevik intellectual known to me is in Kamenev’s short-lived introduction to the Russian translation of The Prince (Moscow, 1934), reprinted in English as ‘Preface to Machiavelli’, New Left Review No 15 (May–June 1962), 39–42. This unswervingly follows the full historicist-sociological approach criticised by Cassirer. Machiavelli is described as an active publicist, preoccupied by the ‘mechanism of the struggles for power’ within and between the Italian principalities, a sociologist who gave a masterly analysis of the ‘sociological’ jungle that preceded the formation of a ‘powerful, national, essentially bourgeois’ Italian State. His almost ‘dialectical’ grasp of the realities of power, and freedom from metaphysical and theological fantasies, establish him as a worthy forerunner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. These opinions were brought up at Kamenev’s trial and pilloried by Vyshinsky, the prosecutor. See on this Chimen Abramsky, ‘Kamenev’s Last Essay’, New Left Review No 15 (May–June 1962), 34–8; and, on the peculiar fate of Machiavelli in Russia, Jan Malarczyk, Politicheskoe uchenia Makiavelli v Rossii, v russkoi dorevolyutsionnoi i sovetskoi istoriografii (Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodkowska, vol. 6, No 1, section G, 1959 (Lubin, 1960)).

  49 George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (London, 1951).

  50 Antonio Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli, in Opere, vol. 5 (Turin, 1949).

  51 Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London, 1929), part 1, chapter 7, pp. 104 ff.

  52 op. cit. (p. 276 above, note 3).

  53 C. J. Friedrich, Constitutional Reason of State (Providence, Rhode Island, 1957).

  54 Charles S. Singleton, ‘The Perspective of Art’, Kenyon Review 15 (1953), 169–89.

  55 See Joseph Kraft, ‘Truth and Poetry in Machiavelli’, Journal of Modern History 23 (1951), 109–21.

  56 Edward Meyer, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama (Weimar, 1897). See on this Christopher Morris, ‘Machiavelli’s Reputation in Tudor England’, Il pensiero politico 2 (1969), 416–33, especially p. 423. See also Mario Praz, ‘Machiavelli and the Elizabethans’, Proceedings of the British Academy 13 (1928), 49–97; Napoleone Orsini, ‘Elizabethan Manuscript Translations of Machiavelli’s Prince’, Journal of the Warburg Institute 1 (1937–8), 166–9; Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London, 1964; Toronto, 1965); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century’, in Politics, Language and Time (London, 1972), pp. 104–47; and, most famous of all, Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox (London, 1951). Zera S. Fink in The Classical Republicans (Evanston, 1945), J. G. A. Pocock and Felix Raab stress his positive influence in seventeenth-century England, with Bacon and Harrington at the head of his admirers.

  57 Jacques Maritain, ‘The End of Machiavellianism’, Review of Politics 4 (1942), 1–33.

  58 Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, Illinois, 1958).

  59 One of the best and liveliest accounts of the mass of conflicting theories about The Prince is provided by E. W. Cochrane in the article cited above on p. 269, note 1, to which this catalogue owes a great deal. For earlier conflicts see Pasquale Villari’s standard and in some ways still unsuperseded The Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. Linda Villari (London, 1898), and the earlier works cited by him, e.g. Robert von Mohl, ‘Die Machiavelli-Literatur’, in Die Geschichte und Literatur der Staatswissenschaften (Erlangen, 1855–8), vol. 3, pp. 519–91), and J. F. Christius, De Nicolao Machiavelli libri tres (Leipzig, 1731). For later works see above, p. 269, note 1.

  60 John Neville Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1916).

  61 Discourses i 12.

  62 See on this much-discussed issue the relevant theses of J. H. Whitfield in Machiavelli (Oxford, 1947), especially pp. 93–5, and J. H. Hexter in ‘Il principe and lo stato’, Studies in the Renaissance 4 (1957), 113–35, and the opposed views of Fredi Chiapelli in Studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli (Florence, 1952), pp. 59–73, Francesco Ercole in La politica di Machiavelli (Rome, 1926) and Felix G
ilbert, op. cit. (p. 269 above, note 1), pp. 328–30. For an earlier version of Gilbert’s anti-Ercole thesis see his ‘The Concept of Nationalism in Machiavelli’s Prince’, Studies in the Renaissance 1 (1954), 38–48. H. C. Dowdall goes further and seems to maintain that it is, in effect, by inventing the word ‘State’ that Machiavelli founded modern political science: ‘The Word “State”’, Law Quarterly Review 39 (1923), 98–125.

  63 op. cit. (p. 276 above, note 3), English version, p. 49.

  64 op. cit. (p. 279 above, note 2), p. 3.

  65 Jeffrey Pulver, Machiavelli: The Man, His Work, and His Times (London, 1937), p. 227.

  66 The Prince, dedication.

  67 This celebrated passage from the seventeenth chapter of The Prince is here given in Prezzolini’s vivid rendering: see his ‘The Christian Roots of Machiavelli’s Moral Pessimism’, Review of National Literatures 1 (1970), 26–37 at p. 27.

  68 Discourses ii 2.

  69 See p. 281 above, note 2.

  70 For which he is commended by de Sanctis, and (as Prezzolini points out, op. cit., p. 269 above, note 1) condemned by Maurice Joly in the famous Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Brussels, 1864), which served as the original of the forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (London, 1920).

  71 Discourses i 26.

  72 ibid. ii 2.

  73 ibid.

  74 ibid. i 12.

  75 Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s nachgelassene Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Bonn, 1834–5), vol. 3, pp. 411–13.

  76 op. cit. (p. 269 above, note 1), English version, p. 43.

  77 p. 291, note 3, and p. 292, note 1.

  78 The Prince, chapter 19.

  79 ibid., chapter 18.

  80 ibid., chapter 14.

  81 ibid., chapter 15.

  82 ibid.

  83 ibid., chapter 18.

  84 The Prince, chapter 8.

  85 op. cit. (p. 269 above, note 1), p. 115.