Machiavelli
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I believe that even if it is true that fortune governs half our lives, she still allows us to take control of the other half . . . . I compare fortune to one of those untamed rivers which, when enraged, floods the plains, uproots trees and topples buildings, and washes the soil from one place to another . . . . [I]n spite of everything, men can still prepare themselves in times of quiet, erecting dams and levees to channel the rising waters, so that when the torrent comes it will not prove as destructive.
Will and chance are in almost perfect balance. Or, to put it more accurately, the two are in constant and dynamic tension since, while equally matched, each force vies to expand its claim on the world. The great rulers—Moses, Alexander, Romulus, Lycurgus—increase their odds of success through boldness, but also through prudence; they are not afraid to take risks, but they leave as little to chance as possible. The wise prince “proves adaptable when unforeseen events occur,” a state of affairs, Machiavelli observed, so common as to be the norm.
For all its pessimism Machiavelli’s philosophy is ultimately empowering. He insists that man has the capacity, indeed the duty, to shape the course of his destiny. Though his options are limited by “Fortune in her furious onrush” who “shifts and reshifts the world’s affairs,” it is through the heroic struggle to give form to what is formless that immortality is achieved. Here the Renaissance belief in the worth of the individual is applied to real-world situations. “O great and wonderful happiness of man!” wrote Lorenzo the Magnificent’s friend Pico della Mirandola. “It is given to him to have that which he chooses and to be that which he wills.”xvi Machiavelli, who lived through more troubled times than Pico, watching as his people were humiliated and the states of Italy crushed beneath the boots of foreigners, struck a less hopeful tone, but he continues to urge ceaseless struggle with fate, even against long odds.
The force of character that allows a man to resist Fortuna Machiavelli refers to as virtù. The term is not to be confused with its English cognate “virtue,” since it does not imply goodness as it is usually understood. Rather, it is closer to “prowess,” the courage and the skill to impose one’s will on the world.xvii It was a quality that Valentino, with his “great spirit” and “lofty ambition,” possessed in full, though it was not sufficient to save him when abandoned by Fortune. In fact virtue and virtù are often incompatible since it is impossible to be an effective leader if one is too squeamish to do the dirty work necessary for achieving and maintaining power. Machiavelli’s ideal prince might well have echoed Hamlet in saying, “I must be cruel to be kind,” keeping in mind that there is no other judge of virtù but success.
“For where men have but little virtue, fortune makes great show of her power,” Machiavelli observes in The Discourses. Virtù is the masculine principle engaged in a perpetual struggle for supremacy with the feminine Fortuna. He makes an invidious comparison between the virtù of the ancient Romans, who mastered the known world, and the “effeminate” Italians of his own day, who, reared in the gentler ethos of the Gospels, allowed themselves to be mastered by others. The word derives from the Latin vir, man, and carries with it the associated ideas of strength and courage. For Machiavelli virtù stands for order against the forces of chaos; it is that which holds society together while fickle Fortuna seeks to tear it down. His conception does not resemble the static cosmologies typical of the Middle Ages, but embraces the notion of creative destruction as each principle gains a temporary advantage, only to be overcome by its opposite—a model of the world that reflects the dynamism and anxieties of the new age.
Though Machiavelli claimed to know nothing about making money, a trait that set him apart from his compatriots, his was a philosophy that came naturally to someone who grew up in a merchant culture driven by entrepreneurs and capitalist gamblers intimately acquainted with cycles of boom and bust. “Everywhere Ambition and Avarice penetrate,” he asserts, qualities he observed every day in the bustling markets of Florence. He accepts man for what he is, not condemning the natural drives that medieval philosophers tended to brand as sins. “It is only natural to desire gain,” Machiavelli observes, “and when capable men attempt great feats, they will be praised, or at least not blamed.”xviii Instead of measuring human behavior in terms of sin and virtue, Machiavelli proposes a different yardstick. “But if they cannot succeed and still persist, here they are in error and deserve to be censured.”
Success and failure, then, are the ultimate arbiters of good and evil in Machiavelli’s universe. “In all men’s acts, and in those of princes most especially,” he insists, “it is the result that renders the verdict when there is no court of appeal.” One can never judge an act in the abstract but only by observing its consequences in the real world. “[I]t’s the part of a prudent man to take the best among bad choices,” he said in another context. The Prince, filled with tentative solutions to particular problems, offers some guidance for the sensible monarch, while admitting that one can never plan for every contingency. It is predicated on a dynamic conception of society typical of the rags-to-riches-and-back-again economy of capitalism.xix
Machiavelli’s worldview—cynical, secular, and anticlerical—was widely shared among Renaissance Florentines, at least in intellectual circles where classical authors took up more space on a scholar’s bookshelves than the writings of the Church Fathers. A similar disdain for conventional attitudes appears in the writings of Machiavelli’s friend, the diplomat and historian Francesco Guicciardini. But while the younger man shared Machiavelli’s jaundiced view of the human animal (in fact he often chided Machiavelli for placing too much faith in the wisdom of the people), Guicciardini criticized his friend for going too far. In offering the earliest known critique of The Prince he demonstrates his more cautious, more conventional, cast of mind. “It is . . . necessary that the prince should have the courage to resort to extraordinary measures whenever they may be required,” Guicciardini acknowledges, “but he should also have the wisdom to neglect no opportunity of establishing affairs with humanity and benevolence, never accepting as an absolute rule the method prescribed by [Machiavelli] who always finds great delight in extraordinary and violent remedies.”
In pointing out Machiavelli’s love of “extraordinary and violent remedies,” Guicciardini captures something of his friend’s personality. In private Guicciardini was as irreverent as Machiavelli, but in his public writing he strikes a more diplomatic tone. Machiavelli was less discreet. He clearly meant what he said, but he never used moderate language when vivid phrases would better make his point. “[O]ne should note,” Machiavelli declares in a classic formulation, “that hatred may be acquired through good deeds as well as through bad. And so, as I said before, a prince wishing to hold on to his state is often forced to be other than good.” The shock provoked by passages like this owes as much to tone as to substance. Machiavelli was one of those tactless people who feel compelled to point out those truths that most are too polite to mention in public.
Of course what Guicciardini, like later critics, found unpalatable was not merely the tone but the substance of Machiavelli’s writing. He is particularly uncomfortable with Machiavelli’s embrace of the liar’s art. “It may also be disputed whether fraud is always a sure means of attaining greatness,” says Guicciardini, responding to one of Machiavelli’s central points, “because, although grand blows may be struck by deceit, yet the reputation of being a deceiver will afterwards prevent you from accomplishing your purpose”—to which Machiavelli himself would have replied that the best of all possible worlds would be to appear honest while yet harvesting the fruits of deception.
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Despite the fact that The Prince is usually regarded as the despot’s handbook, one early critic dubbing it the guide to “Tyrannical science,” Machiavelli’s views are far less congenial to despotic rule than those of his more conventional predecessors. Indeed there is an inherent tension in The Prince between its stated purpose—which is to aid Lorenzo de’ Medici i
n fulfilling his glorious destiny—and the picture Machiavelli paints of a world teetering on the brink of anarchy. Had he been honest with his patron he would have admitted that the journey he was proposing was hazardous and the destination far from assured. “The universe is so constituted that we never flee one peril without finding ourselves in another,” he observes. “But prudence lies in understanding the nature of that peril, and in adopting the least bad as the good.” Such a world is inhospitable to absolutist rule predicated on divine right. How can God sanction the rule of one particular man or dynasty when “[n]ot a thing in the world is eternal” and a man “should every hour adjust himself to [Fortune’s] variation”? Divine right assumes an orderly hierarchy totally absent from Machiavelli’s conception. If God has a plan for this world, Machiavelli has a hard time discerning it.
Even in The Prince Machiavelli is not an apologist for despotism. When he calls on Lorenzo to “redeem [Italy] from barbarian insolence and cruelty,” he regards this as a short-term solution to a particular crisis. His prince will emerge, if at all, only through guile and struggle. Should he succeed he will need to protect his dominion by exercising constant vigilance and his triumph will only be temporary. Fortune’s wheel raises men up, only to plunge them back into the depths. No self-respecting prince would submit himself to such a dreary routine.
Thus despite appearances, and despite the fact that The Prince has been embraced by despots from Philip of Spain to Stalin and Hitler, the book offers only the most limited and contingent endorsement of dictatorship. In fact it was his predecessors, those “virtuous” men who have come down through history as saints and sages, who gave aid and comfort to tyrants. Following Aristotle, the tradition of the specula assumed that one-man rule was superior. “[G]overnment by one person, being the best, is to be preferred,” wrote Aquinas, a logical assumption since he believed earthly government should reflect the Kingdom of Heaven. Machiavelli, by contrast, notes that governments fall into two categories. “All states—all those dominions that once ruled or now rule over men—once were or are now either republics or principalities,” he asserts, remaining silent about his preference, clearly spelled out in The Discourses, for the former.xx Even in The Prince he provides only a limited endorsement of despotic rule, telling Lorenzo, “it seems to me that now so many factors point in favor of a new prince”—a statement that carries with it the not so subtle implication that in other times and in other circumstances a more representative form of government is called for. Machiavelli was a realist, willing to tailor his policies and prescriptions to a given situation. Self-government by a broad segment of the citizenry is preferable, he says, but given Italy’s debased condition only a strong leader can cure what ails her.
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Machiavelli would not have become infamous had he merely been a reluctant pragmatist, advocating the path of virtue as long as he could while admitting that on occasion virtue must be put aside to avert a crisis. But Machiavelli went out of his way to challenge the prevailing wisdom. He took pleasure in scandalizing his readers, standing traditional nostrums on their head and demonstrating how following the recommendations of conventional moralists could lead to disaster. “Everyone knows how laudable it is,” he proclaimed with ill-concealed irony, “for a prince to keep his word and live with integrity instead of by trickery. But the experience of our own time shows us that the princes who have accomplished great things are those who cared little for keeping faith with the people, and who used cleverness to befuddle the minds of men. In the end, such princes overcame those who counted on loyalty alone.” Despite what “everyone knows,” that virtue will triumph and good men will always prosper, Machiavelli demonstrates that the reverse is true. Contemplating the success of Pope Alexander VI, he wrote “a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.” In the real world, honesty is praised but deception is rewarded; a place in heaven is reserved for the merciful prince, but only to compensate him for the worldly kingdom he will surely squander.
Not only, Machiavelli insists, does the universe punish the naively virtuous, but we ourselves extol conventional virtues even as we trample underfoot those who practice them. “[T]here is such a chasm between the way men live and the way they ought to live that he who abandons what is for what should be will soon ruin himself rather than secure his preservation. For a man who wishes to always do good will surely be ruined among so many who are not good. Thus it is necessary for a prince wishing to retain power to learn how not to be good, employing this art or not according to need.”
In condemning man as essentially wicked, Machiavelli echoes the Christian worldview he otherwise scorned. His harsh view of human nature and belief that only the coercive power of the state could repress humanity’s worst instincts mirror the grim assessment of many of the Church Fathers. “Surely, it is not without purpose that we have the institution of the power of kings,” Saint Augustine wrote, “the death penalty of the judge, the barbed hooks of the executioner, the weapons of the soldier, the right of punishment of the overlord, even the severity of the good father. All those things have their methods, their causes, their reasons, their practical benefits. While these are feared, the wicked are kept in bounds and the good live more peacefully among the wicked.” Machiavelli could not have stated the case for strong government any more boldly, but unlike Augustine and other Church Fathers—or prophetic figures like Savonarola—he did not incorporate humankind’s fallen nature into any larger redemptive scheme in which sin was merely the prelude to ultimate salvation.xxi
Though Machiavelli often uses terms like “evil” to describe people’s behavior, this seems more a matter of habit than conviction. Evil or wickedness implies a willful disregard of some higher law, but since Machiavelli is skeptical that such a universal standard exists against which we can measure how far short we have fallen, the term lacks the element of moral censure. In The Prince he often struggles to reconcile his natural revulsion against violence with his experience that the most effective leaders are often those who are least squeamish about employing it. One can sense his ambivalence as he recounts the life of Agathocles, a king of ancient Syracuse: “One cannot call it virtue [virtù] to murder one’s fellow citizens, to betray one’s friends, to live without faith, without piety, without religion,” he admits.
By such means one may win dominion but not glory. But if one considers Agathocles’ prowess [virtù] in first placing himself in peril and then escaping it, and his greatness of spirit in enduring and overcoming adversity, I cannot see why he should be judged inferior to any talented general. Nonetheless, his savage cruelty, inhumanity, and his infinite wickedness will not allow him to be included among those celebrated for their excellence. One should not, then, attribute to fortune or to virtue that which he accomplished without either.
While making an inventory of the tyrant’s many crimes, Machiavelli, in effect, praises Agathocles by damning him only faintly.
Machiavelli is most closely identified with the principle “the ends justify the means,” though the exact phrase never appears in his writing. The closest he comes is in a passage in The Discourses where he declares: “It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good . . . it always justifies the action.” One can argue that this formula is wrongheaded—it may never be possible to get good results from bad actions, since evil will only be met with evil—but not that it is amoral. The worst that one can say is that his morality is utilitarian, geared toward practical results in the here and now rather than obtaining the Kingdom of Heaven.
And what exactly are those ends toward which Machiavelli’s famously unpleasant means are pointing us? Over the centuries many have insisted that it is simply power: how to acquire it and how to secure it once acquired. But it is clear that power is not the “good” result for the sake of which Machiavelli is willing to condone “reprehensible actions.” This misunderstanding can be attributed to the fact that The Prin
ce, his most famous book, focuses almost exclusively on means. It is intended to be a handbook for a practicing politician, and like all how-to manuals it assumes the ends are self-evident and sets them aside in order to concentrate on demonstrating the best way of achieving them.
When Machiavelli does turn to ends rather than means, it is usually to drive home the point that virtuous behavior often leads to bad outcomes, while brutality can sometimes contribute to human welfare. This is not a point of view favored by people of faith because they believe God’s plan must be universally good. Machiavelli’s philosophy, by contrast, embraces ambiguity and contradiction; it is empirical rather than faith-based, willing to accept the truth that good might come from bad.
The thrust of Machiavelli’s ethics is to rescue morality from the theologians. Having witnessed the suffering caused by weakness, corruption, and vacillation, he has nothing but contempt for those holy men who turn their backs on the world to contemplate the purity of their own souls. Though he praises men like Valentino who pursue their ambition openly, he abhors unnecessary cruelty. As always, Machiavelli applies a merchant’s calculus to morality, toting up the consequences of each action in neat columns of profit and loss: “[A] prince must not care whether he is considered cruel when attempting to keep his subjects loyal and united, because with a few examples he will have shown more mercy than those who, from excessive kindheartedness, allow disorders to continue from which arise murder and rapine. These cause universal suffering, while an execution ordered by the prince harms only one man.”