The Proper Study of Mankind
Page 40
For A. H. Gilbert9 it is anything but this – it is a typical piece of its period, a mirror for princes, a genre exercise common enough in the Renaissance and before (and after) it, with very obvious borrowings and ‘echoes’; more gifted than most of these, and certainly more hard-boiled (and influential); but not so very different in style, content or intention.
Giuseppe Prezzolini10 and Hiram Haydn,11 more plausibly, regard it as an anti-Christian piece (in this following Fichte and others)12 and see it as an attack on the Church and all her principles, a defence of the pagan view of life. Giuseppe Toffanin,13 however, thinks Machiavelli was a Christian, though a somewhat peculiar one, a view from which Roberto Ridolfi,14 his most distinguished modern biographer, and Leslie Walker (in his English edition of the Discourses)15 do not wholly dissent. Alderisio,16 indeed, regards him as a sincere Catholic, although he does not go quite so far as Richelieu’s agent, Canon Louis Machon, in his Apology for Machiavelli,17 or the anonymous nineteenth-century compiler of Religious Maxims Faithfully Extracted from the works of Niccolò Machiavelli (referred to by Ridolfi in the last chapter of his biography).18
For Benedetto Croce19 and all the many scholars who have followed him Machiavelli is an anguished humanist, and one who, so far from seeking to soften the impression made by the crimes that he describes, laments the vices of men which make such wicked courses politically unavoidable – a moralist who ‘occasionally experiences moral nausea’20 in contemplating a world in which political ends can be achieved only by means that are morally evil, and thereby the man who divorced the province of politics from that of ethics. But for the Swiss scholars Walder, Kaegi and von Muralt21 he is a peace-loving humanist, who believed in order, stability, pleasure in life, in the disciplining of the aggressive elements of our nature into the kind of civilised harmony that he found in its finest form among the well-armed Swiss democracies of his own time.22
For the neo-stoic Justus Lipsius and a century later for Algarotti (in 1759) and Alfieri23 (in 1786) he was a passionate patriot, who saw in Cesare Borgia the man who, if he had lived, might have liberated Italy from the barbarous French and Spaniards and Austrians who were trampling over her and had reduced her to misery and poverty, decadence and chaos. Garrett Mattingly24 could not credit this because it was obvious to him, and he did not doubt that it must have been no less obvious to Machiavelli, that Cesare was incompetent, a mountebank, a squalid failure; while Eric Vögelin seems to suggest that it is not Cesare, but (of all men) Tamerlane who was hovering before Machiavelli’s fancy-laden gaze.25
For Cassirer,26 Renaudet,27 Olschki28 and Keith Hancock,29 Machiavelli is a cold technician, ethically and politically uncommitted, an objective analyst of politics, a morally neutral scientist, who (Karl Schmid30 tells us) anticipated Galileo in applying inductive methods to social and historical material, and had no moral interest in the use made of his technical discoveries – equally ready to place them at the disposal of liberators and despots, good men and scoundrels. Renaudet describes his method as ‘purely positivist’, Cassirer, as concerned with ‘political statics’. For Federico Chabod, though, he is not coldly calculating at all, but passionate to the point of unrealism;31 Ridolfi, too, speaks of il grande appassionato,32 and de Caprariis33 thinks him positively visionary.
For Herder he is, above all, a marvellous mirror of his age, a man sensitive to the contours of his time, who faithfully described what others did not admit or recognise, an inexhaustible mine of acute contemporary observation; and this is accepted by Ranke and Macaulay, Burd and, in our day, Gennaro Sasso.34 For Fichte he is a man of deep insight into the real historical (or super-historical) forces that mould men and transform their morality – in particular, a man who rejected Christian principles for those of reason, political unity and centralisation. For Hegel he is the man of genius who saw the need for uniting a chaotic collection of small and feeble principalities into a coherent whole; his specific nostrums may excite disgust, but they are accidents due to the conditions of their own time, now long past; yet, however obsolete his precepts, he understood something more important – the demands of his own age – that the hour had struck for the birth of the modern, centralised, political State, for the formation of which he ‘established the truly necessary fundamental principles’.35
The thesis that Machiavelli was above all an Italian and a patriot, speaking principally to his own generation, and if not solely to Florentines, at any rate only to Italians, and must be judged solely, or at least mainly, in terms of his historical context, is a position common to Herder and Hegel, Macaulay and Burd, de Sanctis and Oreste Tommasini.36 Yet for Herbert Butterfield37 and Raffaello Ramat38 he suffers from an equal lack of scientific and historical sense. Obsessed by classical authors, his gaze is on an imaginary past; he deduces his political maxims in an unhistorical and a priori manner from dogmatic axioms (according to Lauri Huovinen)39 – a method that was already becoming obsolete at the time in which he was writing; in this respect his slavish imitation of antiquity is judged to be inferior to the historical sense and sagacious judgement of his friend Guicciardini (so much for the discovery in him of inklings of modern scientific method).
For Bacon40 (as for Spinoza, and later for Lassalle) he is above all the supreme realist and avoider of Utopian fantasies. Boccalini41 is shocked by him, but cannot deny the accuracy or importance of his observations; so is Meinecke,42 for whom he is the father of Staatsräson, with which he plunged a dagger into the body politic of the West, inflicting a wound which only Hegel would know how to heal (this is Meinecke’s optimistic verdict in the 1920s, apparently withdrawn after the Second World War).
For König43 he is not a tough-minded realist or cynic at all, but an aesthete seeking to escape from the chaotic and squalid world of the decadent Italy of his time into a dream of pure art, a man not interested in practice who painted an ideal political landscape; much (if I understand this view correctly) as Piero della Francesca painted an ideal city; The Prince is to be read as an idyll in the best neo-classical, neo-pastoral, Renaissance style (yet De Sanctis in the second volume of his History of Italian Literature denies it a place in the humanist tradition on account of Machiavelli’s hostility to imaginative visions).
For Renzo Sereno44 it is a fantasy indeed, but of a bitterly frustrated man, and its dedication is the ‘desperate plea’45 of a victim of ‘Fortune’s great and steady malice’.46 A psychoanalytic interpretation of one queer episode in Machiavelli’s life is offered in support of his thesis.
For Macaulay Machiavelli is a political pragmatist and a patriot who cared most of all for the independence of Florence, and acclaimed any form of rule that would ensure it.47 Marx calls the History of Florence a ‘masterpiece’, and Engels (in the Dialectics of Nature) speaks of Machiavelli as one of the ‘giants’ of the Enlightenment, a man free from petit-bourgeois outlook. Soviet criticism is more ambivalent.48
For the restorers of the short-lived Florentine republic he was evidently nothing but a venal and treacherous toady, anxious to serve any master, who had unsuccessfully tried to flatter the Medici in the hope of gaining their favour. George Sabine (in his well-known textbook)49 views him as an anti-metaphysical empiricist, a Hume or Popper before his time, free from obscurantist, theological and metaphysical preconceptions. For Antonio Gramsci50 he is above all a revolutionary innovator who directs his shafts against the obsolescent feudal aristocracy and papacy and their mercenaries; his Prince is a myth which signifies the dictatorship of new, progressive forces: ultimately the coming role of the masses and of the need for the emergence of new politically realistic leaders – The Prince is ‘an anthropomorphic symbol’ of the hegemony of the ‘collective will’.
Like Jakob Burckhardt51 and Friedrich Meinecke,52 C. J. Fried-rich53 and Charles Singleton54 maintain that he has a developed conception of the State as a work of art; the great men who have founded or maintain human associations are conceived as analogous to artists whose aim is beauty, and whose essentia
l qualification is understanding of their material – they are moulders of men, as sculptors are moulders of marble or clay.55 Politics, in this view, leaves the realm of ethics, and approaches that of aesthetics. Singleton argues that Machiavelli’s originality consists in his view of political action as a form of what Aristotle called ‘making’ – the goal of which is a non-moral artefact, an object of beauty or use external to man (in this case a particular arrangement of human affairs) – and not of ‘doing’ (where Aristotle and Aquinas had placed it), the goal of which is internal and moral, not the creation of an object, but a particular kind – the right way – of living or being.
This position is not distant from that of Villari, Croce and others, inasmuch as it ascribes to Machiavelli the divorce of politics from ethics. Singleton transfers Machiavelli’s conception of politics to the region of art, which is conceived as being amoral. Croce gives it an independent status of its own: of politics for polities’ sake.
But the commonest view of him, at least as a political thinker, is still that of most Elizabethans, dramatists and scholars alike, for whom he is a man inspired by the Devil to lead good men to their doom, the great subverter, the teacher of evil, le docteur de la scélératesse, the inspirer of St Bartholomew’s Eve, the original of Iago. This is the ‘murderous Machiavel’ of the famous four-hundred-odd references in Elizabethan literature.56 His name adds a new ingredient to the more ancient figure of Old Nick. For the Jesuits he is ‘the devil’s partner in crime’, ‘a dishonourable writer and an unbeliever’, and The Prince is, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘a handbook for gangsters’ (compare with this Mussolini’s description of it as a ‘vade mecum for statesmen’, a view tacidly shared, perhaps, by other heads of State). This is the view common to Protestants and Catholics, Gentillet and François Hotman, Cardinal Pole, Bodin and Frederick the Great, followed by the authors of all the many anti-Machiavels, among the latest of whom are Jacques Maritain57 and Leo Strauss.58
There is prima facie something strange about so violent a disparity of judgements.59 What other thinker has presented so many facets to the students of his ideas? What other writer – and he not even a recognised philosopher – has caused his readers to disagree about his purposes so deeply and so widely? Yet, I must repeat, Machiavelli does not write obscurely; nearly all his interpreters praise him for his terse, dry, clear prose.
What is it that has proved so arresting to so many? Let me deal with some obvious answers. It is no doubt astonishing to find a thinker so free from what we have been taught to regard as being the normal intellectual assumptions of his age. Machiavelli does not so much as mention natural law, the basic category in terms of which (or rather the many varieties of which) Christians and pagans, teleologists and materialists, jurists, theologians and philosophers, before and indeed for many decades after him, discussed the very topics to which he applied his mind. He was of course not a philosopher or a jurist: nevertheless he was a political expert, a well-read man of letters. The influence of the old Stoic-Christian doctrine was not, by his time, what it had once been in Italy, especially among the early humanists. Still, having set himself to generalise about the behaviour of men in society in a novel fashion, Machiavelli might have been expected, if not to refute or reject explicitly, at least to deliver a glancing blow at some of the assumptions which, he clearly thinks, have led so many to their doom. He does, after all, tell us that his path has never before been trodden by any man, and this, in his case, is no mere cliché: there is, therefore, something extraordinary in the fact that he completely ignores the concepts and categories – the routine paraphernalia – in terms of which the best-known thinkers and scholars of his day were accustomed to express themselves. And, indeed, Gentillet in his Contre-Machiavel denounces him precisely for this. Only Marsilio before him had dared do this: and Neville Figgis thinks it a dramatic break with the past.60
The absence of Christian psychology and theology – sin, grace, redemption, salvation – need cause less surprise: few contemporary humanists speak in such terms. The medieval heritage has grown very thin. But, and this is more noteworthy, there is no trace of Platonic or Aristotelian teleology, no reference to any ideal order, to any doctrine of man’s place in nature in the great chain of being, with which the Renaissance thinkers are deeply concerned – which, say, Ficino or Pico or Poggio virtually take for granted. There is nothing here of what Popper has called ‘essentialism’, a priori certainty directly revealed to reason or intuition about the unalterable development of men or social groups in certain directions, in pursuit of goals implanted in them by God or by nature. The method and the tone are empirical. Even Machiavelli’s theory of historical cycles is not metaphysically guaranteed.
As for religion, it is for him not much more than a socially indispensable instrument, so much utilitarian cement: the criterion of the worth of a religion is its role as a promoter of solidarity and cohesion – he anticipates Saint-Simon and Durkheim in stressing its crucial social importance. The great founders of religions are among the men he most greatly admires. Some varieties of religion (for example, Roman paganism) are good for societies, since they make them strong or spirited; others on the contrary (for example, Christian meekness and unworldliness) cause decay or disintegration. The weakening of religious ties is a part of general decadence and corruption: there is no need for a religion to rest on truth, provided that it is socially effective.61 Hence his veneration of those who set their societies on sound spiritual foundations – Moses, Numa, Lycurgus.
There is no serious assumption of the existence of God and divine law; whatever our author’s private convictions, an atheist can read Machiavelli with perfect intellectual comfort. Nor is there piety towards authority, or prescription – nor any interest in the role of the individual conscience, or in any other metaphysical or theological issue. The only freedom he recognises is political freedom, freedom from arbitrary despotic rule, that is, republicanism, and the freedom of one State from control by other States, or rather of the city or patria, for ‘State’ may be a premature term in this connection.62
There is no notion of the rights of, or obligation to, corporations or non-political establishments, sacred or secular – the need for absolute centralised power (if not for sovereignty) is taken for granted. There is scarcely any historical sense: men are much the same everywhere, and at all times, and what has served well for the ancients – their rules of medicine, or warfare, or statecraft – will surely also work for the moderns. Tradition is valued chiefly as a source of social stability. Since there is no far-off divine event to which creation moves and no Platonic ideal for societies or individuals, there is no notion of progress, either material or spiritual. The assumption is that the blessings of the classical age can be restored (if fortune is not too unpropitious) by enough knowledge and will, by virtù on the part of a leader, and by appropriately trained and bravely and skilfully led citizens. There are no intimations of an irrevocably determined flow of events; neither fortuna nor necessità dominates the whole of existence; there are no absolute values which men ignore or deny to their inevitable doom.
It is, no doubt, this freedom from even such relics of the traditional metaphysics of history as linger on in the works of even such perfectly secular humanists as Egidio and Pontano, not to mention earlier authors of ‘mirrors for princes’, as well as Machiavelli’s constant concern with the concrete and practical issues of his day, and not any mysterious presentiment of the coming scientific revolution, that gives him so modern a flavour. Yet it is plainly not these characteristics that have proved so deeply fascinating and horrifying to his readers from his day to our own. ‘Machiavelli’s doctrine’, wrote Meinecke, ‘was a sword thrust in the body politic of Western humanity, causing it to cry out and to struggle against itself.’63
What was it that was so upsetting in the views of Machiavelli? What was the ‘dagger’ and the ‘unhealed wound’ of which Meinecke speaks, ‘the most violent mutilation suffered by the human
practical intellect’64 which Maritain so eloquently denounced? If it is not Machiavelli’s (ruthless, but scarcely original) realism, nor his (relatively original, but by the eighteenth century pretty widespread) empiricism that proves so shocking during all these centuries, what was it?
‘Nothing,’ says one of his commentators:65 The Prince is a mere tabulation of types of government and rulers, and of methods of maintaining them. It is this and no more. All the ‘feeling and controversy’ occasioned by it evidently rest on an almost universal misreading of an exceptionally clear, morally neutral text.
I cite this not uncommon view for fairness’s sake. My own answer to the question will be clear if before offering it I state (in however brief and over-simplified a form) what I believe Machiavelli’s positive beliefs to have been.
II
Like the Roman writers whose ideals were constantly before his mind, like Cicero and Livy, Machiavelli believed that what men – at any rate superior men – sought was the fulfilment and the glory that come from the creation and maintenance by common endeavour of a strong and well-governed social whole. Only those will accomplish this who know the relevant facts. If you make mistakes and live in a state of delusion you will fail in whatever you undertake, for reality misunderstood – or, worse still, ignored or scorned – will always defeat you in the end. We can achieve what we want only if we understand firstly ourselves, and then the nature of the material with which we work.