The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Machiavelli modifies this judgement on Christianity in at least two passages in the Discourses. In the first he observes that Christianity has had this unfortunate effect only because it was misinterpreted in a spirit of ozio – quietism or indolence – for there is surely nothing in Christianity which forbids ‘the betterment and the defence of our country’.73 In the second passage he declares that ‘If religion of this sort had been kept up among the princes of Christendom, in the form in which its giver founded it, Christian States and republics would be more united, much more happy than they are’,74 but the decadent Christianity of the Church of Rome has had the opposite effect – the papacy has destroyed ‘all piety and all religion’ in Italy, and her unity too.

  Even if these passages are taken literally, and are not viewed as pieces of minimum lip-service to avert clerical censorship or persecution, what they assert is that if the Church had developed a patriotic and thoroughly militant outlook, on the lines of Roman antiqua virtus, and had made men virile, stern, devout and public-spirited, it would have produced more satisfactory social consequences. What it has done is to lead, on the one hand, to corruption and political division – the fault of the papacy – and, on the other, to other-worldliness and meek endurance of suffering on earth for the sake of the eternal life beyond the grave. It is this last strain that dissolves the social fabric and helps bullies and oppressors.

  In his political attack on the Church of Rome, shared by Guicciardini and others in his time, Machiavelli might have found enthusiastic allies in the Reformation (there is no evidence, so far as I know, that news of the ‘monks’ quarrel’ had ever reached his ears). His demand for a Christianity which did not put the blessings of a pure conscience and faith in heaven above earthly success, and exalted love of glory and self-assertion above meekness and resignation, might have been more difficult to meet. Machiavelli finds nothing to criticise in pagan Roman religion at its most vigorous; he demands a similar religion – not necessarily wholly unchristian, but muscular enough to be, for practical purposes, no less effective. It does not seem unreasonable to conclude from this (as Fichte75 and Prezzolini76 tell us) that he is an implacable critic of truly Christian institutions, rather than their champion. In this he is followed by all those later thinkers who share with him either his conception of man and his natural needs (eighteenth-century materialists, Nietzsche, social Darwinists) or (like Rousseau and some nineteenth-century positivists) his civic ideals.

  It is important to note that Machiavelli does not formally condemn Christian morality, or the approved values of his own society. Unlike systematic moralists such as Hobbes or Spinoza he does not attempt to redefine terms to conform with an egoistic rationalism, so that such Christian virtues as, say, pity, humility, self-sacrifice, obedience are shown to be weaknesses or vices. He transposes nothing: the things men call good are indeed good. Words like buono, cattivo, onesto, inumano and so forth are used by him as they were in the common speech of his time, and indeed of our own. He merely says that the practice of these virtues makes it impossible to build a society which, once it is contemplated, in the pages of history or by the political imagination, will surely awaken in us – in any man – a great longing.

  One of the crucial passages is to be found in the tenth chapter of the first book of the Discourses: he is distinguishing between the good and the bad Roman emperors on the lines of Tacitus or Dio, and adds ‘if a prince is of human birth, he will be frightened away from any imitation of wicked times and will be fired with an immense eagerness [immenso desiderio] to follow the ways of good ones’ – ‘good’ in some non-Christian sense, evidently. Whitfield thinks that he is not pessimistic or cynical. Perhaps not cynical – that is a fine point: the line between cynicism (and indeed pessimism too) and an unflinching realism is at times not easy to draw. But Machiavelli is not, in the usual sense of the word, hopeful. Yet, like every humanist thinker from his own day to ours, he believes that if only the truth were known – the real truth, not the fairy tales of shallow moralists – it would help to make men understand themselves and make them go farther.

  He believes also that the qualities that men need in order to revive these buoni tempi are not compatible with those that are urged upon them by Christian education. He does not seek to correct the Christian conception of a good man. He does not say that saints are not saints, or that honourable behaviour is not honourable or to be admired; only that this type of goodness cannot, at least in its traditionally accepted forms, create or maintain a strong, secure and vigorous society, that it is in fact fatal to it. He points out that in our world men who pursue such ideals are bound to be defeated and to lead other people to ruin, since their view of the world is not founded upon the truth, at least not upon verità effettuale – the truth that is tested by success and experience – which (however cruel) is always, in the end, less destructive than the other (however noble).

  If the two passages mentioned above77 are to be taken literally, Christianity, at least in theory, could have taken a form not incompatible with the qualities that he celebrates; but, not surprisingly, he does not pursue this line of thought. History took another turn. The idea of such a Christian commonwealth – if he gave it a serious thought – must have seemed to him as Utopian as a world in which all or even most men are good. Christian principles have weakened men’s civic virtues. Speculation on the form that Christianity might have taken, or could, in unlikely circumstances, still take, can for him only be an idle (and dangerous) pastime.

  Christians as he knew them in history and his own experience, that is, men who in their practice actually follow Christian precepts, are good men, but if they govern States in the light of such principles they lead them to destruction. Like Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, like the well-meaning Gonfalonieri of the Florentine Republic, like Savonarola, they are bound to be defeated by the realists (the Medici or the Pope or King Ferdinand of Spain) who understand how to create lasting institutions; build them, if need be, on the bones of innocent victims. I should like to emphasise again that he does not explicitly condemn Christian morality: he merely points out that it is, at least in rulers (but to some degree in subjects too), incompatible with those social ends which he thinks it natural and wise for men to seek. One can save one’s soul, or one can found or maintain or serve a great and glorious State; but not always both at once.

  This is a vast and eloquent development of Aristotle’s obiter dictum in the Politics that a good man may not be identical with a good citizen (even though Aristotle was not thinking in terms of spiritual salvation). Machiavelli does not explicitly rate either way of life above the other. When he says ‘hate is incurred as much by means of good deeds as of bad’,78 he means by ‘good deeds’ what any man brought up to live by Christian values means. Again, when he says that good faith, integrity are ‘praiseworthy’79 even if they end in failure, he means by ‘praiseworthy’ that it is right to praise them, for of course what is good (in the ordinary sense) is good. When he praises the ‘chastity, affability, courtesy and liberality’80 of Scipio or Cyrus or Timoleon, or even the ‘goodness’ of the Medici Pope Leo X, he speaks (whether he is sincere or not) in terms of values that are common to Cicero and Dante, to Erasmus and to us. In the famous fifteenth chapter of The Prince he says that liberality, mercy, honour, humanity, frankness, chastity, religion, and so forth, are indeed virtues, and a life lived in the exercise of these virtues would be successful if men were all good. But they are not; and it is idle to hope that they will become so. We must take men as we find them, and seek to improve them along possible, not impossible, lines.

  This may involve the benefactors of men – the founders, educators, legislators, rulers – in terrible cruelties. ‘I am aware that everyone will admit that it would be most praiseworthy for a prince to exhibit such of the above-mentioned qualities as are considered good. But because no ruler can possess or fully practise them, on account of human conditions that do not permit it’,81 he must at t
imes behave very differently in order to compass his ends. Moses and Theseus, Romulus and Cyrus all killed; what they created lasted, and was glorious; ‘any man who under all conditions insists on making it his business to be good will surely be destroyed among so many who are not good. Hence a prince … must acquire the power to be not good, and understand when to use it and when not to use it, in accord with necessity.’82 ‘If all men were good, this maxim [to break faith if interest dictates] would not be good, but … they are bad.’83 Force and guile must be met with force and guile.

  The qualities of the lion and the fox are not in themselves morally admirable, but if a combination of these qualities will alone preserve the city from destruction, then these are the qualities that leaders must cultivate. They must do this not simply to serve their own interest, that is, because this is how one can become a leader, although whether men become leaders or not is a matter of indifference to the author – but because human societies in fact stand in need of leadership, and cannot become what they should be, save by the effective pursuit of power, of stability, virtù, greatness. These can be attained when men are led by Scipios and Timoleons or, if times are bad, men of more ruthless character. Hannibal was cruel, and cruelty is not a laudable quality, but if a sound society can be built only by conquest, and if cruelty is necessary to it, then it must not be evaded.

  Machiavelli is not sadistic; he does not gloat on the need to employ ruthlessness or fraud for creating or maintaining the kind of society that he admires and recommends. His most savage examples and precepts apply only to situations in which the population is thoroughly corrupt, and needs violent measures to restore it to health, for example where a new prince takes over, or a revolution against a bad prince must be made effective. Where a society is relatively sound, or the rule is traditional and hereditary and supported by public sentiment, it would be quite wrong to practise violence for violence’s sake, since its results would be destructive of social order, when the purpose of government is to create order, harmony, strength. If you are a lion and a fox you can afford virtue – chastity, affability, mercy, humanity, liberality, honour – as Agesilaus and Timoleon, Camillus, Scipio and Marcus did. But if circumstances are adverse, if you find yourself surrounded by treason, what can you do but emulate Philip and Hannibal and Severus?

  Mere lust for power is destructive: Pisistratus, Dionysius, Caesar were tyrants and did harm. Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, who gained power by killing his fellow citizens, betraying his friends, being ‘without fidelity, without mercy, without religion’, went too far, and so did not gain glory; ‘his outrageous cruelty and inhumanity together with his countless wicked acts’84 led to success, but since so much vice was not needed for it, he is excluded from the pantheon; so is the savage Oliverotto da Fermo, his modern counterpart, killed by Cesare Borgia. Still, to be altogether without these qualities guarantees failure; and that makes impossible the only conditions in which Machiavelli believed that normal men could successfully develop. Saints might not need them; anchorites could perhaps practise their virtues in the desert; martyrs will obtain their reward hereafter; but Machiavelli is plainly not interested in these ways of life and does not discuss them. He is a writer about government; he is interested in public affairs; in security, independence, success, glory, strength, vigour, felicity on earth, not in heaven; in the present and future as well as the past; in the real world, not an imaginary one. And for this, given unalterable human limitations, the code preached by the Christian Church, if it is taken seriously, will not do.

  Machiavelli, we are often told, was not concerned with morals. The most influential of all modern interpretations – that of Benedetto Croce, followed to some extent by Chabod, Russo and others – is that Machiavelli, in Cochrane’s words:

  did not deny the validity of Christian morality, and he did not pretend that a crime required by political necessity was any less a crime. Rather he discovered … that this morality simply did not hold in political affairs and that any policy based on the assumption that it did would end in disaster. His factual, objective description of contemporary political practices, then, is a sign not of cynicism or of detachment, but of anguish.85

  This account, it seems to me, contains two basic misinterpretations. The first is that the clash is one between ‘Christian morality’ and ‘political necessity’. The implication is that there is an incompatibility between, on the one hand, morality – the region of ultimate values sought after for their own sakes, values recognition of which alone enables us to speak of ‘crimes’ or morally to justify and condemn anything; and, on the other, politics – the art of adapting means to ends, the region of technical skills, of what Kant was to call ‘hypothetical imperatives’, which take the form ‘If you want to achieve x do y (for example, betray a friend, kill an innocent man)’, without necessarily asking whether x is itself intrinsically desirable or not. This is the heart of the divorce of politics from ethics which Croce and many others attribute to Machiavelli. But this seems to me to rest on a mistake.

  If ethics is confined to, let us say, Stoic, or Christian or Kantian, or even some types of utilitarian ethics, where the source and criterion of value is the word of God, or eternal reason, or some inner sense or knowledge of good and evil, of right or wrong, voices which speak directly to individual consciousness with absolute authority, this might have been tenable. But there exists an equally time-honoured ethics, that of the Greek polis, of which Aristotle provided the clearest exposition. Since men are beings made by nature to live in communities, their communal purposes are the ultimate values from which the rest are derived, or with which their ends as individuals are identified. Politics – the art of living in a polis – is not an activity which can be dispensed with by those who prefer private life: it is not like seafaring or sculpture, which those who do not wish to do so need not undertake. Political conduct is intrinsic to being a human being at a certain stage of civilisation, and what it demands is intrinsic to living a successful human life.

  Ethics so conceived – the code of conduct of, or the ideal to be pursued by, the individual – cannot be known save by understanding the purpose and character of his polis: still less be capable of being divorced from it, even in thought. This is the kind of pre-Christian morality which Machiavelli takes for granted. ‘It is well known’, says Benedetto Croce,86 ‘that Machiavelli discovered the necessity and the autonomy of politics, politics which is beyond moral good and evil, which has its own laws against which it is futile to rebel, which cannot be exorcised and banished from the world with holy water.’ Beyond good and evil in some non-Aristotelian, religious or liberal-Kantian sense; but not beyond the good and evil of those communities, ancient or modern, whose sacred values are social through and through. The arts of colonisation or of mass murder (let us say) may also have their ‘own laws against which it is futile to rebel’ for those who wish to practise them successfully. But if or when these laws collide with those of morality, it is possible and indeed morally imperative to abandon such activities.

  But if Aristotle and Machiavelli are right about what men are (and should be – and Machiavelli’s ideal is, particularly in the Discourses, drawn in vivid colours), political activity is intrinsic to human nature, and while individuals here and there may opt out, the mass of mankind cannot do so; and its communal life determines the moral duties of its members. Hence in opposing the ‘laws of politics’ to ‘good and evil’ Machiavelli is not contrasting two ‘autonomous’ spheres of acting – the ‘political’ and the ‘moral’: he is contrasting his own ‘political’ ethics with another conception of it which governs the lives of persons who are of no interest to him. He is indeed rejecting one morality – the Christian – but not in favour of something that cannot be described as a morality at all, but only as a game of skill, an activity called political, which is not concerned with ultimate human ends, and is therefore not ethical at all.

  He is indeed rejecting Christian ethics, but in favour of a
nother system, another moral universe – the world of Pericles or of Scipio, or even of the Duke of Valentino, a society geared to ends just as ultimate as the Christian faith, a society in which men fight and are ready to die for (public) ends which they pursue for their own sakes. They are choosing not a realm of means (called politics) as opposed to a realm of ends (called morals), but opt for a rival (Roman or classical) morality, an alternative realm of ends. In other words the conflict is between two moralities, Christian and pagan (or, as some wish to call it, aesthetic), not between autonomous realms of morals and politics.

  Nor is this a mere question of nomenclature, unless politics is conceived as being concerned not (as it usually is) with means, skills, methods, techniques, ‘know-how’, Croce’s pratica (whether or not governed by unbreakable rules of its own), but with an independent kingdom of ends of its own, sought for their own sake, a substitute for ethics.87 When Machiavelli said (in a letter to Francesco Vettori) that he loved his native city more than his own soul, he revealed his basic moral beliefs, a position with which Croce does not credit him.88

  The second thesis in this connection which seems to me mistaken is the idea that Machiavelli viewed the crimes of his society with anguish. (Chabod in his excellent study, unlike Croce and some Croceans, does not insist on this.) This entails that he accepts the dire necessities of the raison d’état with reluctance, because he sees no alternative. But there is no evidence for this: there is no trace of agony in his political works, any more than in his plays or letters.