by Nancy Reagin
Cicero’s political oratory was unequalled.
Cicero was also right to be concerned in his own case: despite Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March, 44 BC, his adoptive heir, Octavian, became the first proper emperor of Rome in 27 BC and began the 180-year Pax Romana.24 The constitutional balance of power shifted from the Senate’s auctoritas to the emperor’s potestas, and the control of the former by the latter was absolute. In spite of this, Cicero’s vision lived on at the heart of republicanism, an ideal that survived the waning of the Roman Republic.
The beginning of the end for the Republic. (Revenge of the Sith)
“The Dark Side Clouds Everything”
Although republican government was to remain submerged in European society for more than a thousand years, the Middle Ages were still intimately shaped by the legacy of the Roman Empire. A new layer was added to medieval kingship and the feudal economy by the application of Christianity and its distinctive morality. Rulers and the ruled became more concerned about the legitimacy of regimes than ever before, and Christian virtues overtook secular ones in defining the public good. St. Augustine believed that just civic arrangements followed two rules: “do no harm to anyone” and “help everyone whenever possible.”25 From St. Augustine’s point of view, the overweening desire for secular political power could be traced back to the Fall, which starkly contrasted with the peacefulness of Augustine’s “City of God.”
In the medieval era, the devious ins and outs of court culture defined much of the constellation of politics orbiting kings, queens, and princes. The picture is of a coterie of “officials, clerics, and nobles who attended the king more or less regularly in both informal and formal capacities,” pusillanimously seeking patronage or access to the head of state.26 In response, the twelfth-century Englishman John of Salisbury spent hundreds of pages in his book Policratius decrying flattery. “Success, implacable foe of virtue, applauds its devotees only to harm them, and with its ill-starred prosperity escorts them on their joyous way to bring about their ultimate fall,” he wrote.27 John was echoing the views of Aristotle and Cicero. For him, courtier culture inevitably inspired avarice, pride, vanity, competitiveness, envy, and hatred, in both rulers and the ruled. In such a situation, the Sith Code would dictate that we should be a manipulative courtier, rather than the self-deceived monarch. Indeed, this is one possible interpretation of how Darth Sidious ingratiates himself with so many different forces—the Neimodians, Count Dooku, Anakin Skywalker. Each is powerful in his own right, but also flawed in a way that Sidious is clever enough to exploit. One wonders whether his own pasty-faced lackeys in Return of the Jedi were trying to turn the same trick on him.
Machiavelli, breaking away from this tradition in the Renaissance, would have us be neither of these. If anyone has followed the dictates of the man whom Shakespeare has Richard III admiringly refer to as “the murderous Machiavel,” it must be Darth Sidious. Sidious is a true Sith pioneer, avoiding direct confrontations, yet working to destroy the Republic from within. Palpatine’s bid for power is a wedge between a manufactured external threat—Dooku’s Separatist Confederacy, backed by the Trade Federation’s Droid Army—and internal corruption and loss of a common center in the galactic polity. His strategy shrewdly exploits the rational self-interest of the Senators and their constituents, promising protection from the Separatists, but not until the situation is at its most dire. By actively engineering a formidable threat to the Republic (as Sidious) and slowly but surely taking the reins of military and political control (as Supreme Chancellor), Palpatine embraces the ominous dictum that “the ends justify the means.”
Machiavelli immortalized this dictum in his book The Prince (published in 1532). In its pages, he famously claimed that since “men love at their own will and fear at the will of the prince,” it is “far safer to be feared than loved.”28 Machiavelli demonstrates here the acute understanding of human psychology and its application to effective ruling that has earned him his place in history as one of the inventors of modern political theory. His “political science” was, in many ways, ahead of its time.
Does it really make sense to make deals with Sith? (The Phantom Menace)
Machiavelli was an adviser to the powerful who died in poverty.
Yet Machiavelli is also a man of his time, in his interest in using the models of classical Greece and Rome as guides: Renaissance humanism of Machiavelli’s age used historical cultures and actors as sources of inspiration for the present. If it seems odd that The Prince is a book that emerges from humanism, consider that its genesis also lies in an Italy torn apart by the European powers, its former republics rent by the antagonism of factions, while the liberties of the people withered in the face of the growth of private wealth.29 In 1494, Charles VIII of France forced Florence and Rome into submission and pillaged the countryside. His successor, Louis XII, mounted three more invasions, “generating endemic warfare throughout Italy.”30 Not to be outdone, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V invaded as well, turning Italy into a bloody battle-ground for thirty years.
The Prince confronts this kind of political violence as a new fact of life. The charismatic and ruthless Cesare Borgia (1476?–1507), the bastard son of Pope Alexander VI and gonfaloniere of the papal states, was one of Machiavelli’s inspirations. It was not merely Borgia’s means, but his ends that attracted Machiavelli: Borgia put an end to the cruel and ineffective governance of the petty lords of the region of the Romagna, thus lifting a long-standing burden from the shoulders of its people.31 Machiavelli admired Borgia—as he did the classical leader Hannibal—and concluded that both rulers’ “inhuman cruelty” was the key to their glorious success. Machiavelli insisted that we must accept that “if a ruler is genuinely concerned to ‘maintain his state,’ he will have to shake off the demands of Christian virtue, wholeheartedly embracing the very different morality which his situation dictates.”32
Cesare Borgia takes a break from poisoning old allies.
It’s not surprising, then, that Machiavelli didn’t dare to publish The Prince during his lifetime, and when it was printed after his death, The Prince was put on the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of officially prohibited books in 1559. The book, first printed in 1532, “found very few discerning readers who understood its value. At the same time, it found a host of enemies who saw it as an evil work, inspired directly by the devil, in which a malevolent author teaches a prince how to win and keep power through avarice, cruelty, and falseness, making cynical use of religion as a tool to keep the populace docile,” wrote a recent biographer of Machiavelli.33
Yet as much as readers of The Prince focus on its callous demand to choose fear over love, it also has many illustrations of entirely moral principles, such as the one that rulers should temper their worst impulses in dealing with their subjects. This advice would have been quite acceptable to the ancient Romans whom Machiavelli admired so much. With it, he is recommending that princes consider putting aside the indiscriminate use of coercive potestas in favor of well-thought-out auctoritas, that is, the “soft” power that relies on understanding of, and respect from, one’s subjects. As we’ll see, Palpatine relies on the mastery of the first of these, but only the semblance of the second.
“A Pathway to Many Abilities Some Consider to Be Unnatural”
We have already seen the parallels between two histories: one of Greek tyranny and Roman dictatorship, the other of the rise and fall of the Galactic Republic. How much blame for the demise of a great civilization can we lay at the feet of its primary architect, Darth Sidious? Or—not quite the same question—how Machiavellian was Palpatine? Machiavelli might have admired Palpatine more for his highly organized, long game of seizing power than for what Palpatine does once he has power.
On the one hand, the Emperor recognizes that the successful Machiavellian ruler must commit his regime to constant war. Heeding Machiavelli’s often-repeated advice, Palpatine puts no trust in mercenary armies, even hardwiring in
to the program of an entire clone army various orders.34 Despite this, he has often had use for bounty hunters, particularly Cad Bane, whom he employs in a number of episodes of The Clone Wars. Machiavelli warns “the Prince” that because mercenaries have no fealty to those who employ them, their devotion to protecting property and persons should always be suspect. Despite her ruthless devotion to fulfilling her contracts, Aurra Sing’s intense hatred of the Jedi threatens to distract her from her work for her employers. We see evidence of this when she teams up with the young Boba Fett to assassinate Mace Windu in The Clone Wars’ “Death Trap.”
Learning from the best: Aurra Sing and Boba Fett. (The Clone Wars)
Throughout history, these Machiavellian lessons have been taught well outside of Renaissance Italy. Similar to early China’s brutal “First Emperor,” Qin Shi Huangdi (246–210 BC), Emperor Palpatine enforces a strict “resistance is futile” policy through the construction of a totalitarian New Order in the galaxy.35 Imperial industries produce deadly engines of battle, such as the colossal Star Destroyers and the nimble TIE fighters. This New Order encourages the growth of a new type of rapacious individual. One of these, the Grand Moff Tarkin, is put in charge of the Death Star, a crystallization of the Empire’s technological terror. Like Palpatine, Tarkin is someone whom impetuous young Anakin Skywalker looks up to for his criticisms of the inefficiency of the Jedi during times of war. In The Clone Wars’ “Counterattack,” Tarkin mirrors Machiavelli’s disdain for conventional morality and religion when he tells Anakin, “I find [the Jedi’s] tactics ineffective. The Jedi Code prevents them from going far enough to achieve victory, to do whatever it takes to win, the very reason why peacekeepers should not be leading a war.”
On the other hand, as a Sith Lord, Sidious violates Machiavelli’s principle that cruelty must not be used indiscriminately. We see his cold-blooded nature onscreen, commanding Trade Federation troops on Naboo to “wipe them out. All of them.” He proves there’s no honor among Dark Lords when he sacrifices Darth Tyranus to his desire for a more powerful apprentice in Revenge of the Sith, compelling Anakin to execute his former apprentice. Off-screen, his crimes are even more remarkable: he murders his Master, Darth Plagueis—required by the Sith “Rule of Two,” but nonetheless a reminder to an aspiring Sith Lord to put off taking an apprentice until the last possible moment!
Darth Sidious, despite his immense power, still doesn’t want to reveal his hand until absolutely necessary. Yet for Machiavelli, part of the “virtue” of the successful prince was that he was publicly seen to be possessed of great mercy and great cruelty, of both magnificence and ruthlessness. In his role as a politician, Palpatine employs the publicly acceptable force of auctoritas to get things done, and here he is an ideal Machiavellian, “using his grasp of psychology and bureaucracy to stifle justice” and bringing about successive crises for the Republic, each of which helps build his political and military powers.36 Against the background of an increasingly corrupt Senate, Palpatine has both unethical, manipulative means and legitimate institutional channels to achieve his unscrupulous ends. He has learned the central Machiavellian lesson well:
I will even be so bold as to say that it actually does a prince harm to have those good qualities and always observe them. But appearing to have them will benefit him. Of course, it is best to both seem and be merciful, loyal, humane, upright, and scrupulous. And yet one’s spirit should be calculated in such a way that one can, if need be, turn one’s back on these qualities and become the opposite. . . . He must have a spirit that can change depending on the winds and variation of Fortune, and as I have said above, he must not, if he is able, distance himself from what is good, but must also, when necessary, know how to prefer what is bad.37
Yet not until he becomes Emperor does Palpatine seem to be able to employ wholesale the central Machiavellian tool of direct application of fear, “held in place by a dread of punishment, which one can always rely on.”38 The asymmetry in the Sith “Rule of Two” between Master and Apprentice means that Vader is used as a “blunt instrument” of Palpatine’s policy, often being kept in the dark himself about the Emperor’s ultimate goals. Former allies such as the Trade Federation are simply absorbed into the Empire, dissidents are sent to the spice mines of Kessel, and the only programming available on the HoloNet is Imperial propaganda. Palpatine does away with the Senate in A New Hope, working most effectively with the governors of planetary systems who are willing to use the same terror tactics and ultimately using the Death Star to instill fear throughout the galaxy.
Power play: Supreme Chancellor Palpatine tricks Anakin Skywalker into becoming his new apprentice. (Revenge of the Sith)
And Yet . . .
Overheard in the Mos Eisley Cantina: “Say what you will about Palpatine, at least he made the Corellian freighters run on time.”39 It’s hard to believe that there are some who will actually miss his totalitarian rule after his death, but history has demonstrated this does happen in the cases of dictators such as Stalin and Mao Zedong. Therefore, it’s important to keep in mind that the rule of the ruthless, in our galaxy or any other, can’t be credited merely to the scheming of one man. Conditions of cultural decadence, political amoralism, and unrestrained, all-consuming commerce and industry paved the way for the Empire. As Padmé observes, liberty died not with a whimper, but to thunderous applause.
Although Machiavelli told us how to manipulate the public in The Prince, he conceded in his Discourses (1531) that absolute power should not be concentrated in the hands of one corruptible individual. Instead, “the willingness to do what is necessary to advance the common good, and thereby acquire glory for the city, is virtue (virtù), which for Machiavelli explains why monarchies cannot compete with republics.”40 The Discourses imagined government along the lines of the Roman Republic, not the absolute dictatorship of the Empire. It returned to the examples of Aristotle, Cicero, and John of Salisbury in extolling the ideal of the virtuous citizen supporting a free republic. Machiavelli’s ideal republic in the Discourses “maintain[s] a free constitution under which every citizen is able to enjoy an equal opportunity of involving himself actively in the business of government.”41 So although the onscreen work of the Rebellion against the Empire is shown mainly in the hands of X-wing pilots and forest-moon commandos, we should not forget the serious, if less flashy, roles of Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, and Leia Organa in preparing for a new and, it is hoped, more virtuous estate after the Empire’s fall.
Luke and Anakin, face to face. (Return of the Jedi)
Similar to the Star Wars universe, Machiavelli’s world of warring Renaissance Italian city-states—like the Roman Empire—was “a political universe inhabited at its very center by magic.”42 For Sidious, this magic is the Force; for the Romans, the emperor himself was divine; for Machiavelli, the power of Fortuna (fortune), often symbolized as an inconstant woman or an ever-turning wheel. The need to outguess and outmaneuver fortune is one of the important lessons in political history and the hardest to master. Its test is one that Emperor Palpatine ultimately fails, because of an unexpected, yet highly fortunate bond: that between a father and his son.
Notes
1. Stephen J. Sansweet and Peter Vilmur, The Star Wars Vault: Thirty Years of Treasures from the Lucasfilm Archives (New York: Harper/Lucasfilm, 2007), 22.
2. Civic virtue includes the responsibility not only to hold office, but also to deliberate on important affairs, pay fair taxes, and maintain respect for fellow citizens, even in times of intense disagreement. So you can see how contemporary America is not a republic!
3. Bruni, as interpreted by J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Theory and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 88.
4. A parallel development occurs in ancient China, as the virtue- and duty-based philosophy of Confucius (551–479 BC) becomes the standard by which the vast Chinese bureaucratic structure of the Mandarins would judge themselves; see John
Keay, China: A History (New York: Basic Books, 2009), chap. 2.
5. Aristotle, Politics, 1295a 20–23, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2056.
6. McCormick, “From Constitutional Technique to Caesarist Ploy,” in Baehr and Richter, Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism (Washington, DC, and New York: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2004), 198.
7. Herodotus, “Tyranny in Corinth,” in Donald Kagan, ed., Problems in Ancient History, Volume One: The Ancient Near East and Greece (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 205.
8. Aristotle, Politics 1310b, 15–16, 2070.
9. Aristotle, “Constitution of Athens,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2056.