Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  Right and wrong, then, are determined not in the individual conscience but in society, whose ultimate expression is the state and whose preservation, in peace and security, is necessary to human happiness. “It must be understood,” he says, “that a prince, especially a newly crowned prince, cannot observe all those things that give a man a reputation for goodness, it often being necessary, for the preservation of the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion.” The relevant question for Machiavelli is not whether one’s own soul is pure, but whether the choices one makes contribute in the long run to the collective good. Using this social calculus, Machiavelli discovers that many forms of behavior condemned by traditional moralists actually promote the general welfare. This is particularly true in judging the deeds of those entrusted with the care of the state. Murdering potential rivals may be wrong by traditional measures, but it may well spare the people the horrors of civil war. As Cosimo de’ Medici, the former strongman of Florence, once remarked: “states cannot be held with paternosters.”

  Like Hobbes a century and a half later, Machiavelli justified drastic measures in the name of security since the alternative was far worse. A well-ordered polity provides a check on human appetites and ambitions that would otherwise run amok, causing untold misery.xxii “[W]hen the safety of one’s country wholly depends on the decision to be taken, no attention should be paid either to justice or injustice, to kindness or cruelty, or to its being praiseworthy or ignominious. On the contrary, every other consideration being set aside, that alternative should be wholeheartedly adopted which will save the life and preserve the freedom of one’s country.”

  These and other similar pronouncements have earned Machiavelli the reputation as father of the concept raison d’état (reason of state). Since this doctrine has been deployed by many a regime to justify the suppression of individual liberties, Machiavelli has been accused of being complicit in tyranny. It is a valid criticism up to a point. Machiavelli considers almost any form of government, no matter how oppressive, as worthy of our sacrifice and entitled to our devotion. But the state is not an end in itself. Rather, the state demands our obedience because it is the vital bulwark against the forces of chaos.xxiii To the totalitarian, citizens exist to serve the state, while for Machiavelli the state exists to serve the citizens. His own experience had shown him that oppressive yet well-ordered governments produced far less suffering than permissive governments where neither person nor property was safe, but he also insists that in the long run the most stable and productive societies are those, like the Roman Republic, that promoted liberty and accepted a degree of civil strife as the price for that freedom.xxiv

  Machiavelli is both cynical about and tolerant of human nature. All men may be “wicked,” as he asserts, but what he really means is that all men are animals who act according to their bestial natures. Where Aristotle declared that what distinguished man from the rest of creation was the exercise of reason,xxv Machiavelli stresses our kinship with the animals. All living beings are defined by unreasonable appetite, and humans are no exception. We are selfish and self-serving, cowardly, dishonest, and greedy, but Machiavelli refuses to pass judgment. “[I]t is impossible to go against what nature inclines us to do,” he says. He accepts our failings, just as he indulged his own vices, preferring to deploy wry humor rather than harsh censure. One vice he lacked was hypocrisy, the vice that justifies all other vices by refusing to recognize in oneself the sins attributed to others.

  In the eyes of future generations Machiavelli’s greatest crime, the characteristic that has become most closely identified with the term Machiavellian, is his disdain for the cardinal virtue of honesty. Machiavelli himself contributed to this perception, boasting on occasion of his own duplicitous nature. Writing to Guicciardini about an elaborate practical joke the two of them were playing on the simple villagers of Carpi, he proclaims: “As for the lies of these citizens of Carpi, I can beat all of them out, because it has been a while since I have become a doctor of this art . . . so, for some time now I have never said what I believe or believed what I said; and if indeed I do sometimes tell the truth, I hide it behind so many lies that it is hard to find.” But this is little more than wishful thinking. Machiavelli may have been an admirer of cleverness in others, but he was in fact something of a naïf, offending those around him by telling them exactly what he thought. In fact Machiavelli was among the most honest—even tactless—of men. It is his brutal frankness, not his prevarications, that caused him so much trouble. What kind of liar would make such a confession or publicly announce his belief that deception is often the most effective strategy? It is the deceiver who conceals his art by playing the part of an honest man.

  Even more than his advocacy of judicious cruelty, it is his promotion of judicious deceit that has made Machiavelli’s name synonymous with villainy. “[A] wise prince cannot keep his word when the situation alters to his disadvantage and when the basis on which he made the pledge no longer holds,” he insists. Anticipating in advance the abuse that will come his way, he returns to that critical distinction between the world as it should be, the “fancies” imagined by philosophers, and the world as it really is: “If all men were good, this precept would not be good, but since they are wicked and would not keep faith with you, you need not keep faith with them.”

  Equally cynical is his contention that a prince who cannot afford to be virtuous must nonetheless appear to be so: “I know everyone agrees that it would be laudable for a prince to possess every good quality. But since it is not possible to possess them all, or subscribe to them completely—the human condition being what it is—it is necessary to be sufficiently prudent to avoid gaining a reputation for those vices which would cost him his state . . . . For, everything considered, he will discover things which, though seeming virtuous, will cause his ruin, and others which, though seeming wicked, will make him secure and promote his well-being.”xxvi

  In noting the strategic uses of cruelty and deceit, Machiavelli dismisses millennia of ethical teaching as irrelevant to the way men and women actually live. The revolution achieved by The Prince is to engineer a radical shift in perspective away from the God-centered universe of previous thinkers to one in which the human animal takes his place alongside the other beasts in a perpetual struggle for security and the gratification of appetite. “[S]o great is man’s ambition that, in striving to slake his present desire, he gives no thought to the evils that in a short time will follow in its wake,” Machiavelli observes in a passage that is echoed a century and a half later in the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes.xxvii In The Discourses, he offers a similarly bleak assessment: “[H]uman appetites are insatiable, for by nature we are so constituted that there is nothing we cannot long for, but by fortune we are such that of these things we can attain but few. The result is that the human mind is perpetually discontented, and of its possessions is apt to grow weary.” The moral architecture of sin and redemption painstakingly constructed over the centuries by the Church has vanished, replaced by the empirical methodology of the laboratory. In this new setting the moralist gives way to the political scientist, whose job is not to condemn human nature but to describe it in order to minimize its most pernicious effects. Instead of the morally freighted concept of original sin, Machiavelli offers up the morally neutral concept of human nature, something that must be managed rather than atoned for.

  • • •

  Machiavelli abandons the pose of clinical detachment he has deployed throughout The Prince in the book’s stirring final chapter. In “An Exhortation to Free Italy from the Hands of the Barbarians,” all the passion that has been bubbling just below the surface erupts in a brilliant and stirring peroration in which he paints an abject picture of contemporary Italy and calls upon the Medici lord to embrace his destiny as the nation’s liberator:

  Almost bereft of life, Italy waits for someone who can salve her wounds, put an end to the sacking of Lombardy, to the despoiling of Naples
and Tuscany, and heal those sores that have for too long festered. See how she prays God to send someone who will rescue her from the cruel and insolent barbarian. See, too, how eager she is to rally to any banner, so long as there is someone who will raise it.

  Many have discovered in this final chapter the key to Machiavelli’s own redemption. To those who accuse him of being the despot’s best friend, his defenders respond with this moving exhortation, as if to say that every uncomfortable recommendation that preceded it—every defense of violence, every attempt to justify deceit—can be forgiven (or at least explained) on the grounds that desperate times called for desperate measures, that only a leader as stone-hearted and ruthless as Machiavelli’s imaginary prince could save Italy from ruin.

  To the extent that Machiavelli justified dictatorship, it is clear that he thought of it as a temporary expedient. Looking back on Roman history in The Discourses, he remarks: “I claim that republics which, when in imminent danger, have recourse neither to a dictatorship, nor some form of authority analogous to it, will always be ruined when grave misfortune befalls them.” Tyranny is not the ideal form of government, but sometimes there is no alternative. Now, Machiavelli would argue, is one of those moments when only a firm hand on the tiller can steer the nation to safety. With the states of Italy bowed beneath a foreign yoke, only a strong leader possessed of immense courage and foresight and granted extraordinary powers can set free a suffering people. “And although someone may already have given us a glimmer of hope that he had been ordained by God for our redemption,” Machiavelli says in an oblique reference to Valentino, “still we saw how at the critical moment he was abandoned by fortune.”

  Only the house of Medici, he insists, can raise up the banner so recently laid down by the house of Borgia: “Nor at the moment can one see where one may place hope other than in your illustrious house,” he tells Lorenzo, “which, blessed by fortune and virtue, favored by God and by the Church, can place itself at the head of this campaign of redemption.” But in order to fulfill its glorious destiny, the ruling family of Florence must learn the lessons of history. Here Machiavelli turns to one of his favorite themes: the need for an army of citizen soldiers who fight not for pay but for love of country: “Should your house wish to emulate those great men who redeemed their countries, it will be necessary, above all other things, to furnish yourself with your own army, the foundation of every undertaking; for you cannot possess more loyal, truer, or better soldiers . . . . [C] ommanded by their own prince,” he concludes, “Italian valor will defend us from the foreigners.”

  If Machiavelli were in need of absolution, this final chapter might provide some measure of grace. He was above all an ardent patriot and had nothing but scorn for those corrupt weaklings who had plunged their nation into the abyss. Though his loyalties are no longer parochially Florentine—encompassing now the broader conception of an as yet unrealized Italian nation—his passion for his country, however defined, provides the guiding principle of all his policies.xxviii Much of the apparent harshness of The Prince stems from his realization that only a powerful lord, another Valentino, could rescue a people “more oppressed than the Hebrews, more enslaved than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians, without leaders, without order, beaten, despoiled, whipped, trampled, suffering every kind of ruin.”

  But though Machiavelli’s view of the world was shaped by contemporary events, the principles of conduct he lays out in his book have a more universal application. More important than any particular prescription—since each is only tentative, to be adopted as long as it is effective and discarded as soon as it proves faulty—is his perspective, his willingness to face a world where mankind has been left to its own devices. He provides a new moral architecture to replace the tottering edifice based on Christian virtues that were everywhere espoused and nowhere obeyed. He insists that we deal with the world as it is, rather than the world as we wish it were, separating once and for all the role of the political scientist from the theologian, the sociologist from the metaphysician.xxix

  One feature of the world that his predecessors largely neglected but that to Machiavelli was the very heart of the matter was the violent clash between opposing states. Medieval philosophers like Aquinas and Dante recognized that in the real world a prince might rule over limited territory and might be forced to take up arms against an unscrupulous colleague, but this was merely an unfortunate and temporary deviation from the ideal of a universal government sanctioned by God.xxx Machiavelli, by contrast, cannot conceive of government absent the state of war, calling it “the only art which is of concern to one who commands.” He can’t be bothered speculating about universal empires filled with happy subjects flourishing under the paternal care of a wise and serene monarch since it is the fact of man’s violent nature that makes government necessary in the first place. His is a Darwinian world where a prince must devour his neighbors before they have a chance to feast on him, where war is the normal condition and only the strong and cunning survive.

  If critics have detected in Machiavelli a moral slipperiness—a discreditable tendency to tailor principle to circumstance—this is because what mattered to him was not the individual conscience (or soul, to use the term that had greater currency in his own day) but the result of any course of action.xxxi Sometimes he seems to advocate tyranny as the solution to Italy’s problems; at other times, particularly in The Discourses, he argues at length for republican rule. These are mere details. Machiavelli’s originality lies in the ease with which his philosophy—or, more accurately, his approach, since philosophy implies a consistency he never aspires to—can accommodate both systems. Experience is his guide and expedience his god. One must stick to the path of the good as long as possible, he agrees, but when pursuit of this chimera leads one into treacherous thickets, the ruler must be prepared to abandon this elusive goal and strike out in a different direction.

  • • •

  Machiavelli’s letter to Francesco Vettori dated December 10, 1513, indicates that, a mere ten months after his release from prison, he had almost completed his brief tract. But now that he was nearing the end doubts began to creep in: “I have discussed this little study of mine with Filippo [Casavecchia] and whether or not it would be a good idea to present it [to Giuliano], and if it were a good idea, whether I should take it myself or send it to you. Against presenting it would be my suspicion that he might not even read it and that that person [Piero] Ardinghelli might take credit for this most recent of my endeavors.” His fear that Ardinghelli, one of Giuliano de’ Medici’s private secretaries, would take credit for his work suggests that Machiavelli thought he had achieved something notable. In an age before copyright protection, literary theft was a common occurrence, and Machiavelli had every reason to worry that others might claim his ideas as their own.xxxii

  In fact Machiavelli never sent the work to Giuliano, perhaps because Vettori’s response was discouraging. “When I have seen it,” Vettori told him, “I shall tell you my opinion about presenting it or not to the Magnificent Giuliano, as it may seem to me”—a less than ringing endorsement of the project. It may also have occurred to Machiavelli how unsuitable the text was for its intended recipient. In writing The Prince, Machiavelli had let his imagination and his hopes run away with him. Giuliano de’ Medici, the youngest son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, turned out to have been a man singularly ill adapted to play the role Machiavelli had assigned to him. He was cultured like his father but had none of the great man’s passion for statecraft. As one of the principal characters in Baldassare Castiglione’s popular The Courtier, a sixteenth-century guide to princely refinement and good breeding, Giuliano appears as an affable and sophisticated gentleman, hardly the ruthless leader Machiavelli was dreaming up in the pages of his book.xxxiii

  Machiavelli was not the only one frustrated in his attempt to refashion the young Medici lord into a great prince. Pope Leo had similar ambitions for his younger brother, and grew impatient as he, too, saw
his efforts fall short. Not long after ascending the papal throne Leo had named Giuliano Gonfaloniere of the Church, a position that Cesare Borgia had held before him; following the pattern set by the della Rovere family, he also made Giuliano a feudal lord by marrying him into the French nobility. Giuliano’s marriage to Philiberte of Savoy brought him the high-sounding title Duke of Nemours, but it could not light the fire of ambition in a man who preferred books and art to martial glory.

  In the end the fun-loving Giuliano could not live up to his résumé. He never fulfilled his brother’s expectations as the man who would extend the Medici dominion over north and central Italy, and was even more disappointing to those like Machiavelli who imagined him as the founder of a unified Italian state with Florence as its capital. In 1516 Giuliano succumbed to syphilis, a disease that had been brought to Italy by the invading French army in 1494. He lives on in history through the work of others rather than for anything he himself achieved.xxxiv

  When Machiavelli finally worked up the courage to send The Prince, he dedicated it to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Pope’s nephew, who now bore the hopes of the family as well as those of Florentine patriots. But Lorenzo proved no more capable than Giuliano. Leo’s attempts to create a strong principality in the heart of Italy ruled by the Medici family and strong enough to deter foreign armies foundered even more quickly than Alexander’s abortive efforts on behalf of his son. Machiavelli’s dream of a unified Italian state would have to wait more than three centuries until a generation of leaders—led by Garibaldi, Cavour, and Mazzini, with Vittorio Emmanuele taking up the mantle discarded by the Medici princelings—inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and fired by the patriotic exhortation of the Florentine civil servant, would drive the foreigners from native soil. As those nineteenth-century nationalists fought to liberate their nation from the Austrians, many marched into battle with the final words of The Prince ringing in their ears: