Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  All Machiavelli’s important political writings date to the period following his expulsion from office, but though he was banished from the Palazzo della Signoria his perspective remains that of the civil servant. This gives his books a unique flavor among the great works of political philosophy. They are pragmatic, acerbic, filled with penetrating insights into matters both great and small, and always faithful to the principles that guided him as an agent of the Florentine government: to provide the clearest, most useful analysis of any situation, free from cant and stripped of illusion.

  Perhaps the best way to frame Machiavelli’s revolutionary approach is to compare him to the man whose life in many ways most closely paralleled his own. Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman who turned to philosophy after being forced from political office in circumstances not dissimilar to those that ended the career of Florence’s Second Chancellor. As a Roman consul who found himself on the wrong side of history when he backed Cassius and Brutus in their war with the heirs of Caesar, Cicero was forced to retire to his country villa.iii For thousands of years men looked to Cicero’s essays for an eloquent defense of the vita contemplativa, his authority enhanced by his impeccable credentials as a practitioner of the vita activa. Cicero described his coming of age as a philosopher in De Officiis:

  If things had gone better I should never have been devoting my attention to writing, as I do now. No, I would have been delivering public addresses, as I used to in the days when we still had a government . . . . Every scrap of my energy, attention and care used to go to politics. So when there was no such thing as politics any more, it was inevitable that my voice should be heard in the Forum and Senate no longer. Yet how could I let my mind become completely idle? . . . [T]he terrible calamities that have descended on us nowadays have at least made it possible to extract one advantage from the situation. That is to say, they have given me the opportunity to prepare written accounts of extremely worthwhile subjects which our compatriots have never known enough about before.

  For Cicero banishment from public life turns out to be a blessing in disguise, allowing him the serenity to turn his mind to timeless truths. Machiavelli, by contrast, thought the life of the mind poor compensation for what he had lost. Not only is he incapable of summoning Cicero’s serenity, but the source of his frustration lies in something Cicero would not have understood or sympathized with. “I believe that if His Holiness would put me to work,” Machiavelli pleads with Vettori, “I would not only help myself but also bring honor and benefits to all my friends.” For Machiavelli “work” and “benefits”iv are intimately bound up with “honor,” a modern, bourgeois notion that ran counter to millennia of teaching in which leisure was deemed essential to the cultivation of the noble spirit.v Cicero considered public life a burden, shouldered only reluctantly out of a sense of duty to his country; relieved of that burden he is free to return to the way of life he found most congenial.vi Machiavelli, showing himself to be no gentleman, feels useless without his old job. In the wake of their misfortunes both unemployed politicians turned to writing, but while Cicero leaves behind his former life with few regrets, Machiavelli acts like a jilted lover still obsessed with the woman who scorned him.

  Machiavelli did not share the aristocrat’s contempt for honest labor; indeed, he could hardly afford to. He belonged to the professional class, which in Florence included notaries, lawyers, and physicians—educated men who worked for a living and who stood uneasily between the ruling elite and the mass of illiterate workers and peasants. He was a salary man, a “working stiff” to borrow a modern phrase, and embraced the role of a civil servant that a true gentleman would have found degrading. As befit a true professional, he offered his expertise rather than an abstract philosophy suitable for the academy. “[I]n this work I have expressed all that I know and all that I have learned from a long practice and from continual study of the ways of this world,” he wrote in the dedication to The Discourses, confirming that his natural habitat is the bustling office, not the ivory tower.

  For centuries, proponents of the vita contemplativa celebrated the simple joys of country life. Machiavelli’s famous letter to Vettori in which he first mentions The Prince stands the tradition of the bucolic idyll on its head. His version of country life is not marked, like Cicero’s, by philosophical reflection but by “a thousand squabbles and angry words,” the vitriol not diminished by the insignificance of the stakes. If his status as a property owner raises him above his fellow villagers, relations are marked by rivalry and competition for resources rather than by reverence and awe. Instead of happy shepherds playing their flutes and dreaming of lovely nymphs—a poetic vision favored by aristocratic Florentines like Lorenzo the Magnificent—Machiavelli gives us toothless peasants who cheat at cards and plot to swindle their neighbors. In life, as in his speculative philosophy, Machiavelli deemed it best to stick to the reality of things.

  Machiavelli’s realism is both aesthetic and substantive. He turns the same unsparing eye on his country neighbors as he does on the great lords of Europe, accepting human nature as he finds it and offering advice on how to prosper in a world populated by scoundrels. And if his view of human nature is unsentimental, it is also generous, accepting, and open to the comedy inherent in daily existence.

  The difference between Machiavelli’s attitude and that of Cicero is largely one of social standing. Machiavelli can’t afford to romanticize the poor peasants who surround him since he is not far removed from their condition. In fact he is engaged in a daily battle to avoid being pulled down to their level. Honest labor is the antidote to a life of shabby indolence, and, conversely, those who live off the toil of others are a threat to good government. In The Discourses Machiavelli derides those gentlemen “who live in idleness on the abundant revenue derived from their estates, without having anything to do either with their cultivation or with other forms of labor essential to life. Such men are a pest in any republic . . . but still more pernicious are those who, in addition to the aforesaid revenues, have castles under their command and subjects who are under their obedience . . . . For men born in such conditions are inimical to any form of civic government.”

  Here Machiavelli shows himself to be a true child of Florence, product of a merchant culture that valued work and carried in its collective consciousness a memory of the battles required to free itself from the grasp of the feudal aristocracy. In particular, he is a product of the Florentine professional class, that pool of educated men dependent on their wealthier patrons for their livelihood. While it is true that many a Florentine merchant wished nothing more than to accumulate enough wealth to retire to a castle in the countryside where he could ape the manners of an idle lord, Machiavelli was never tempted by a life of pampered indolence. Perhaps if he had been richer the pleasures of idleness might have been more appealing, but given his poverty, inactivity meant disgrace.

  Machiavelli, for all his financial insecurity, is not a dependent but rather a client, a subtle but important distinction. Unlike Erasmus, who joined the court of Charles V, Machiavelli hoped to sell his services to his social superiors but was never completely under their thumb. His relations with the great and near great of Florence were mediated by his salary, which put him in a subservient position while still leaving him his own man. His condition prefigures that of countless men and women in the following centuries, that great class of salaried professionals who labor in anonymity but whose income permits a modicum of autonomy and self-respect. His work ethic, unsentimental attitude toward his inferiors, and cynicism toward those above him in the pecking order, foreshadow the world to come. One can sense in Machiavelli the bourgeois’s fragile vanity, where servility wars with pride and feelings of shame at his neediness are alleviated by a healthy sense of his own abilities.

  Machiavelli’s insecure status in society goes a long way toward explaining his novel approach to timeworn themes. Gone are those hazy abstractions favored by earlier philosophers, replaced by a hardheaded assess
ment built on years of experience. “I have no greater gift to offer you,” he tells his patron, “than the ability to comprehend in a very brief time all that I, over many years and through much toil and many dangers, have come to learn and understand.” What could be further from the vita contemplativa than a life of “labors and danger”? It is the fruits of this workaday life that Machiavelli can offer his patron, bringing a professional’s coldly calculating eye to material once thought suitable only to learned scholars who rarely left the sanctuary of their book-lined studies.

  • • •

  The Prince was not the only important work that emerged from this most difficult period in Machiavelli’s life. Even as he was writing his most famous tract, he was hard at work on a more substantial manuscript whose theme the Medici lords might have found less appealing.vii Machiavelli first gives a hint of a second work early in the pages of The Prince. “I shall leave out any discussion of republics,” he informs his readers, “since I have discussed them at length elsewhere.” This casual remark is crucial not only for determining the chronology of his two most important philosophical books (he apparently worked on both simultaneously in the initial period following his forced retirement) but, more importantly, in resolving the apparently contradictory picture each presents of its author. Those who know Machiavelli only through his most famous book tend to consider him an apologist for tyranny, while to those who have dived into the denser material of The Discourses he appears a stalwart defender of republican government. Those conversant with both sometimes dismiss him as an opportunist, willing to sell his intellectual virtue to whoever is paying his wages.

  Machiavelli’s Discourses—or to give its full title, The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Liviusviii—is no minor or secondary work. Not only is it considerably longer than The Prince, but in its pages Machiavelli gives the fullest account of his political philosophy. He himself considered it his most important contribution to political theory, and would certainly have been amused, if not bewildered, to learn that this substantial and erudite work would ultimately be eclipsed by its slighter companion. While The Prince is something of a polemic—a brilliant and passionate argument written in response to a personal and political crisis—The Discourses presents a reasoned inquiry, based on historical precedents, into the nature of government and a penetrating analysis of how states are formed, how they can be preserved, and what causes them to fail.

  The Discourses is in some respects a typical product of Florentine humanism, the intellectual movement that sought to revive the art, language, and literature of the classical past. Inspired by Petrarch’s pioneering scholarship in the mid-fourteenth century and primarily associated with Florence, this cultural and literary revival challenged the established order by placing on an equal footing with the teachings of the Church Fathers a body of work of great ambition and sophistication written by men who knew nothing of the Gospels. Rediscovering the depth and breadth of pagan learning and the glories of Greek and Roman art, both excited and unsettled generations of Florentines as accepted wisdom was reexamined in the light of novel ideas—anxieties exploited by fundamentalists like Savonarola, whose preaching satisfied a longing for certainty.

  Machiavelli, though he belonged to a generation that had grown up on the great classical texts, was perhaps the first to face squarely the challenge posed by the revival of ancient learning. Most of his contemporaries were content to spend their leisure hours absorbed in a volume of erotic poetry by Ovid or Caesar’s history of the Gallic Wars, and then make their way to church to attend Mass, oblivious to the ethical and intellectual acrobatics required to embrace both worldviews. Machiavelli confronts the essential contradiction: that accepting the teaching of the Gospels and simultaneously taking seriously the lessons taught by the pagan philosophers and historians plunged one into a vertiginous world of paradox and moral ambiguity.

  The unsettled and unsettling nature of Machiavelli’s writing is a product of this clash of mutually exclusive systems of value, one of which makes a claim on our faith, the other on our reason. It is a clash that can be resolved only through deception, that most Machiavellian of expedients:

  A prince, therefore, cannot in fact possess all the virtues previously mentioned, but he would do well to appear to possess them. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that should he have all the virtues and observe them at all times it would be positively harmful, though appearing to be virtuous would prove consistently useful. It would serve him to appear pious, faithful, humane, true, religious, and even to be so, but only if he is willing, should it become necessary, to act in the opposite manner. It must be understood 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.

  Machiavelli was not the first to recognize that it was impossible for a politician to live according to the precepts set down by Jesus and his disciples, but he was the first to openly endorse appearing to live by one set of standards while secretly adopting another. Without explicitly rejecting the faith into which he had been born, he demonstrates time and again which set of values he esteems more.

  Machiavelli builds The Discourses around one of the key sources of Roman history, Titus Livius’s History of Rome. It was a text that had particular significance for him. His father, Bernardo, had spent many years compiling an index for a new, multivolume edition and in return for this scholarly effort had received a set of the books, which otherwise he could not have afforded. It was these precious family heirlooms that Niccolò now consulted as the basis for his own monumental undertaking.

  In his fascination with ancient, particularly Roman, history, and in his tendency to view his own times through the lens of the distant past, Machiavelli differed little from other well-educated Florentines. But while he and his peers were steeped in the same cultural brew, Machiavelli transformed the common intellectual material of the day into something new. When he showed the still unfinished work to Jacopo Nardi, his friend marveled that it presented “a new argument, never (that I know) essayed by any other.” Machiavelli himself believed that what he was attempting constituted a radical departure from the self-consciously antiquarian tomes of his peers. In the preface to The Discourses he writes that “for the common benefit of all, I have decided to follow a path that has not yet been explored by anyone,” a claim that echoes one made in The Prince, where he says “I intend to depart substantially from what others have said.”ix

  In The Prince the claim of originality is followed by one of his more startling prescriptions—that the sensible ruler will always strive to appear good, while sticking to the good only as long as it proves useful to him. In The Discourses the claim of originality involves what appears at first to be a less radical departure from tradition. Machiavelli insists that, while antique forms are widely admired, the substance of the ancients’ achievement is neglected. “[I]n the governing of kingdoms, in forming an army or conducting a war, in adjudicating the disputes of one’s subjects, or in adding to empire, one finds neither princes, nor republics, nor captains, nor citizens who turn to the ancients for examples,” he grumbles.

  This might seem like a minor distinction. After all, most educated Florentines were already obsessed with the culture of ancient Greece and Rome, as familiar with the history of the Peloponnesian War as they were with their own recent struggles with Pisa or Milan. In fact religious zealots like Savonarola accused them of being more pagan than Christian. Machiavelli could not disagree more. Admiration for the ancients is superficial, he insists; his compatriots were dazzled by appearances while they failed to probe essentials. The important question to ask is not what made the proportions of the Pantheon so harmonious, but what allowed Alexander to conquer most of the known world with modest numbers of disciplined troops; not which rhyme scheme Virgil employed in The Aeneid, but what caused a small vill
age along the marshy banks of the Tiber to grow and prosper until it ruled an empire that stretched from the Euphrates to the Thames:

  When, therefore, I consider in what honor antiquity is held, and how—to cite but one instance—a bit of an old statue has fetched a high price that someone may have it by him to give honor to his house . . . and when, on the other hand, I notice that what history has to say about the highly virtuous actions performed by ancient kingdoms and republics, by their kings, their generals, their citizens, their legislators, and by others who have gone to the trouble of serving their country, is rather admired than imitated; nay, is so shunned by everybody in each little thing they do, that the virtue of bygone days there remains no trace, it cannot but fill me at once with astonishment and grief.

  Machiavelli is urging nothing less than a revolution of values to complete the revolution of taste that has already occurred. While many admired the beauty of ancient art and the sophistication of its poetry, Machiavelli believed that his contemporaries failed to grasp that the genius of the ancients lay in the virtue (or virtù) of the men who plied the chisel and the pen, and, more importantly, of those who wrote the laws and fought the battles.x Unless men embrace those ancient virtues, history will continue on its downward spiral: “[S]ince fortune is changeable, republics and states also change frequently. And they will go on changing until someone comes along who is so enamored of antiquity that he arranges things in such a manner that fortune does not, with every turn of the sun, show what she is capable of.”