Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  The contest over the meaning of Machiavelli’s writings began even before his death. Shortly after he wrote The Prince, and years before it was actually published, Biagio Buonaccorsi wrote to a mutual friend that they must defend him against those who would try “to bite and tear him.” Even people accustomed to the worldly, cynical tone of Florentine political discourse found him abrasive and worried that his words could be put to evil uses. When the first Florentine edition of The Prince came out in 1532, his publisher offered the weak defense “that those who teach the use of herbs and medicines also give instruction in poisons so that, recognizing them, we may protect ourselves from them.”iii The notion that The Prince was not a handbook of tyranny but rather an exposé of the very thing it appeared to promote is an old one and reflects the degree of discomfort the book stirred even among Machiavelli’s friends.

  The truth, of course, is at once more subtle and more straightforward. Machiavelli clearly meant what he said in The Prince, but this small book represented only one aspect of a more complex body of thought that included The Discourses and other heartfelt defenses of republican government. He was neither an ideological democrat nor an apostle of tyranny, but rather a pragmatist who was willing to pursue whatever path seemed to offer the best chance of success at a given moment. He resembled one of those Renaissance mapmakers who, during the century or two before he wrote his seminal works, transformed cartography from a branch of theology—where the earth displayed the Garden of Eden and Jerusalem at its center—to a science based on observation and subject to empirical tests. Machiavelli himself pushes the metaphor in his dedication to The Discourses, where he begins: “Although owing to the envy inherent in man’s nature, it has always been no less dangerous to discover new ways and methods than to set off in search of new seas and unknown lands . . . I have decided to enter upon a new way, as yet untrodden by anyone else.” If his methodology was often flawed and his data inaccurate or incomplete, he shares these shortcomings with all who blaze trails through uncharted territory.

  Machiavelli is generally credited with founding the new field of political science, but when he is judged by the standards of the discipline he supposedly invented, he sometimes seems to fall short of the mark. Francis Bacon, father of the modern scientific method, never doubted the crucial importance of the Florentine’s insights, declaring “we are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.” Many others who followed in his footsteps faulted Machiavelli for his lack of consistency, but it is unfair to condemn him for not achieving a scientific rigor to which he never aspired. Although he attempted to place the study of politics on a more rational basis, his approach remains anecdotal rather than programmatic, as if he never really abandoned his role as a diplomat and bureaucrat dispensing practical advice for real-world situations.

  Unlike his successors—even those whose theories had a far greater impact on the way politics was actually practiced—Machiavelli looms large in the popular imagination, where his name has become associated not only with a particular approach to politics but with a particular type of personality. To describe someone as a Marxist is to define his political views; to describe someone as Machiavellian is to impugn his character. Machiavelli was certainly not the world’s first cynic, but he has been so closely identified with a certain kind of unscrupulousness that any manipulative, self-serving behavior is now described as Machiavellian.

  Machiavellianism in the popular imagination is little more than an endorsement of underhanded and immoral behavior. This largely inaccurate, or at least simplistic, interpretation is again a function of his pragmatism, an approach that offends those who insist that morality should be based on something more ethereal. One of Machiavelli’s most important contributions was to collapse the distinction between theory and practice, the vital first step in transforming the study of politics into a science. While Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas had dwelt in realms of abstract theory far removed from the places where men lived, Machiavelli took his role of adviser to a practicing politician seriously. As a writer he never really left behind the habits and attitudes he had developed in the Chancery of Florence, where he confronted on a daily basis crises that demanded a realistic assessment of facts. Assuming the worst of both friends and enemies was always the safest course, and in taking this approach he was rarely disappointed. Results were all that mattered. Instead of asking: What course of action should a prince take in order to be considered good? he asked what to him was the more important question: What course of action should a prince take to remain in power, without which his ability to do good vanishes altogether? “It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects,” he writes in The Discourses, “and that when the effect is good . . . it always justifies the action.” This is not an apology for selfishness, but rather a plea that we judge actions not in the abstract but by their consequences. Having spent many years closely observing the powerful, Machiavelli came to the conclusion that those whose actions conformed to traditional notions of virtue often invited calamity, while those who violated those standards often improved the lives of their citizens. Because he promoted what worked instead of what conformed to conventional notions of right and wrong, he provided ammunition to generations of the righteous who preferred to look down on him from their high horse rather than meeting him on his own ground.

  At the time of his death Machiavelli was better known as a satirist than as a political writer, particularly in Venice and Rome, where performances of La Mandragola were frequent and well received. This reputation changed in the following decades when all his major political works were published in multiple editions, evidence that they had struck a chord with a wider public. The businessmen who ran the small printing houses of the era soon learned that there was a reliable market for his work, and the more controversy the books generated, the more sales improved. By 1559, the Art of War had gone through thirteen editions, The Discourses twenty-six, The Prince seventeen, and the Florentine Histories fifteen, so that within a couple of decades of his death Machiavelli was among the biggest selling authors of the day.

  In part one can attribute Machiavelli’s posthumous success to an obvious but often overlooked aspect of his work: he is simply a wonderful writer.iv His Italian is spare, muscular, without those extraneous flourishes and literary devices beloved by his humanist colleagues. “I have not adorned this work,” he says in his dedication to The Prince, “with sonorous phrases, with pompous or magnificent words, or with any of those ingratiating or irrelevant ornaments with which many are apt to decorate their writings.” Such directness makes him a joy to read, but it also gets him into trouble when he exaggerates for effect. Many of his most shocking pronouncements—such as that it is better to be feared than loved, or that good princes must be good liars—turn out to be more nuanced than they at first appear, but as Guicciardini noted, his friend never sacrificed a memorable phrase for the sake of precision.

  Machiavelli’s writing and his thought are both marked by clarity and directness; he had a gift for penetration, for going straight to the heart of the matter without being distracted by superficialities. Just as in his prose he eliminates unnecessary ornaments of style, in his philosophy he strips away the phony pieties of religion and convention. His goal is always to discover the universal rules underlying the apparent chaos of the world and the truth hidden beneath the fancies spun by his fellow philosophers.

  Though the appeal of Machiavelli’s writings is universal, they spoke with particular eloquence to the new age whose painful birth pangs he witnessed in the last years of his life. They were a final creative utterance from the passing age of the small city-state republics, but they appeared to be addressed to the world to come—an age of sprawling nation-states proclaiming the divine right of kings. The Prince in particular, with its cunning hero ready to resort to any expedient to increase the reach of his power, seemed prophetic of the new world order where great monar
chs bestrode the continent, aided by vast bureaucracies that reached deep into the lives of ordinary people. The Machiavellian concept of raison d’état captured the ethos of these newly consolidated states: vast, impersonal, and ubiquitous. His nationalism, while poignant or even pathetic in the context of his native Italy, encouraged monarchs and civil servants in the rising states of Spain, France, and England who were intent on consolidating power over their own subjects as a prelude to projecting that power abroad. Not everyone agreed these innovations were beneficial, but few denied the relevance of the man who seemed able to peer into the future.

  Initially it was the Roman Church that led the charge against Machiavelli, its moral authority contributing to the popular image of him as a man in league with the Devil. In 1559 he was among the first writers placed on the first Papal Index of Prohibited Books, a perverse testament to his popularity since the Pope would not have singled him out if no one read him.v It is not surprising that the Pope came down hard on Machiavelli. His anticlericism, a common attitude in Renaissance Florence, was less acceptable in the era of the Council of Trent (1545–63) when the Church responded to the challenge of Protestantism by reforming and clarifying its doctrines and practices. Ambrogio Catharino, who was active at the council that launched the Counterreformation and influenced the decision to ban Machiavelli’s works, called him “wholly destitute of religion and a contemner thereof,” a common critique among churchmen, who felt themselves already under siege from heretics and had no tolerance for dissent from within the fold.

  Machiavelli’s inclusion on the Index reflected a growing consensus that he was a wicked man advocating wicked behavior. The first extended anti-Machiavellian diatribe came barely a decade after his death. It was written, perhaps surprisingly, by an Englishman, Cardinal Reginald Pole, whose 1539 Apologia Reginaldi Poli ad Carolum V (“Apology of Reginald Pole to Charles V”) credits the Florentine’s writings with a great and sinister influence. “This poison,” he wrote, “is spread through the courts of princes in this man’s books which are circulating almost everywhere.” The savagery of Pole’s attack (he goes on to call Machiavelli an “enemy of the human race” and the “finger of Satan”) suggests personal pique as well as ideological objections. Pole was convinced that his nemesis at the court of Henry VIII, the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was a disciple of the devious Florentine, and that it was under his baleful influence the fateful decision to break with Rome was made. Whether Cromwell actually read Machiavelli, Pole’s charge is not entirely implausible since two of the pillars of Machiavelli’s thought—his anticlericism and his belief that the state took precedence over the Church—might well have proved useful to Henry in his ongoing struggle with the Pope.

  Ironically, the man to whom Cardinal Pole addressed his screed—the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V—was also said to be a disciple of this “son of Satan.” According to Francesco Sansovino’s 1567 biographical sketch, the Emperor read only three books: Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier and Machiavelli’s Discourses and The Prince. But this peculiar situation, in which Machiavelli was accused of being the evil puppet master controlling both sides in a bitter dispute, was not unusual. Though Pole believed the English Reformation to be the brainchild of the wicked Florentine, it was just as plausible to view the author of The Prince as the ally of a Catholic autocrat.

  Indeed the fact that Machiavelli was roundly condemned by the princes of the Catholic Church did not prevent him from being savaged by their ideological foes. In the second half of the sixteenth century, as France was plunged into a civil war between Protestants and Catholics, Machiavelli’s name was again invoked. The struggle between the Calvinist Huguenots and the Catholics culminated in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) when mobs, egged on by a royal court that had remained loyal to Rome, assaulted and killed the religious dissenters in their midst. In the ensuing war of words, the prominent Huguenot pamphleteer Innocent Gentillet laid the blame squarely at Machiavelli’s door. In his 1589 essay Contre-Machiavel (“Against Machiavelli”), Gentillet insisted that the massacre was part of a diabolical plot on the part of the Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici, and her Italian courtiers, inspired by the writings of Machiavelli. Here the link was ethnic rather than ideological since Catherine was a Florentine, daughter of that same Lorenzo to whom Machiavelli dedicated The Prince. “[M]y intent and purpose,” Gentillet wrote, “is onely to shew, that Nicholas Machiavell, not long agoe Secretarie of the Florentine commonweale . . . understood nothing or little in this Politicke science whereof we speake: and that he hath taken Maximes and rules altogether wicked, and hath builded upon them, not a Politicke, but a Tyrannical science. Behold here then the end and scope which I have proposed unto myself, that is, to confute the doctrine of Machiavell.” Gentillet assumed that because Machiavelli’s rules were “altogether wicked” they were necessarily false, an assumption Machiavelli himself would have regarded as quaint. Machiavelli was perhaps the first to confront us with the terrifying thought that something could be both wicked and manifestly true.

  Because Machiavelli did not promote any particular ideology, both sides in any contest found it easy to smear his reputation. In the next century Edmund Burke could blame “the odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy” for the “democratic tyranny” of the French Revolution, while a hundred years after that, Marx and Engels contended that a “Machiavellian policy” was the hallmark of anti-revolutionary reaction.

  More sympathetic were the so-called Commonwealth men, followers of John Locke, who discovered in the Florentine’s philosophy a basis for a liberal society: “All these discoveries and complaints of the crookedness and corruption of human nature,” wrote John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in their influential collection of essays, Cato’s Letters, “are made with no malignant intent to break the bonds of society; but they are made to shew, that as selfishness is the strongest bias of men, every man ought to be upon his guard against another, that he become not the prey of another.” These essays, which in turn influenced our own Founding Fathers, rehabilitated Machiavelli as a humane philosopher who laid the foundations of the modern state by recognizing that political institutions could be built only on interest rather than virtue. When Madison insists that “[a]mbition must be made to counteract ambition,” he is paraphrasing Machiavelli and, whether he is willing to acknowledge it or not, his contention that democracy forms the only sound basis for good government, “supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives,” he marks himself as a true disciple of the cynical Florentine.

  Still, what casual readers took away from Machiavelli’s writings was not specifically political. More memorable was his attack on traditional morality and his substitution of a new kind of ethics based on self-interest for one based on traditional notions of good and evil.vi Machiavellianism soon broke free of Machiavelli and of the particular political conditions that molded his thought. Coined in the early seventeenth century, the term (Machiavellisme in the original French of its inventor) stood for insincerity and deviousness, no matter the context and no matter the ideology promoted. The descriptive noun was defined by its inventor as “subtle policie, cunning roguerie,” a meaning that has endured almost unchanged down to the present century. In this broader sense the adjective “Machiavellian” can be applied to all behavior, not merely to unscrupulous political acts. Voltaire, for example, described Machiavelli’s essential lesson as “ruin[ing] anyone who might someday ruin you; assassinat[ing] your neighbor who might become strong enough to kill you”—an approach to life as old as humanity itself and one that bears only the most tenuous resemblance to his actual philosophy.

  Machiavelli did not invent a particular way of looking at the world, but he expressed that viewpoint in such stark and vivid prose that he quickly came to stand for a universally recognizable type. He is the cynic with the disdainful grin curling on his lips as he contemplates the folly of the human comedy; he is the puncturer of every gaseous piety,
the debunker of every comforting illusion. As soon as his books were absorbed into the collective consciousness Machiavelli became a stock character, his malevolent influence lurking behind every evil scheme and diabolical plot. Elizabethan playwrights in particular found him a useful dramatic prop. His reputation for villainy was so widely accepted that one only needed to invoke his name to conjure up all manner of crime. In The Jew of Malta, Christopher Marlowe creates a fictional Machiavelli who embodies the monster without conscience, to whom nothing is sacred and nothing prohibited. “I count religion but a childish toy,” he scoffs, “and I hold there is no sin but ignorance.” Shakespeare also discovered in Machiavelli an irresistible dramatic device. Richard III, the treacherous schemer who murders his way to the throne, is modeled on the Florentine Chancellor. In Henry VI, Part 3, Richard, still Duke of Gloucester, lays out the villainous plot that will eventually win him the crown by declaring:

  I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk,

  I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,

  Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,

  And like a Sinon, take another Troy.

  I can add colors to the chameleon,

  Change shapes with Proteus for advantages

  And set the murtherous Machevil to school.

  Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?

  Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.

  Machiavelli came to embody the dark side of the Renaissance belief in man’s infinite potential. The universal genius, the Renaissance man—signaled in Pico’s lines “O great and wonderful happiness of man! It is given to him to have that which he chooses and to be that which he wills,” or Shakespeare’s “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!”—has an evil twin in Machiavelli’s prince, whose only cause in life is the gratification of his own selfish desires. Playing Mr. Hyde to all those Dr. Jekylls of the age—revered geniuses like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Galileo—Machiavelli represents all those who, having thrown off the shackles of religious orthodoxy, believe themselves to be gods.