22nd Aug 2022

Niccolò Machiavelli

History: According to Machiavelli, the ends always justify the means—no matter how cruel, calculating or immoral those means might be. Tony Soprano and Shakespeare’s Macbeth may be well-known Machiavellian characters, but the man whose name inspired the term, Niccolo Machiavelli, didn’t operate by his own cynical rule book. Rather, when Machiavelli wrote The Prince, his shrewd guidelines to power in the 16th century, he was an exiled statesman angling for a post in the Florentine government. It was his hope that a strong sovereign, as outlined in his writing, could return Florence to its former glory.

Study: Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was an Italian diplomat, writer, and political philosopher. During his lifetime, he was an official in the Florentine Republic, and he also wrote a variety of genres, including poetry, comedy, and other political philosophy. Today, he is best known for his political treatise, The Prince.

Wikipedia: The term Machiavellian often connotes political deceit, deviousness, and realpolitik. Even though Machiavelli has become most famous for his work on principalities, scholars also give attention to the exhortations in his other works of political philosophy. While much less well known than The Prince, the Discourses on Livy (composed c. 1517) has been said to have paved the way of modern republicanism.

Some scholars, such as Leo Strauss, have restated the traditional opinion that Machiavelli was a "teacher of evil". 

Brittannica: Machiavelli cannot simply dismiss or replace the traditional notion of moral virtue, which gets its strength from the religious beliefs of ordinary people. His own virtue of mastery coexists with traditional moral virtue yet also makes use of it. A prince who possesses the virtue of mastery can command fortune and manage people to a degree never before thought possible.

Machiavelli’s republicanism does not rest on the usual republican premise that power is safer in the hands of many than it is in the hands of one. To the contrary, he asserts that, to found or reform a republic, it is necessary to “be alone.” Any ordering must depend on a single mind; thus, Romulus “deserves excuse” for killing Remus, his brother and partner in the founding of Rome, because it was for the common good. This statement is as close as Machiavelli ever came to saying “the end justifies the means,” a phrase closely associated with interpretations of The Prince.

Republics need the kind of leaders that Machiavelli describes in The Prince. These “princes in a republic” cannot govern in accordance with justice, because those who get what they deserve from them do not feel any obligation. Nor do those who are left alone feel grateful. Thus, a prince in a republic will have no “partisan friends” unless he learns “to kill the sons of Brutus,” using violence to make examples of enemies of the republic and, not incidentally, of himself. To reform a corrupt state presupposes a good man, but to become a prince presupposes a bad man. Good men, Machiavelli claims, will almost never get power, and bad men will almost never use power for a good end. Yet, since republics become corrupt when the people lose the fear that compels them to obey, the people must be led back to their original virtue by sensational executions reminding them of punishment and reviving their fear. The apparent solution to the problem is to let bad men gain glory through actions that have a good outcome, if not a good motive.

His emphasis on the effectual truth led him to seek the hidden springs of politics in fraud and conspiracy, examples of which he discussed with apparent relish. It is notable that, in both The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, the longest chapters are on conspiracy.

Wikipedia: In 1513, the Medici accused him of conspiracy against them and had him imprisoned. Despite being subjected to torture ("with the rope", in which the prisoner is hanged from his bound wrists from the back, forcing the arms to bear the body's weight and dislocating the shoulders), he denied involvement and was released after three weeks. 

As a political theorist, Machiavelli emphasized the "necessity" for the methodical exercise of brute force or deceit, including extermination of entire noble families, to head off any chance of a challenge to the prince's authority.

Violence may be necessary for the successful stabilization of power and introduction of new political institutions. Force may be used to eliminate political rivals, to destroy resistant populations, and to purge the community of other men strong enough of a character to rule, who will inevitably attempt to replace the ruler.

Machiavelli has noted that to save a republic from corruption, it is necessary to return it to a "kingly state" using violent means.

While fear of God can be replaced by fear of the prince, if there is a strong enough prince, Machiavelli felt that having a religion is in any case especially essential to keeping a republic in order. For Machiavelli, a truly great prince can never be conventionally religious himself, but he should make his people religious if he can.

Machiavelli’s underground influence on thinkers who avoided using his name

Brittannica: One may suspect that some used his doctrines even while joining in attacks on him. One such scholar, for example, was the Italian philosopher Giovanni Botero (1540–1617), who was among the first to establish the idea of a moral exemption for the state. Authors taking a similar approach developed, for safety’s sake, the practice of quoting passages from the Roman historian Tacitus (AD 56–120)—thus becoming known as “Tacitists”—when they might just as well have cited Machiavelli.

Study: Machiavelli seems to have based his figure of the ''ideal prince'' on Cesare Borgia, a ruthless Italian politician who murdered and manipulated his way into power.

History: Machiavelli’s guide to power was revolutionary in that it described how powerful people succeeded—as he saw it—rather than as one imagined a leader should operate.

Unlike the noble princes portrayed in fairy tales, a successful ruler of a principality, as described in Machiavelli’s writings, is brutal, calculating and, when necessary, utterly immoral.

Because people are “quick to change their nature when they imagine they can improve their lot,” he wrote, a leader must also be shrewd. “The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore, if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must be prepared not to be virtuous, and to make use of this or not according to need.”

Until Machiavelli’s writing, most philosophers of politics had defined a good leader as humble, moral and honest. Machiavelli shed that notion, saying frankly, “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot have both.”

Keeping one’s word can also be dangerous, he said, since “experience shows that those who do not keep their word get the better of those who do.”

Moreover, Machiavelli also believed that when leaders are not moral, it’s important they pretend they are to keep up appearances. “A prince must always seem to be very moral, even if he is not,” he wrote.

Fortune and Virtù

Finally, leaders must not rely on luck, Machiavelli wrote, but should shape their own fortune, through charisma, cunning and force. As Machiavelli saw it, there were two main variables in life: fortune and virtù.

Virtù (not virtue) meant bravery, power and the ability to impose one’s own will. Fortune, he wrote, was like a “violent river” that can flood and destroy the earth, but when it is quiet, leaders can use their free will to prepare for and conquer the rough river of fate. An effective leader, Machiavelli wrote, maximizes virtù and minimizes the role of fortune. This way, “fortune favors the brave.”

Machiavelli Quotes

"The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him."

"It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles."

"Whoever believes that great advancement and new benefits make men forget old injuries is mistaken."

"The best fortress is to be found in the love of the people, for although you may have fortresses, they will not save you if you are hated by the people."

Eventually, The Prince was published in 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death. Over the centuries that followed, the principles it espoused would trigger outrage as well as admiration and establish Machiavelli as a controversial and revolutionary political thinker.

In 1559, all of Machiavelli’s works were placed on the Catholic church’s “Index of Prohibited Books.” The recently formed Protestant Church also condemned The Prince, and it was banned in Elizabethan England. Nonetheless, the book was widely read, and its author’s name became synonymous with cunning and unscrupulous behavior.

Wikipedia: Despite the classical precedents, which Machiavelli was not the only one to promote in his time, Machiavelli's realism and willingness to argue that good ends justify bad things, is seen as a critical stimulus towards some of the most important theories of modern politics.

Firstly, particularly in the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is unusual in the positive side he sometimes seems to describe in factionalism in republics. For example, quite early in the Discourses, (in Book I, chapter 4), a chapter title announces that the disunion of the plebs and senate in Rome "kept Rome free". That a community has different components whose interests must be balanced in any good regime is an idea with classical precedents, but Machiavelli's particularly extreme presentation is seen as a critical step towards the later political ideas of both a division of powers or checks and balances, ideas which lay behind the US constitution, as well as many other modern state constitutions.

Similarly, the modern economic argument for capitalism, and most modern forms of economics, was often stated in the form of "public virtue from private vices." Also in this case, even though there are classical precedents, Machiavelli's insistence on being both realistic and ambitious, not only admitting that vice exists but being willing to risk encouraging it, is a critical step on the path to this insight.

The American rapper Tupac Shakur read Machiavelli while in prison and became greatly influenced by his work. Upon his release from prison, Tupac honoured Machiavelli in 1996 by changing his own rap name from 2Pac to Makaveli.

History: Philosopher Edmund Burke would describe the French Revolution as bearing evidence of the “odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy.” In the 20th century, some would point to Machiavelli as playing a role in the rise of dictators like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

Hitler kept a copy of The Prince by his bedside and Stalin was known to have read and annotated his copy of the book. Business leaders have looked to the work as a cutthroat approach to getting ahead, and the book has been called the “Mafia Bible” with gangsters, including John Gotti, quoting from its pages.

Francis Bacon, the English statesman-scientist-philosopher, was among those who appreciated Machiavelli’s frank reflections early on, writing in 1605, “We are much beholden to Machiavel and others that write what men do and not what they ought to do.”

Do yourself a favor. Think for yourself. Be your own person. Question everything. Stand for principle. Champion individual liberty and self-ownership where you can. Develop a strong moral code. Be kind to others. Do no harm, unless that harm is warranted. Pretty obvious stuff...but people who hold these things in their hearts seem to be disappearing from the earth at an accelerated rate. Stay safe, my friends. Thanks for being here.

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