Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527)

Florentine diplomat, dramatist and political thinker, Machiavelli’s treatise, Il principe (The Prince ) (1532a), has earned him notoriety as a political immoralist (or at least an amoralist) and a teacher of evil. In The Prince , Machiavelli posits a complex relationship between ethics and politics that associates princely virtù with the capacity to know and act within the political world as it ‘is’, and with the beastly abilities to dispense violence and practise deception. Behind this argument dwells the distinctly Machiavellian insight that politics is a realm of appearances where the practice of moral or Christian virtues often results in a prince’s ruin, while knowing ‘how not to be good’ may result in greater security and wellbeing for both prince and people. Machiavelli warns that the prince’s possibilities for success in this matter are always mediated by fortune; hence the prudent prince is one who is prepared to resist fortune by adapting his procedure to the times and his nature to ‘the necessity of the case’.

A less notorious but equally influential text is the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy) (1531), in which Machiavelli offers a defence of popular liberty and republican government that takes the ancient republic of Rome as its model and emphasizes the role of the people in the ‘public administration’ of the city. However, Machiavelli also argues that a republic is only as successful in self-governance as its citizens are infused with civic virtù and therefore not corrupted. Accordingly, he praises the work of political founders who craft republican laws and institutions, and religious founders who fuse God and patria as one in the people’s hearts. The apparent tension between Machiavelli’s republican sympathies in Discourses and his elitist proclivities in The Prince has helped to fuel a vast interpretive literature concerning his political attitudes, his theory of politics, and the nature and meaning of ‘machiavellianism’ in Western political thought.

1 Machiavelli in politics

From the beginning Niccolò Machiavelli’s life, like the city of Florence itself, was caught in the ebb and flow of power that characterized the fortunes of the great banking and ruling house of the Florentine Medici. Machiavelli was born into the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent, a Medici prince who ruled the city until his death in 1492. When Piero de’ Medici fled Florence at the approach of the French army in 1494, the family’s hold on power was temporarily broken. After the short-lived regime of the charismatic friar Savonarola, the Florentine republic was restored, and Machiavelli was positioned to begin a career in politics. As Second Chancellor and Secretary to the Ten of War, he worked as a government functionary in affairs of state, travelling widely on diplomatic missions to various secular and ecclesiastical courts, as well as to the campaign headquarters of Cesare Borgia. As a result, Machiavelli became intimately acquainted with the strategies that are a part of ‘the art that is necessary to one who commands’ ([1532a] 1950: 53 ).

The Florentine republic was relatively short-lived. With the aid of the Spanish army, the Medici recaptured the city in 1512. Machiavelli was arrested, imprisoned and tortured, under suspicion as a co-conspirator in a plot to assassinate the Medici brothers. In 1513, he was released from prison and sent to rural isolation on his farm in the Tuscan countryside. ‘To-day fortunate, tomorrow ruined,’ was Machiavelli’s succinct summation later. He would never again participate actively in the political affairs of Florence.

Like many displaced political actors, Machiavelli turned to writing. Within the first year of his exile, he produced a short treatise on l’arte dello stato wherein, he reported to his friend Francesco Vettori, ‘I go as deeply as I can into considerations on this subject, debating what a princedom is, of what kinds they are, how they are gained, how they are kept, why they are lost’ ( [1498–1527] 1961: 142 ). Under this seemingly prosaic description smoulders the book that ignited a firestorm of invective in the sixteenth century, a book that continues to be one of the most controversial texts in the history of Western political thought.

2 Il principe (The Prince)

In terms of its formal structure, Il principe (The Prince) consists of a dedication (to Lorenzo the Magnificent, son of Piero de’ Medici), and twenty-six chapters that can be divided into five general sections: chapters I–XI: a typology of states and how they are acquired; chapters XII– XIV: observations on militia and military command; chapters XV–XIX: advice to a prince regarding character and conduct; chapters XX–XV: advice to a prince regarding circumstances and conditions (fortresses, favours, functionaries and fortune); and chapter XVI: an exhortation to Italy that reconfigures the credo of Pope Julius II: Fuori i Barbari! (Put the barbarians out!). The formal structure of the treatise belies its substantive complexity, however, and the magnitude of rival interpretations that attend it. (There are now well over 3,000 commentaries.)

The notoriety of The Prince rests primarily upon the nature of Machiavelli’s advice concerning the ‘methods and rules’ that a leader must follow in order to exhibit strength (virtù), gain and maintain his position within a particular territory (lo stato), and secure the state itself. On these matters, Machiavelli crafts a perspective that aligns politics with warfare, and justifies the deployment of force, the exercise of cruelties, the practice of deceit and the manipulation of appearances in the service of a political mentality that is ‘disposed to adapt itself according to the wind’ and ‘able to do evil if constrained’ ( [1532a] 1950: 65). In the opening paragraph of chapter XV, in which this perspective on politics crystallizes, Machiavelli dismisses the usefulness of those writers who imagine ‘republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality’, and declares that he will go ‘to the real truth of the matter’ (verità effettuale) ( [1532a] 1950: 56). The real truth is that in politics, a ruler must be ready to play upon falsehoods and appearances, ‘being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion’ ( [1532a] 1950: 65). Accordingly, a prince must ‘learn how not to be good,’ and ‘use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case’ ( [1532a] 1950: 56 ).

In producing this perspective, The Prince forcefully deviates from and craftily subverts an entire genre of Renaissance advice-books that traditionally had aligned princely virtù (those qualities that enable a ruler to acquire honour, glory and fame) with the Platonic and Ciceronian ‘cardinal’ virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and moderation, and with the Christian ethic of goodness and righteousness. Machiavelli’s treatise may not have ‘revolutionized’ the genre of advice-books, as Skinner (1978) contends, but it surely constitutes an unprecedented Renaissance challenge both to moral philosophy and to Christianity as normative bases for a theory of politics. This challenge may have earned the Florentine the admiration of ‘anti-philosophers’ and ‘anti-Christs’ of later ages (Nietzsche foremost among them), but more immediately it induced the Roman papacy to place all of Machiavelli’s writings on the Index, where they remained for almost 300 years. The Prince also set in train its author’s long-lived reputation as an atheistic, evil and satanic ‘Machiavel’, a man ‘inspired by the Devil to lead good men to their doom’ (Berlin 1982: 35 ). In contemporary vocabulary, the terms ‘machiavellian’ and ‘machiavellianism’ capture an understanding of politics as a domain that embraces naked self-interest, the maintenance of rulership at all costs, the utility of unethical behaviour and the centrality of power as an end that justifies any means.

3 The politics of princes

Despite the durability of these characterizations, Machiavelli posits a more complex relation between value (or ethics) and politics in The Prince than either an immoralist, ‘teacher of evil’, or an amoralist, realpolitik, rendering of his views allow. It is true that, unlike any other humanist writer, he openly associates princely virtù not with law (which he deems often insufficient to the combat that is ineliminable in politics), but with the abilities to dispense violence, or imitate the lion, and practise deception, or imitate the fox. Behind this argument dwells the distinctively Machiavellian insight that, in matters of state, ‘some things which seem virtues would, if followed, lead to one’s ruin, and some others which appear vices result in one’s greater security and wellbeing’ ( [1532a] 1950: 57 ). Goodness is sometimes disastrous in politics, and cruelty less ruinous than clemency. Thus knowledge of beastly abilities and when and how to use them is essential, and it is acquired in two ways: by action, and by the historical study of the good and bad fortunes of ‘eminent men’. The men Machiavelli admires and recommends for study are unexcelled in their capacity to exert coercive power and trick others into doing what they want, and thus bring fortune (fortuna) under control: the bloody Pope Alexander VI, and the warring and impetuous Pope Julius II, the ruthless Cesare Borgia, the scheming Roman emperor Severus, the more humane Marcus, the wily condottiere Francesco Sforza, and Scipio, Cyrus and Alexander the Great.

Yet there are also apparently effective rulers that Machiavelli introduces and condemns: Agathocles the Sicilian, Oliverotto da Fermo, and a host of nefarious Roman emperors. In proffering these examples, The Prince appears to formulate a standard of right, or at least prudential, conduct that is appropriate to virtù. Thus it throws into question the standard view that machiavellianism celebrates politics as a sphere of unrestrained evil, and power as the exercise of unremitting violence. Machiavelli’s most notable condemnation concerns Agathocles, who arrived at his position as prince in Syracuse through the cold-blooded slaughter of the senators and richest men of the city. Machiavelli remarks: ‘it cannot be called virtue to kill one’s fellow-citizens, betray one’s friends, be without faith, without pity and without religion; by these methods one may indeed gain power but not glory’ ( [1532a] 1950: 32 ). The comment on glory (gloria) introduces a crucial qualification, because it suggests that the truly virtùoso prince is not one who uses his power simply for self-aggrandizement, but in order to construct something that will outlast him, and sanctify his name.

Even in political situations where glorious deeds are unlikely, however, and pure power reigns supreme, Machiavelli distinguishes between ferocious and contemptible conduct, and praises as virtùous those leaders who are feared but not hated. At issue here is a deeper distinction that does not obviate conflict and cruelty as inescapable aspects of political action, but nevertheless differentiates cruelties that are ‘well-committed’ from those that are ‘ill- committed’, and therefore increase rather than diminish with time. It is precisely Machiavelli’s refusal to disentangle conflict and cruelty from politics that has led some commentators to configure him as a teacher of evil who divorces politics from ethics (Strauss 1958). For others, however, his thought represents a powerful reconstitution of an action concept that, even as it withdraws politics from the domain of purely moral or Christian judgment, reinvests it as a value sphere with its own peculiar and demanding configurations of good and evil, and hence its own norms and standards of ethical evaluation (Berlin 1982 ).

4 Virtù and fortuna

Whatever their ethical implications, neither Machiavelli’s action concept of politics nor his notion of princely virtù can be fully appreciated without considering the role he assigns to fortuna in human affairs. The metaphysical picture behind his account of politics is that of an all-pervading necessity that forms the fabric of the world, but wherein freedom, as the exercise of human control over circumstances, is a real possibility at least half of the time. Thus princely virtù also presupposes a capacity to master fortune and navigate within the inherent flux and turmoil of political affairs. It is perhaps this elusive capacity that Machiavelli struggled hardest to comprehend, in response to a phenomenological puzzle about action, character, circumstance and method. Strategically, he cast the solution to this problem as the ability to be prudent (prudente), and thereby read circumstances, anticipate probabilities and master events. In terms of character, he presented it as the ability to be inherently flexible, the willingness to deviate from what comes naturally and the determination to exercise a steely self-control. Thus, Machiavelli writes: ‘[the prince] is happy whose mode of procedure accords with the needs of the times, and similarly he is unfortunate whose mode of procedure (modo di procedere) is opposed to the times’ ( [1532a] 1950: 92 ).

Readers should note, following Pitkin (1984), that Machiavelli’s ‘metaphysics’ is decisively gendered, in so far as he represents fortuna not only as a river, but also as a woman, or an engulfing female power that threatens to overwhelm and crush the man of virtù. ‘Fortune varies and commands men, and holds them under her yoke’; but if the prince is impetuous and willing ‘to conquer her by force’, he can subdue fortune and thereby use her to his advantage ( 1498–1527: 99, 94). The symbolic gendering of action, chance and circumstance that Machiavelli effects on a state level in The Prince is recapitulated on a domestic level in his play Mandragola ([c.1518] 1957), where the oppositional erotics of instrumental violence is delivered as comedy. Both The Prince as politics, and Mandragola as domestics, allow us to see the limits of a world that is constructed as a struggle between virtù and fortuna, a world wholly devoid of human mutuality, reciprocity and genuine civic life.

5 Discorsi (The Discourses)

Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy) appears to redress, if not repudiate, the uncivic orientation of The Prince and its comedic counterpart Mandragola by directing its political attentions elsewhere. In this work (probably completed in 1518 although not printed until 1531), Machiavelli distances himself from ‘those who generally dedicate their works to some prince’ and resolves to undertake the dangerous task of introducing ‘new principles and systems’ like the explorers of ‘unknown seas and continents’ in order to ‘open a new route, which has not yet been followed by any one’. The new route is discoverable only by way of a return to the past or to ‘examples of antiquity’ ( [1531] 1950: 102– 4). Although he implies at the start that the subject matter of his treatise will encompass a vast array of historical and political topics, Discourses in fact concentrates upon one singular historical example, the Roman republic, and one singular type of ruler: ‘the sagacious legislator of a republic…whose object is to promote the public good, and not his private interests, and who prefers his country to his own successors’ ([1531] 1950: 138). Thus Discourses is best read as illuminating the presence of the past, in order to assess what is necessary if modern republics are to flourish and endure like ancient Rome. More indirectly but no less decisively, Discourses is also a biting condemnation of the corruption of Florence, a subject that Machiavelli addressed more subtly in Istorie Fiorentine (The History of Florence) , a work commissioned in 1520 (although not published until 1532) by a new Medicean court that, at long last, rewarded his literary if not his diplomatic talents.

Discourses is divided into three books (of 60, 33 and 49 chapters respectively) that span an impressive array of political topics concerning the early history of Rome and the Romans: origins and founders, religion, armies, conquests and colonies, the constitution, institutions of government, customs, laws (civil and agrarian), character, warfare and diplomacy, notable leaders (including a tribute to Cincinnatus) and citizens. A careful look at the chapter titles reveals the question that is central to Machiavelli’s investigation of Rome: What makes republican regimes stable and enduring? Pocock (1975) argues that in Discourses Machiavelli configures the relationship between the all-too-human ‘republic’ and the unremitting forces of ‘time’ as a historical confrontation that cannot be deferred. But Machiavelli also attempts to mediate the confrontation through a careful study of the conditions and civic qualities that are necessary if republics are to have even a minimal chance of effectively countering the ordinances of fortuna and ‘achieving greatness like that of Rome’. Machiavelli’s study of civic virtù is at the heart of his republican theory of citizenship (see Republicanism §2 ).

6 The politics of republics

If we approach Machiavelli’s classical republican theory as a complex of elements, then four emerge as primary. The first, which can hold for either principalities or republics, is libertà, or the condition of being free from subjection to a foreign power and governed by one’s own laws. The significance that Machiavelli attaches to liberty cannot be overstated, for he argues that only a city free from servitude is potentially capable of achieving greatness, whether in power, or wealth, or both. For this reason he cautions against attempts to establish republics in countries not suited to them lest the government ‘lack proper proportions and have but little durability’ ([1531] 1950: 257 ). Nevertheless and in general, the institutions that are essential to civic liberty are better perfected in republics than in monarchies.

If republics are better safeguards of liberty than monarchies, then republics which entrust their liberty to the people are even more likely to retain freedom than those who favour the nobility. The second element of Machiavellian republicanism involves a defence of the people (popolo), as the active guardians of public liberty. As usual, Machiavelli’s reasoning on this matter is complex and contextual, and it does not denote an absolute rule. In Sparta and Venice for example, where power was entrusted to the nobility, liberties endured far longer than in Rome. Nevertheless, a republic that desires to extend its empire, rather than merely seek its own preservation, would do well to follow Rome and entrust liberty to the people. A republic that emulates Rome recognizes that its liberty depends upon admitting its people ‘to a share of its glory’, for the people are superior in maintaining the ‘institutions, laws and ordinances’ upon which the freedom of the republic rests.

Machiavelli recognizes, however, that a self-governing republic that is animated by ordinary citizens is only as virtùous as its laws and institutions (ordini) allow. Thus the third element of his republican theory places great emphasis upon the talents of the founders of republics, like Romulus, and even more emphasis upon those founders who recognize God and religion ‘as the most necessary and assured support of any civil society’ and use them to divinize the republic’s laws and institutions before an awe-struck people, as Numa did in Rome. The welfare of a republic does not consist, then, ‘in having a prince who governs it wisely during his lifetime, but in having one who will give it such laws that it will maintain itself even after his death’ ( [1531] 1950: 146, 148). Among the specific institutions that Machiavelli recommends as most beneficial to republican liberty is a government that combines ‘a prince, a nobility and the power of the people’ under the same constitution. This was the case in ancient Rome, where the consuls, the senate and the tribunes maintained a tense equilibrium, and kept each other in check. The significance of Machiavelli’s advice on this matter has less to do with the later ‘separation of powers’ doctrine than with his insistence that ‘all the laws that are favourable to liberty’ result from partisan struggles between the nobility and the people ([1531] 1950: 119 ).

The emphasis on struggle which, as we have seen, is an indelible aspect of Machiavellian politics, leads to the fourth and most audacious element of Machiavellian republicanism. This element forwards a view of civic participation (participazione) as the inevitable clash of interests within and among diverse competing political forces, and it embraces a view of the republic as a ‘theatre of turbulence’. From this perspective, the prosperity of republics hinges not upon quelling turbulence or repressing divisiveness, but rather on finding ways of channelling the energies and agitations within the state to good effect. This is particularly true with regard to the people. Accordingly, Machiavelli insists that: ‘every free state ought to afford the people the opportunity of giving vent, so to say, to their ambition’ ([1531] 1950: 120 ). Behind this remark rests an even deeper conviction: when civic disturbances generate ordini that give the people ‘a share in the public administration’, they also establish the most assured guardians of liberty, as the tribunes were in Rome.

From the complex of elements (libertà, popolo, ordini and participazione) that constitutes the republican orientation of Discourses arises a host of secondary issues that are no less important to Machiavelli’s analysis of how republics can survive the test of time and fortune. Primary among these is the issue of vulnerability, or what threatens a republic’s stability from within and from outside. Since he is well aware of the vulnerability of republics to threats from within, Machiavelli is alert to the problem of corruption (or the disintegration of civic virtù), especially as it manifests itself in ambition (ambizione) and in factions that threaten to turn productive conflict into internecine warfare (see Corruption §1, 3). Book III, chapter 6 of Discourses, ‘Of Conspiracies’ , unmasks the motives and methods that induce individuals, whether alone or in groups, to engage in such warfare, and plot against princes and republics. In true Machiavellian fashion, it also instructs potential conspirators about what works and what does not.

Machiavelli is also aware of the vulnerability of republics to threats from outside, and on this score he repeats and develops an admonition that is found in The Prince and elaborated at great length in Arte della guerra (The Art of War) (1521): if glory is to be attained, a state must rely upon its own armies and cultivate in its citizens a military virtù, as the Romans did. Thus: ‘any republic that adopts the military organization and discipline of the Romans…will always and under all circumstances find [her soldiers] to display a courage and dignity similar to that of the Romans’ ([1531] 1950: 504). Without good military organization there can be neither ‘good laws nor anything else good’, and a republic is left prey to the vicissitudes of fortune. Although Machiavelli is in this instance comparing the ‘wretched military organization’ of Venice to that of Rome, it is hard not to see Florence in this depiction. Read in this light, Discourses intones a dirge for Florence, even as it strikes symbols of tribute to ancient Rome.

7 The motives of Machiavelli

Almost inevitably, the comparison of the subject matter of The Prince and Discourses gives rise to the intriguing question of Machiavelli’s motives and his political attitudes. For several centuries, commentators have found it difficult to overlook what seems to be a glaring contrast between the Medicean sympathies of The Prince, in which Machiavelli extols princes and insists that all that the people want is not to be oppressed, and the republican convictions of Discourses , in which the people are elevated as the guardians of liberty, and the lives of princes are short. In essence, the interpretive question seems to be this: How is it possible to hail Machiavelli as a defender of republican citizenship and liberty, self-government and civic virtù, when these appear to be the very regimes and values he teaches his Medici protégé to subvert?

In response, some critics (such as Hans Baron and J.R. Hale) argue that Machiavelli was in fact less a republican and more of a realist who adjusted his advice as political conditions warranted. Thus The Prince can be read as a clear- sighted, if opportunistic, attempt to gain favour with the ruling regime. Other critics insist upon Machiavelli’s unwavering commitment to republicanism (as Spinoza did), and reconfigure the notorious advice-book as (a) a subversive handbook for republicans (an interpretation favoured by Rousseau); (b) a satire on princely governance (provided by Garrett Mattingly); or (c) a masterful act of political deception, intended for and against the Medici (offered by Mary Dietz). Still others, including Sheldon Wolin, suggest that there are no real dissimilarities between the two texts at all; thus the republicanism of the Discourses can be taken as the salutary result of the political acts of a well-advised, virtùous prince. Whatever else, these debates over Machiavelli the man are proof that Machiavelli the theorist of politics sought and perhaps mastered the ability to be simultaneously deceptive and truthful, realistic and ethical, cruel and humane.