Smith - Political Philosophy - Chapter 7

Political
Philosophy
steven b. smith
New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of
Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.
Copyright © 2012 by Yale University.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections
107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for

educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail
sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).
Set in Minion type by Westchester Book Group.

Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Steven B., 1951–

Political philosophy / Steven B. Smith.
p. cm. — (The open Yale courses series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-18180-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Political science—
Philosophy—History. I. Title.
JA71.S498 2012
320.01—dc23
2012016209
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992

(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
c ha p t e r 7
Machiavelli and the Art
of Political Founding
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469–1527. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
109
110 Machiavelli and the Art of Political Founding
Machiavelli was a Florentine. To know that is to know virtually everything

you need to know about him. I exaggerate, of course, but the point is that
Florence was a city-state—a republic—and Machiavelli spent his life in the
ser vice of the republic. Living in Florence, the center of the Renaissance at
the height of the Renaissance, he hoped to do for politics what his contem-
poraries Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo had done for art and sculp-
ture. He hoped to revive the spirit of the ancients, of antiquity, but to modify
and correct it by the light of his own experience. As he puts it in the Dedica-
tion of The Prince, his book is the product of “long experience with modern
things and a continuous reading of ancient ones” (Dedication/3).
To be sure, Machiavelli was not an ordinary Florentine. He was born
in 1469 and grew up under the rule of the Medici, the fi rst family of Flor-
ence, but lived to see them deposed by a Dominican friar by the name of
Savonarola. Savonarola sought to impose on Florence a kind of theocracy, a
republic of Christian virtue, but the Florentines being what they were, his
experiment proved short-lived. In its place, a republic was established under
a man named Piero Soderini (whose name appears several times in The
Prince), where Machiavelli occupied the office of the secretary of the Second
Chancery—a diplomatic post—for fourteen years from 1498 to 1512. After
the fall of the republic and the return of the Medici, Machiavelli was tor-
tured and then exiled from Florence to a small estate that he owned on the
outskirts of the city. It was here during this life of political exile that he
penned his major political works, The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, and
the Art of War.
It was also here that he wrote voluminous letters to friends, seeking
knowledge of political events and happenings. In one letter to his friend
Francesco Vettori he describes how he came to write his most famous book.
“When evening comes,” he writes, “I return to my house and enter my study”:
On the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with

mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fit-
ted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the
ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself
on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I
am unashamed to converse with them and to question them
about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human
kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no bore-
dom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am
Machiavelli and the Art of Political Founding 111
not terrified by death. I have jotted down what I have profited

from in their conversation and composed a short study, De prin-
cipatibus, in which I delve as deeply as I can into the ideas con-
cerning this topic, discussing the definition of a princedom, the
categories of princedoms, how they are acquired, how they are
retained, and why they are lost.
The Prince is a deceptive book. What else would we expect? It is a work

that everyone has heard of and perhaps has some preconception about. It is
a book that has spawned scores of imitators. There are serious books, like
Carnes Lord’s The Modern Prince, dealing with leadership issues in times of
war, and James Burnham’s classic study The Machiavellians, defending the
role of elite rule in modern society. But there are also books with titles like
The Machiavellian Guide to Womanizing (by an appropriately named Nick
Casanova), The Mafia Manager: A Guide to the Corporate Machiavelli, and
my personal favorite, The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style. We
all know—or think we know—what the work is about. Machiavelli’s name is
synonymous with deception, treachery, cunning, and deceit. Just look at his
likeness. His smile—really a smirk—seems to say, “I know something you
don’t know.” The difficulty with reading Machiavelli is that we already think
we know all there is to know and consequently do not read him with the
care he deserves. But there is more—much more—to Machiavelli than this.
Machiavelli was, above all, a revolutionary. In the Preface to his Dis-
courses on Livy he compares himself with Christopher Columbus for his
discovery of “new modes and orders.” What Columbus did for geography,
Machiavelli will do for politics: discover a new continent, a new world, so
to speak. Machiavelli’s new world, his new modes and orders, will require
the displacement of the previous one. He makes this clear in the opening to
chapter 15 of The Prince: “I depart from the orders of others,” he writes. “But
since it is my intent to write something useful to whoever understands it, it
has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the
thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and
principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so
far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is
done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation”
(XV/61). But what was Machiavelli’s revolution about?
This passage is often taken as providing the essence of Machiavellian
realism, often called realpolitik, his appeal from the ideal to the real, from
the Ought to the Is. Machiavelli’s call is to take one’s bearings from the
“effectual truth of things”: do not look at what people say, look at what they
do. To be sure, Machiavelli focuses on key features of reality: murders, con-
spiracies, coups d’état. He is more interested in the actual evils that men do
than in the goods to which they aspire. You might even say that Machiavelli
takes delight in demonstrating, much to our chagrin, the space between our
loft y intentions and the actual consequences of our deeds.
And yet there is more—far more—to Machiavelli than the term “real-
ism” connotes. The term may be deeply misleading. Machiavelli speaks the
language of political innovation, renewal, and even redemption. The book
draws on the biblical language of prophecy, and Machiavelli presents him-
self as a prophet of liberation. In the passage cited above, he boldly an-
nounces his break with—indeed, his repudiation of—all those who have
come before him. He both replaces and combines elements from both Chris-
tianity and the Roman republic to create a new form of political organiza-
tion distinctly his own: the modern state. He is the architect of the modern
sovereign state that is given theoretical expression in the later writings of
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, to say nothing of contemporary writers on
both the left and the right, from Max Weber and Carl Schmitt to Antonio
Gramsci, the author of a book called The Modern Prince.
The Form and Dedication of The Prince

Machiavelli was a partisan of the new. But like all pathbreakers, he often
combined his novelties with conventional pieties and forms. His writings
are a curious combination of boldness and caution. His often conventional
exterior almost always belies an unconventional interior. Consider just the
form and dedication of The Prince.
The Prince appears on its surface to be the most conventional of
books. It presents itself as a work in the long tradition of what is known as
“mirror of princes,” that is, handbooks that attempt to advise a prince
about how to behave, a kind of dos and don’ts of princely rule. Fair enough.
The oldest work of this genre is Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus (Cyropaid-
eia), which Machiavelli both misidentifies and includes on his required
reading list (XIV/60). The appearance of conventionality is further sup-
ported by the opening words of the book: “It is customary.” Machiavelli
wraps himself in the mantle of tradition. It is a work intended to ingratiate
him to Lorenzo de Medici, the man whose name appears on the dedication
page.
But look again. Consider the structure of the first three chapters. “All
states, all dominions that have held and do hold empire over men, are either
republics or principalities,” Machiavelli declares in the opening sentence of
chapter one (I/5). He then asserts that in this work he will deal only with prin-
cipalities, leaving the discussion of republics for elsewhere, one assumes his
Discourses. Having distinguished principalities and republics as the only two
kinds of regime worth mentioning, he goes on to distinguish between
two kinds of principality: hereditary princes like Lorenzo, who have ac-
quired their authority through tradition and blood line, and new princes.
But then Machiavelli goes on to tell the reader that the exclusive sub-
ject of the book will be the new prince—not Lorenzo at all, but precisely the
kind of prince who has achieved his authority through his own guile, force,
and cunning. The true addressee of the book must necessarily be the poten-
tial prince, someone with sufficient political audacity to create his own au-
thority. The Prince is addressed to a new kind of leader, one who is prepared
to create his own authority ex nihilo. But there is literally only one creator
who is able to create from scratch. Machiavelli’s prince seems to be an an-
swer to the creator described in the opening chapters of Genesis. The Prince
describes a new kind of political leader emancipated from traditional forms
of authority and virtue and endowed with a species of ambition, love of
glory, and elements of prophetic authority that we today might call “cha-
risma.”
Armed and Unarmed Prophets

So what, then, is the character of this new prince, and how does he differ
from more conventional models of princely authority? In one of the most
famous chapters of the book, entitled “Of New Principalities That Are
Acquired Through One’s Own Arms and Virtue,” Machiavelli discusses
the character of the new prince (VI/21–25). He begins by stating, perhaps
overstating, the difficulties in establishing one’s authority. “A prudent
man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men, and imitate
those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not
reach that far, it is at least in the odor of it” (VI/22). One should do what
archers do when attempting to reach a distant target, namely, aim one’s
bow high, knowing that gravity will force the arrow down. In other words,
set your sights high, knowing that you will probably fall short. So who are
“the greatest examples” of princely rule that the prudent man should imi-
tate?
Here Machiavelli gives a list of heroic founders of peoples and states:

Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and so on. “As one examines their actions
and lives,” he writes, “one does not see that they had anything else from
fortune than the opportunity which gave them the matter enabling them to
introduce any form they pleased” (VI/23). In short, these were founders
who, like the biblical God, created ex nihilo, with only the occasion to act
and the necessary virtues—strength of mind—to take advantage of their
situation. “Such opportunities,” he continues, “made these men success-
ful and their excellent virtue enabled the opportunity to be recognized;
hence their fatherlands were ennobled by it and they became prosperous”
(VI/23).
It is here that Machiavelli introduces his famous distinction between
armed and unarmed prophets. “All the armed prophets conquered and the
unarmed ones were ruined,” he concludes (VI/24). This seems to be—and
is—a statement of sheer power politics. Political power grows out of the bar-
rel of a gun, as a twentieth-century Machiavellian has said. But there is more
than this. Why does Machiavelli compare the new prince to a prophet? What
is a prophet? The most obvious answer is a man to whom God speaks. The
biblical prophet—Nathan is a perfect example—is someone brought to chas-
tise or rebuke rulers for their injustice and misuse of power. Machiavelli’s
prophets, however, come armed. They come to assume power. There is only
one figure on Machiavelli’s list who could qualify as a prophet in the strict
sense, namely, Moses, whom he calls a “mere agent” who should be admired
not for his skill “but for that grace which made him deserving of speaking
with God” (VI/22).
But the prophet in Machiavelli’s sense is also someone who inhabits
the imagination (fantasia) of a people. It is not enough that a prophet be
obeyed; he must be believed. An interesting case in point is the treatment of
Savonarola, a near-prophet, who failed, so to speak, only when words failed
him. “He was ruined in his new orders as soon as the multitude began not
to believe in them and he had no mode for holding fi rm those who had
believed nor for making unbelievers believe” (VI/24). The lesson of Savon-
arola cannot be repeated too often. Savonarola did not fail because he was
the prototypical unarmed prophet; the source of his failure was not just
a failure of arms but of words: the people had ceased to believe in him.
Machiavelli’s prophets may not be religious figures or the recipients of di-
vine knowledge, but they must be persons of exceptional personal qualities
that allow them to bring laws, to shape institutions, and reform the opinions
that govern men’s lives. Machiavelli’s armed prophet is more than a gangster;
he is an educator.
Although it is characteristic of Machiavelli to talk tough—armed
prophets always conquer and the unarmed always lose—he clearly recog-
nizes that there are huge exceptions to this rule. The most obvious and im-
portant exception of an unarmed prophet conquering is Jesus Christ. Jesus
conquered by words alone, which helped to establish first a sect, then a reli-
gion, and eventually an empire. Words may well be a weapon as powerful as
a gun. And, then, what is Machiavelli himself but an archetypal unarmed
prophet? He controls no troops or territory. Yet he is clearly attempting to
conquer in large part through the transformation of our understanding of
good and evil, of virtue and vice. In order to make people obey, you must
first make them believe. Machiavelli’s prophetic prince must have many of
the qualities of a philosopher and a religious reformer.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

It is often said of Machiavelli that he introduced a new kind of immoral-
ism into politics. In his famous formula from chapter 15 he sets out to
teach the prince “how not to be good.” Leo Strauss, in perhaps the most
important book on Machiavelli ever written, declared him to be a “teacher
of evil.” Questions of good and bad, virtue and vice, appear on virtually
every page of The Prince. Machiavelli is not simply a teacher of pragma-
tism, of how to adjust the means to fit the ends; he is offering nothing short
of a comprehensive reevaluation of our basic moral vocabulary of good
and evil.
In order to affect his transformation of Christian morality, in order
to teach the prince “how not to be good,” it is necessary to go to the source
of morality. To effect the maxims that actually govern our lives, it is neces-
sary to go to the foundation of those maxims, ones that can be found only
in religion. Oddly enough, religion does not seem to be a major theme of
The Prince. In a memorable passage from chapter 18, Machiavelli advises
the prince to always cultivate the appearance of religion: “He should ap-
pear all mercy, all faith, all honesty, all humanity, all religion,” he writes,
adding that “nothing is more necessary to appear to have than this last
quality” (XVIII/70–71). The point is clear: the appearance of religion—by
which he means here Christianity—is good, while the actual practice of it
is harmful.
Machiavelli’s point is that if you want liberty, you have to learn how not
to be good, at least as Christianity has defined goodness. The Christian vir-
tues of humility, turning the other cheek, and forgiveness of sins must be re-
jected if you want to do good as opposed to just be good. You have to learn
how to get your hands dirty. Between the innocence of the Christian and the
worldliness of Machiavelli’s new morality, there can be no reconciliation.
These are two incompatible moral positions. But Machiavelli goes further.
The safety and security enjoyed by the innocent, their freedom to live blame-
less lives and untroubled sleep, depends entirely upon the prince’s clear-eyed
and even ruthless use of power. The true statesman must be prepared to mix
a love of the common good, a love of his own people, with a streak of cruelty
that is often deemed essential for a great ruler in general. It is simply another
example of how moral goodness grows out of and requires a context of moral
evil. Machiavelli’s advice is clear: if you cannot accept the responsibilities
of political life, if you cannot accept the harsh necessities that may require
cruelty, deceit, and even murder, then get out of the way. Do not seek to
impose your own high-minded innocence—sometimes called justice—on
the requirements of statecraft, because it will only lead to ruin. In our era,
the presidency of Jimmy Carter is usually taken as Exhibit A of this confu-
sion of Christian humanitarianism with raison d’état.
In the philosophical literature this is known as the problem of dirty
hands, so called after a play, Les Mains sales, written by the French philoso-
pher Jean-Paul Sartre. The problem of dirty hands refers to the confl ict
between the harsh requirements of politics and the equally demanding de-
sire for moral purity, to keep the world at a distance. In Sartre’s play, which
takes place in a fictional eastern European country during World War II, a
communist resistance fighter named Hoederer upbraids an idealistic young
recruit who balks at the order to carry out a political assassination. The
communists are no different from members of any other party, Hoederer
explains. They will do whatever they have to do to achieve victory: “How you
cling to your purity, young man! How afraid you are to soil your hands! All
right, stay pure! What good will it do you? Why did you join us? Purity is an
idea for a yogi or a monk. Well, I have dirty hands. Right up to the elbows.
I’ve plunged them in filth and blood. But what do you hope? Do you think
anyone can govern innocently?”
Or take another example: Carol Reed’s great film The Third Man. There
an American innocent named Holly Martins comes to postwar Vienna to
join his boyhood friend and idol, Harry Lime, who, Martins discovers, is
deep inside a murderous black market racket. From a ferris wheel high
above the bombed-out city, they look down on the people below, and Harry
asks: “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving
forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped,
would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate
how many dots you could afford to spare?” As they prepare to part, Harry
provides a speech that would have done Machiavelli proud: “Under the Bor-
gias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they
had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what
did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Or take one more example: John Le Carré’s splendid Cold War thriller
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Here a British agent, Alec Lemas, car-
ries on an affair with an idealistic young Englishwoman who has joined the
Communist Party out of a belief in nuclear disarmament and world peace.
In the course of the story, the two are used to protect an East German agent
who has been turned by the English intelligence forces. After their unwitting
role in the plot is made clear, Lemas explains what the world of high espio-
nage is all about: “There’s only one law in this game, the expediency of tem-
porary alliances. What do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring
everything against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not! They’re just a
bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-
pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten
their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing
right against wrong?”
These are all examples of what I would call faux Machiavellianism:
intellectuals engaging in tough talk to show that they really have lost their
idealism, the intellectual’s equivalent of losing one’s virginity. It suggests that
the world is divided between the strong and the weak, between realists who
see things the way they really are and the idealists who require the comfort
of moral illusions.
Machiavelli does not so much reject the idea of the good as redefine it.
He is continually speaking the language of virtue—actually virtù—a word
which retains the Latin root for the word “man” and which translates into
something like our term for manliness. What distinguishes Machiavelli’s
use of this term is that he seeks to locate it in certain extreme situations
such as political foundings, changes of regimes, and wars, both domestic
and foreign. What distinguishes Machiavelli from his predecessors is his
attempt to take the extraordinary situation—the extreme—as the normal

situation and then make morality fit the extreme. His examples are typically
drawn from situations in extremis where the very survival or independence
of society is at stake. In such situations—and only in such situations—is it
permissible to violate the precepts of ordinary morality. Machiavelli takes
his bearings from such extreme states of emergency and seeks to render
them normal.
Machiavelli does not deny that in ordinary times—in what we might
call times of normal politics—the rules of justice may prevail. He shows
only that normal politics is itself dependent on extraordinary politics—
periods of crisis, anarchy, and revolution—where the normal rules of the
game are suspended. It is in these times when individuals of extraordinary
virtue are most likely to emerge. Machiavelli’s preference for the extreme
situation expresses his belief that only in moments of great political crisis,
when the very existence of society is at risk, does human nature most fully
reveal itself. His writings convey a sense of urgency that evokes the neces-
sity for the most drastic action. While the Aristotelian statesman is most
likely to value stability and the means necessary to achieving it, the Ma-
chiavellian prince seeks war because only in the most extreme situations
can one hope to prosper.
Machiavelli’s ethics are avowedly immoralist. What he wants the prince
to value above all else are glory, fame, and honor. These are sought by the
most “excellent men,” Moses, Theseus, Cyrus, and maybe Cesare Borgia, but
others like Agathocles lack them. The ethic of glory is a distinctively non-
moral good. It aims not at justice, fairness, or friendship but at fostering those
qualities that bring with them memorable greatness and lasting fame. These
qualities Machiavelli believes are most conspicuously displayed in the world
of “great politics,” specifically building up the strength of one’s city or na-
tion for it to play a role in the game of world history. History, for Machia-
velli, becomes the true court of judgment—the only final reward of virtue.
Machiavelli’s advice to the prince is to create monuments for your city,
make something that will be remembered, whether for good or evil. He
advises citizens to take pride in the glorious achievements of their country
and make their own contributions to the annals of its history.
The question that animates Machiavelli’s Prince is this. Politicians can-
not serve their country unless they are prepared to dirty their hands through
unscrupulous means. But how does one—how can one—preserve something
like inner integrity while stooping to means—lying, character assassination,
betrayal—that no decent person would employ? Machiavelli does not discuss
the inner states or frames of mind of his heroes—Caesar, Hannibal, Borgia—

who have chosen to get their hands dirty. What such men think of them-
selves, we have no idea. They perhaps have no inner life, and this is what
renders them psychologically flat. Machiavelli seems to assume that the glory
that comes with creating or strengthening a state is its own reward. His ad-
vice seems to be, “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” If you
don’t like the kind of person you think you might become through the de-
mands of political life, then stay at home.
The Aesthetics of Violence

The model of Machiavellian virtù is the Renaissance statesman and general
Cesare Borgia. In chapter 7 of The Prince he gives a powerful example of
Borgia’s virtue in practice. Here Machiavelli tells the story of how Borgia ap-
pointed one of his lieutenants, Remirro de Orco, “a cruel and ready man,” to
help organize a territory not far from the outskirts of Florence. Remirro was
an efficient officer and soon established order, but Borgia, to show that he
was in charge, ordered Remirro to be murdered and the body and bloody
knife to be displayed in the town square. “The ferocity of this spectacle,”
Machiavelli concludes, “left the people satisfied and stupefied [satisfatte e
stupidi]” (VII/30).
Borgia’s use of cruelty here is an example of what Machiavelli calls
“cruelty well-used”: “Those [cruelties] can be called well-used,” he writes,
adding parenthetically “(if it is permissible to speak well of evil) that are done
at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself and then are not persisted in
but are turned to as much utility for the subjects as one can” (VIII/37–38). So
Machiavelli criticizes Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, whose “savage cru-
elty and inhumanity, together with his infinite crimes, do not allow him to be
celebrated among the most excellent men” (VIII/35). There can be no clearer
statement of what Sheldon Wolin has called Machiavelli’s “economy of vio-
lence,” that is, the need for quick, efficient, and resolute acts of cruelty that are
judged in terms of their effects alone. “What he hoped to further by his
economy of violence,” Wolin writes, “was the ‘pure’ use of power, undefi led
by pride, ambition, or motives of petty revenge.”
This is at best only partially true. The term “economy of violence” says
little of interest about Machiavelli, but the term “spectacle” does. He is less
interested in the economy than the aesthetics of violence. He approaches
politics not as an economist calculating costs and benefits but as an aesthe-
tician concerned with the spectacular effects that violence will achieve.
No one can read his descriptions of political assassination, conquest, and

empire without sensing a deep admiration, even a celebration, of acts of cre-
ative violence. Thus can Machiavelli heap praise on Hannibal and his “inhu-
man cruelty that together with his infinite virtues always made him venerable
and terrible in the sight of his soldiers” (XVII/67). But Machiavelli was not a
sadist. He did not celebrate cruelty for its own sake. In a deeply revealing
passage, he criticizes Ferdinand of Aragon for his acts of “pious cruelty” in
expelling the Jews from Spain (XXI/88). He treated violence not as an unfor-
tunate byproduct of political necessity but as a supreme political virtue
through which form is imposed on matter.
Machiavelli’s aesthetic of violence is connected to the belief that the
great civilizations in history—the Persian, the Hebrew, the Roman—all grew
out of acts of cruelty, domination, and conquest. The great political leaders
past and present were not monks or moral philosophers calibrating finely
tuned theories of justice but men with “dirty hands” who were prepared to
use instruments of deceit, cruelty, and even murder to achieve conspicuous
greatness. Machiavelli takes a perverse delight in bringing out the depen-
dence of flourishing and successful civilizations on initial acts of fratricide,
murder, and civil war.
There is an often violent and usurpatory character to what Machiavelli
calls virtù. Virtù is above all the ability to take advantage of a situation—
the “occasion,” as Machiavelli sometimes calls it—that has been handed to us
by fortuna. Virtù and fortuna are complementary terms for Machiavelli.
There can be no virtue without a proper occasion in which to use it, and no
occasion that does not create opportunities to exercise the proper human
skills and abilities. Thus in the famous chapter 25, “How Much Fortune Can
Do in Human Affairs,” Machiavelli begins by considering the proposition
that so much of human life is left to chance that there is little we can do to
affect the course of events. “This opinion,” he writes, with a nod to the pre-
sent, “has been believed more in our times because of the great variability of
things” (XXV/98).
Machiavelli considers the proposition, but rejects it. While much of
what happens in politics is a matter of happenstance, luck, and sheer con-
tingency, human intelligence, planning, and foresight still have some role
to play. “In order that our free will not be eliminated,” he conjectures, “I
judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of half our actions, but
also that she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern” (XXV/98).
The idea is that if fortuna governs half of life, virtù has some role in shaping
the other half. And in a famous image he compares fortuna to a raging cur-
rent or a flood, but says that virtù, using foresight, can create artificial bar-
riers like dams to control the uncontrollable and put in order what is by
nature chaotic. It follows that those who rely or depend too much on the
power of luck—like those people who live in perpetual hope that they will
purchase a winning lottery ticket—will come to ruin, while those who adapt
themselves to the times have a greater chance of success. This seems to be a
variation of the adage that fortune favors the prepared.
But Machiavelli goes further than this. Virtù is not simply a matter of
adaptation and adjustment to the circumstances. It is also a matter of forc-
ing the circumstances to adapt to you. There is a violent and aggressive as-
pect to Machiavelli’s idea of adapting to the occasion. “I judge this indeed,”
he writes, “that it is better to be impetuous than cautious because fortune is
a woman and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and
strike her down” (XXV/101). In other words, fortune responds more easily
to audacity than to caution, to boldness and resoluteness than to modera-
tion. Machiavelli’s virtue is nothing if not a policy of preemption. Further-
more, Machiavelli tells the reader that such policies are more likely to find
favor among the young, who he says are “less cautious, more ferocious, and
command her [fortuna] with more audacity” (XXV/101).
Two Humors
What kind of government did Machiavelli think best? As he indicates at the
beginning of The Prince, there are two kinds of regimes: principalities and
republics. But each of these regimes is based on certain contrasting disposi-
tions or what he calls “humors.” “For in every city,” Machiavelli writes in
chapter 9, “two diverse humors are found, which arises from this: that the
people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great and the
great desire to command and oppress the people” (IX/39).
Machiavelli here uses a psychological, even quasi-medical term—
“humors” (umori)—to designate the two great classes of people on which
every state is based. Machiavelli’s theory of the two humors is reminiscent of
Plato’s account of the three classes of the soul, with one vivid exception: each
class in the city is bound to a “humor,” but neither humor is anchored in
reason. Every state is divided into two classes, the grandi, the rich and pow-
erful who wish to dominate, and the popolo, the common people who wish
merely to be left alone, who desire neither to rule nor be ruled. One might
expect the author of a book entitled The Prince to favor the great. Are not
these aristocratic goals of honor and glory precisely what Machiavelli has
been advocating?
Yet Machiavelli proceeds to deprecate radically the virtues of the no-
bility. “The end of the people,” he says, “is more decent than that of the
great, since the great want to oppress and the people want not to be op-
pressed” (IX/39). His advice seems to be that the prince should seek to build
his power base on the people rather than the nobles. Because of their ambi-
tion for power, the nobles will always be a threat to the prince, while a
prince who has the people for his base can rule with greater ease and confi-
dence. In an interesting reversal of the classical conception of politics, it is
the nobles who are here said to be fickle and unreliable, while the people are
more constant and stable. “The worst that a prince can expect from a hos-
tile people is to be abandoned by it,” Machiavelli writes, “but from the
great, when they are hostile, he must fear not only being abandoned but
also that they may move against him” (IX/39–40).
The main business of government consists, then, in knowing how to
control the great because they are always a potential source of conflict. The
prince must know how to chasten the ambition—to humble the pride, as it
were—of the great and powerful. This, as we will see, will be a major theme
in the political philosophy of Hobbes. The rule of the prince or sovereign
requires the ability to control ambition and to do so through selective poli-
cies of execution, public accusations, and political trials. Remember the
example of Remirro de Orco and how his execution left the people “satis-
fied and stupefied.” Here is a perfect example of how both to control the
ambitions of the nobles and to cater to the desires of the people.
Machiavelli’s prince, while not exactly a democrat, recognizes the es-
sential decency of the people and the need to keep their faith. By decency
Machiavelli seems to mean their absence of ambition, the absence of the de-
sire to dominate and command. But this decency is not the same as good-
ness. For there is a tendency on the part of the people to descend into what
Machiavelli deems “idleness” or license. The desire not to oppress others may
be decent, but at the same time the people must be taught how to defend their
liberty. Fifteen hundred years of Christianity have left men weak, without
the capacities to exercise political responsibility or the resources to defend
themselves from attack. Just as the prince must know how to control the
ambitions of the nobles, he must know how to strengthen the desires of
the common people.
Some readers—even some very astute readers—of Machiavelli have

thought that his prince is really a kind of democrat, and that The Prince is
intended precisely to alert the people to the dangers of a usurping prince.
Consider Spinoza’s Political Treatise: “[Machiavelli] perhaps wished to show
how careful a free people should be before entrusting its welfare to a single
prince. . . . I am led to this opinion concerning that most far-seeing man be-
cause it is known that he was favorable to liberty.” Or, if you do not believe
Spinoza, consider Rousseau’s comment from The Social Contract: “Machia-
velli was an honest man and a good citizen; but being attached to the house of
Medici he was forced during the oppression of his fatherland to disguise his
love of freedom.”
These comments are extremely revealing. Both of these great political
writers take Machiavelli to be an apostle of freedom. Spinoza takes him to be
offering a warning to the people about the dangers of princely rule; Rousseau
takes him to have deliberately disguised his love of freedom due to the tyran-
nical rule of the Medici. Both regard him to be surreptitiously defending the
people against the nobles.
Spinoza and Rousseau may exaggerate, but they are surely on to some-
thing. In the classical republic it is the nobility—the gentlemen possessed of
wealth and leisure who are therefore capable of forming judgment—who
dominate, while in Machiavelli’s state it is the people who are going to be the
dominant social and political power. Machiavelli wants to redirect power
away from the nobles and toward the people. Why? In the first place, he
judges the people to be more reliable than the great. Once the people have
been taught to value their liberty, have learned to oppose encroachments on
their freedom, to be fierce and vigilant watchdogs rather than humble and
subservient underlings, they will serve as a reliable basis for the greatness
and power of a state. With the people on his side, the prince is more likely to
achieve his goals of a robust civil life for his people and eternal glory for
himself.
As Machiavelli likes to say, a prince must know how to adapt to the
times. What is true for princes is no less true for their advisers like Machia-
velli. One must know the nature of both princes and peoples. In the Dedi-
cation Machiavelli compares himself to a landscape painter who must place
himself on top of mountains to paint the valleys and in the valleys to paint
the mountains (Dedication/4). In the ancient republics it may have been
necessary to find restraints on the passions of the demos, but in the modern
world, where republics have become a thing of the past, the people need to
be taught to value their liberty above all else. The most excellent princes of
the past were those, like Moses, who brought tablets of the law and prepared
their people for self-government. It is fitting that Machiavelli concludes The
Prince with a chapter calling upon his countrymen to emancipate them-
selves and to liberate Italy from foreign intruders.
Machiavelli’s Utopianism
Let me conclude this analysis of The Prince by considering what I want to
call Machiavelli’s utopianism. On the face of it, this term seems to be an
oxymoron. Doesn’t Machiavelli exhort us to consider only “the effectual
truth” of things, as opposed to imagined principalities, that is, to look at
what people do, not at what they say, at the Is rather than the Ought? Yet
despite his avowed rejection of ancient utopianism, Machiavelli tells readers
to take as their models the greatest founders of peoples and nations, that
these founders must be endowed with certain charismatic or prophetic prop-
erties, and that such people have come to power not through force alone but
through their own virtù. These views provide evidence for an idealistic, even
utopian, strain in Machiavelli’s thought.
Nowhere is Machiavelli’s idealism more on display than in the final
chapter of The Prince, “Exhortation to Seize Italy and Free Her from the
Barbarians.” This chapter has probably given rise to more discussion than
any other part of the book. Why at the end of what to many readers seems
no more than a technical, how-to manual on politics does Machiavelli con-
clude with a passionate call for liberation? Some readers even believe there
was a gap of several years between the composition of the first twenty-five
chapters of the book, written in 1513, and the final chapter. For such readers
the sections of the final chapter that speak of the liberation from the bar-
barians and the call for the redemption of Italy could only have been written
around the year 1518.
Far from an afterthought, these reflections were an obsession of Ma-
chiavelli’s throughout all of his writings. His answer to the weakness and
disunity of the Italian states was the myth of the prince: the figure personi-
fying virtù, strength, and charisma whose redemptive power could point
the way to a new Rome. In fact the opportunity for such a prince to exhibit
real virtù is dependent on the current degradation of society, just as “it was
necessary for anyone wanting to see the virtue of Moses that the people of
Israel be enslaved in Egypt” (XXVI/102). The prophet and his people are
linked. There is no such thing as a prophet without a people, or redemption
without a redeemer. That Machiavelli expected such a redeemer-prince to

emerge from the conditions of current decadence is clear from a letter to
Vettori of August 26, 1513, during the time he was writing The Prince: “I
certainly do not think that they [the Swiss] will create an empire like the
Romans, but I do think they can become masters of Italy thanks to their
proximity and thanks to our disarray and bad situation. And because these
things appall me, I should like to remedy them . . . and now I am ready to
start weeping with you over our collapse and our servitude that, if it does
not come today or tomorrow, will come in our lifetime.”
It is precisely out of the degradation of Italy that Machiavelli believes
political redemption will follow. In fact the condition of Italy’s degradation
is even necessary for the accomplishment of its eventual redemption. Like
Moses, Machiavelli seems to be aware that he would not live to see the new
promised land, that he was an unarmed prophet, who at best could show a
new prince the way out of the wilderness and to a new Jerusalem. Machiavelli
is aware that such a redeemer-prince may not come “in our time,” that the
immediate future of Italy will be one of weakness and disorder, but come he
will; and when he does, he will not be the prince of peace but another Borgia,
Hannibal, or Alexander. Machiavelli writes to hasten the coming of this
redeemer-prince. He may well have added: “May he come quickly and in our
time.”
Machiavelli’s Discourses
For serious students of Machiavelli, the Discourses on Livy—the full title of
the book is actually Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy—has al-
ways been considered his most important work. In part because of its length
and the organization of its subject matter, it is not read nearly so frequently
as The Prince. In fact the relation between the two books has been some-
thing of an enigma for generations of readers.
The Prince was published in 1513, the year after Machiavelli was ex-
pelled from public office. The date of the Discourses is more difficult to
establish. The best guess is that it was written sometime between the years
1513 and 1517, although it was not published until 1531, four years after Ma-
chiavelli’s death. Even so, he seems to have been working on both books
simultaneously. In the second chapter of The Prince, he makes what seems
to be an allusion to the Discourses. He remarks that The Prince will deal
only with principalities and that he has saved his discussion of republics for
elsewhere. That is commonly believed to be a reference to the Discourses.
Machiavelli’s statement here tells us something about the subject

matter of the two books. The Prince follows the genre of the mirror of
princes. It is a manual on how to achieve and maintain princely power.
The Discourses is commonly regarded as Machiavelli’s book on republics.
It takes the form of a historical and political commentary on the first ten
books of Livy’s history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita. Livy was widely regarded
as the greatest of the Roman historians. He told the history of Rome from
its founding—actually, its numerous foundings—to the establishment of
the republic and the height of its power. He did not dwell (as he might
have) on the descent of the republic into civil war and the transition from
the republic to the monarchy under the emperors (although he wrote dur-
ing the reign of Augustus). Livy’s history was always regarded as the Bible
of republican government. Machiavelli, in choosing to present his teach-
ing by means of a commentary on the greatest Roman historian, calls the
reader’s attention to the greatness, the unsurpassable greatness, of Rome.
Anyone who wants to understand greatness must understand Rome. Machi-
avelli’s turn to Rome, and especially to the history of the republic, is a sig-
nal that he sides with the ancients against the moderns and the republic
against princely rule.
The Two Dedications

The difference between The Prince and the Discourses is further indicated
by the dedications of the two books. The Prince is dedicated to Lorenzo de
Medici. Machiavelli begins by noting that it is customary for a man of low
station to dedicate his work to a person of high station. The Discourses by
contrast is dedicated to two young friends of Machiavelli’s—Zanobi Buon-
delmonti and Cosimo Rucellai—who he says have “forced” him to write the
book that he would never have written of his own accord. In what way, we
wonder, was Machiavelli forced? These two young men were part of a liter-
ary circle to which Machiavelli belonged. More important than who they
were is what they represent. Sociolog ically, they were members of the
grandi—the aristocracy—and as such the future members of the Florentine
ruling class. Machiavelli’s audience was composed of young men like
Buondelmonti and Rucellai, cultured aristocrats who frequented the social
gatherings in the great houses of the Italian cities, who gathered for discus-
sions in the court of Lorenzo, and who attended productions of Roman
and contemporary plays in the Orti Oricellari (Rucellai Gardens), which
have been compared to the Platonic Academy. It was, apparently, under the
trees in these gardens that Machiavelli first read sections of his tribute to
republics to his Medicean audience!
Yet something seems amiss. Machiavelli is writing a book in praise of
republics but dedicates it to two members of the aristocracy, who by their
birth, education, and upbringing were bound to be deeply hostile to the
cause of republican government. To be sure, Machiavelli’s best friends were
members of this class. The two best known were his friend Francesco Vettori,
the Florentine ambassador to Rome with whom he shared a lengthy corre-
spondence, and the historian Francesco Guicciardini. What was he trying to
accomplish? What seems clear is that he intended the Discourses as a kind of
educational treatise for these young aristocrats. He presents himself as a
teacher, an educator. The length and academic form of the work—a commen-
tary on an ancient historian—would presumably have appealed to the two
young Florentine humanists. In any case Machiavelli knows how to flatter his
readers: “I have chosen to dedicate these, my discourses, to you in preference
to all others; both because, in doing so, I seem to be showing some gratitude
for benefits received, and also because I seem in this to be departing from
the usual practice of authors, which has always been to dedicate their works
to some prince and blinded by ambition and avarice, to praise him for all his
virtuous qualities when they ought to have blamed him for all manner of
shameful deeds” (Dedication/201–2).
In his dedication Machiavelli seems to be engaged in an act of self-
criticism, repudiating his dedication of The Prince to Lorenzo. “So to avoid
this mistake,” he continues, “I have chosen not those who are princes, but
those . . . who deserve to be . . . those who know how to govern a kingdom,
not those who, without knowing how, actually govern one” (Dedication/202).
Machiavelli enjoys underscoring the youth of his audience. In fact book 1 of
the Discourses ends with a reference to “very young men” who won triumphs
for Rome. In the dedication and throughout the book, Machiavelli presents
himself as a guide to the young.
Of course, Machiavelli exaggerates. If the young readers to whom the
work is dedicated already knew how to govern a kingdom, then his act of
writing the Discourses would appear superfluous. You don’t write a book of
this length to tell people what they already know. Machiavelli insinuates
himself into his readers’ good graces in order to gain their confidence. His
purpose, I want to suggest, is to win over this class to the cause of republi-
canism, to show them the well-ordered republic so that they might create
the republic that might yet be. The Discourses brings out Machiavelli’s ambi-
tion and idealism. His desire is nothing less than to create a new Rome.
“New Modes and Orders”

Machiavelli hopes to whet his readers’ appetite for Rome in the Preface to
the Discourses. This is where he famously announces his discovery of “new
modes and orders.” He compares himself to Columbus in a search for “new
seas and unknown lands” and boasts that he has entered upon “a new way
as yet untrodden by anyone else” (Preface/205). But it turns out that Ma-
chiavelli’s nautical image is the discovery not exactly of a wholly unknown
land but rather of a forgotten land, a land that time has forgotten. Th is new
land is Rome.
Machiavelli knows this claim will seem strange. He lives in a time—
the Renaissance—and place—Florence—saturated with antiquity. The hu-
manists of Machiavelli’s time were themselves imbued with love of the
ancients. In order, then, to distinguish himself, Machiavelli contrasts his
approach to the ancients to the aestheticizing tendency of his contempo-
raries in order to return his readers to the first principles of the Roman
republic. Rather than praising dilettantes who collect fragments of Roman
statuary to adorn their houses and gardens, Machiavelli points his readers
to the actual deeds of the Romans as related by Livy: “When I notice that
what history has to say about the highly virtuous actions performed by an-
cient kingdoms and republics, by their kings, their generals, their citizens,
their legislators, and by others who have worn themselves out in their
country’s ser vice, is rather admired than imitated; nay, is so shunned by
everybody in each little thing they do, that of the virtue of bygone days
there remains no trace, it cannot but fill me at once with astonishment and
grief” (Preface/205–6).
Machiavelli’s sarcasm is obvious. What interests his contemporaries
about Rome, he implies, is its artistic style—its art and architecture. In focus-
ing on matters of what we would call art history, they forget the most vital
and important lessons, that is, the political lessons. It is important to return
to Rome today, Machiavelli says, because our capacity for self-government
has undergone degeneration. The moderns are inferior to the ancients in pre-
cisely those qualities that contribute to freedom. Machiavelli attributes this
decline in part to Christianity, but even more to a degeneration in the art
of reading. His book will be a reading lesson—a very long reading lesson—
addressed to those who lack “a proper appreciation of history, owing to
people failing to realize the significance of what they read, and to their
having no taste for the delicacies it comprises. Hence it comes about that the
great bulk of those who read it take pleasure in hearing of the various inci-
dents that are contained in it, but never think of imitating them, since they
hold them to be not merely difficult but impossible of imitation, as if the
heavens, the sun, the elements of man had in their motion, their order, and
their potency, become different from what they used to be” (Preface/206).
Machiavelli wants to encourage his readers not just to idly and eclec-
tically reflect on what they read but to actively imitate the great deeds of
their ancient ancestors. It is this, he says, that has led him to write a com-
mentary on Livy. Indeed, to do full justice to the Discourses one would need
to read with constant reference to Livy and to Machiavelli’s many other
sources. To be sure, the Discourses is no ordinary commentary. Machiavelli
uses Livy promiscuously, and for long stretches of time he disappears alto-
gether from Machiavelli’s text. He hopes to improve upon Livy and therefore
to improve upon Rome. Machiavelli will not confine himself to the study of
his ancient sources alone but will constantly be “comparing ancient with
modern events” in order to draw “practical lessons” from them. Let us con-
sider some of these lessons.
Republics Ancient and Modern

The paradox at the heart of the Discourses is that Machiavelli’s claim to
novelty—his nautical image of the discovery of new lands—is actually a
recovery of ancient modes and orders. How does Machiavelli make some-
thing very old appear to be new and unprecedented? One answer is that he
uses Livy—a respected and respectable authority—as a means to advocate for
his own views on what constitutes a well-ordered republic. He hides behind
Livy’s authority in order to give himself the sheen of respectability and
therefore takes full advantage of the immunity of the commentator. There
are four features, I want to suggest, that constitute the novelty of Machia-
velli’s republic and that bear some marked resemblances to our own.
The Discourses begins with a reflection on whether it is preferable for
a regime to be established by a single lawgiver or to grow haphazardly over
time. The model for the former is Sparta, whose laws and constitution were
given by a single man, Lycurgus, and remained intact for eight centuries.
The latter model, the regime that is the product of chance—or fortuna, in
Machiavelli’s language—is Rome, which lacked a single founder and was
forced to refound and adapt itself to circumstances as they arose. Machia-
velli presents this as something of a debate, considering the pros and cons
of each side. Yet contrary to expectation, he draws a surprising conclusion:
“In spite of the fact that Rome had no Lycurgus to give it at the outset such
a constitution as would ensure to it a long life of freedom, yet owing to fric-

tion between the plebs and the senate, so many things happened that chance
effected what had not been provided by a law-giver. So that, if Rome did not
get fortune’s first gift, it got its second. For her early institutions, though
defective, were not on wrong lines and so might pave the way to perfection”
(I.2/215).
The claim that Rome achieved its longevity and freedom not thanks to
conscious design but as a consequence of chance and luck merely paves the
way for Machiavelli’s most daring and arresting thesis. It is the claim that
conflict, not consensus, was what contributed most to the greatness of Rome.
Not unity but disunity gave Rome its strength. Machiavelli is above all a
theorist of social conflict—of class conflict—which he treats, when it is kept
within bounds, as a positive good.
Machiavelli remained deeply controversial for his rejection of the
model of class consensus or harmony so beloved by the humanists of his
time. He returns to this theme again in book 1, chapter 4: “To me those who
condemn the quarrels between the nobles and the plebs, seem to be cavilling
about the very things that were the primary cause of Rome’s retaining her
freedom, and that they pay more attention to the noise and clamor resulting
from such commotions than to what resulted from them. . . . Nor do they
realize that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the
plebs and that of the nobles and that all legislation favorable to liberty is
brought about by the clash between them” (I.4/218; translation modified).
This passage makes two important points. The first goes back to Ma-
chiavelli’s statement in The Prince always to look at “the effectual truth of
things.” It is consequences that count, and one should not be misled by other
considerations. And second, conflict is rooted deeply in human psychology,
in the two “humors” or dispositions, the desire of the nobles to rule and
dominate and the desire of the plebs to be free. National strength and great-
ness are the outcome of a clash of these opposing dispositions, not of some
specious appeal to consensus. All politics is for Machiavelli partisan politics.
Consensus is a fraud. Appeals to consensus are just a smokescreen for the
dominance of one class. Human life is essentially an inescapable conflict. To
claim that people can rise above partisanship and all embrace some idea of
the common good is one of those pleasing illusions that belong to “princi-
palities in the air.” The aim of politics should not be to eliminate conflict but
to organize it and make it serve the cause of national greatness.
The second major claim of the Discourses is introduced in book 1,
chapter 5, in a debate over what Machiavelli calls the “guardianship” of
liberty. He asks, is power better entrusted to the people or to the nobles?

Once again, he sets up the question as a debate and presents arguments from
both sides. Sparta and Venice are republics that have followed the aristocratic
model, lodging power within the hands of the nobility. There are good rea-
sons for them to do this. The nobles are the class that most desire to rule, so
giving them political power satisfies this desire. Also, giving power to the
nobles offsets the restlessness of the plebs, who are notoriously agitated and
fickle. Rome, on the other hand, is the example of a republic where power was
concentrated in the plebs. It was above all the power of the people that con-
tributed to the greatness of Rome. Although Sparta may have lasted longer, it
was Rome that demonstrated greater virtue. Machiavelli sets himself firmly
on the side of Rome.
Machiavelli’s preference for the plebs—the common people—is per-
haps a first in political theory. Unlike the Aristotelian model of the politeia,
or constitutional government that sought a balance of the different factions
or classes, Machiavelli clearly favors the dominance of what Aristotle calls
the demos. The people, Machiavelli believes, are the most reliable support of
liberty. The Aristotlelian balanced constitution has become with Machiavelli
a democratic republic. Machiavelli returns to this theme near the end of book
1 of the Discourses. In chapter 55 he defends republics that have established a
wide degree of social equality. He goes on a tear against the nobles, who
“live in idleness on their abundant revenue derived from their estates” and
perform no essential labor for the republic (I.55/335). Such a class is a drain on
the republic and should be eliminated. In other words, occasional purges are
necessary to keep the republic pure—a lesson later adopted by the French and
Russian revolutionaries who instituted bloody purges of those deemed to be
“enemies of the people.” This is surely one of Machiavelli’s most bloodthirsty
moments.
This argument is further developed in book 1, chapter 58, entitled
“The Multitude Is Wiser and More Constant Than the Prince.” Here Machia-
velli sets out his differences with Livy. Where Livy had said that the people
are the most inconstant faction, Machiavelli stands this on its head. “I pro-
pose to defend a position that all writers attack,” he declares (I.58/341). Having
just declared himself in favor of a bloody purge of the nobles in chapter 55, he
now proclaims: “There can be no harm in defending an opinion by argu-
ments so long as one has no intention of appealing either to authority or
force” (I.58/341). It is odd that in a book designed to help us become better
readers, Machiavelli seems to assume here that we have forgotten what he
said just a few pages before!
Machiavelli’s arguments in defense of a democratic republic develop

what he says in chapter 9 of The Prince, where he calls the people more “de-
cent” than the prince. The people as a whole—not as any particular indi-
vidual or group—reveal better judgment, more prudence, than a prince.
Machiavelli develops arguments that attribute great foresight and intelli-
gence to the people. When two speakers with equal rhetorical gifts are advo-
cating for different positions, he asserts, the people never fail to make the
right choice. I am not sure what evidence there is to support this claim.
Machiavelli remarks that in the entire history of Rome, only four times—he
does not say which four—did the people have cause to repent their decisions
(I.58/344). Further, it is far easier to corrupt a single individual ruler than the
great body of the people. In short, the people are more reliable and better
judges of character than a prince. And finally, Machiavelli is prepared to
excuse the brutalities of the people because, he says, they are more likely to
be directed against the enemies of the republic, while the brutalities of a
prince are directed against his private enemies (I.58/345).
There is one further feature of Machiavelli’s democratic republic that is
worth noting. This is the Roman institution of public indictments (I.7/227–30).
These were similar to people’s courts, where those accused of conspiring
against the public good would have to defend themselves. Machiavelli ap-
proves the Roman practice of bringing public accusations against citizens
deemed to be enemies of the people. This sounds more than a little like the
practice of public denunciations during Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the in-
famous “show trials” under Stalin. Machiavelli approves this as an outlet for
venting public hostility and also as a tool for keeping the aristocracy in check.
He criticizes modern Florence for lacking such an institution, which leaves
no means of chastising ambitious citizens. Note that Machiavelli says noth-
ing about the possible injustice of such indictments. He will gladly sacrifice
one person—recall Remirro d’Orco from The Prince—if it brings satisfaction
to the many. In Rome public indictments were a weapon of the plebs against
the rich and powerful and a chief outlet for what Machiavelli calls the “malig-
nant humors”—jealousy, resentment, envy—to which all of us are prone.
This brings us to the fourth feature of Machiavelli’s republic. In book 1,
chapter 6, Machiavelli sets out another point for the reader to consider:
“Should anyone be about to set up a republic, he should first inquire whether
it is to expand, as Rome did, both in dominion and in power, or is to be con-
fined to narrow limits” (I.6/225). Traditionally, republics were understood to
be small, self-contained city-states. Aristotle, recall, had praised the city that
could be “taken in at a glance.” A large state undercuts the ethos necessary for
political participation and civic engagement; it also encourages luxury that

tends toward corruption. Machiavelli even admits that if your concern is lon-
gevity, you should follow the Spartan and Venetian models.
But after appearing to endorse the city-state model that he associated
with aristocratic predominance, Machiavelli immediately goes on to under-
cut it. The goal of Rome was not simply longevity but greatness, and greatness
is only possible with a policy of imperial expansion and conquest. Machia-
velli’s republic is a republic on the march. His point is connected with the
republic’s ability to control its own environment. All cities have enemies and
live in the domain of fortuna; to adopt a purely defensive posture is to render
oneself vulnerable to attack from others. One should therefore follow the
policy of the Romans, who resolved upon empire as a means of conquering
their environment and thus rendering themselves immune to the winds
of fortune. They achieved this first of all by arming the plebs, which con-
tributed to Rome’s military greatness. Arming the plebs was the source of
continual tumult and dissension, but it was also the source of glory and
power.
Machiavelli defends this claim with a kind of ontological argument
about the nature of political reality. We live in a world of flux. States of af-
fairs are in constant change, and the fortunes of nations constantly go up
and down. A state that seeks merely to preserve itself thus risks disaster.
There is no perfect balance or stable point of equilibrium to be found; there-
fore one has to grow and expand in order to survive. States must expand
their power or face ruin—it’s that simple.
Machiavelli concludes this part of his discussion as follows: “Since it
is impossible, so I hold, to adjust the balance so nicely as to keep things
exactly to this middle course, one ought, in constituting a republic, to con-
sider the possibility of its playing a more honorable role, and so to consti-
tute it that, should necessity actually force it to expand, it may be able to
retain possession of what it has acquired. . . . I am convinced the Roman
type of constitution should be adopted and not that of any other republic,
for to find a middle way between the extremes, I do not think possible”
(I.6/226–27).
Machiavelli’s dismissive reference here to the “middle course” is a
clear reference to Aristotle and his policy of seeking the mean or the mod-
erate course of action. As Machiavelli suggests here, moderation is not pos-
sible in a world characterized by constant flux, because there is no stable
point of equilibrium from which to measure the mean. His advice: a repub-
lic must either expand or die. Does Machiavelli’s contentious, large-scale,
imperialistic republic sound familiar? It should, because Machiavelli is de-

scribing us.
The New Christianity

We cannot leave the Discourses without a word about religion—a theme that
Machiavelli alludes to several times throughout the book. In the Preface
he blames Christianity—he calls it “the religion of today” (what about
tomorrow?)—for abetting the weakness and disunity of present-day Italy.
He also refers to the evils brought about by ambition mixed with idleness, a
standard form of reference to priests and their influence (Preface/206).
Much of his language is that of a religious reformer—sometimes a radical
reformer—much like his German contemporary Martin Luther. Yet there is
a difference—a big difference.
Machiavelli is a great admirer of Numa Pompilius, the founder of the
pagan religion of ancient Rome. “The religion established by Numa,” he
writes at I.11, “was among the primary causes of Rome’s success.” What
was it that Machiavelli admired? He freely acknowledges that the religion
founded by Numa was a kind of fraud created to establish political virtue.
Numa “pretended to have private conferences with a nymph who advised
him about the advice he should give the people. Th is was because he
wanted to introduce new institutions to which the city was unaccustomed
and doubted whether his own authority would suffice” (I.11/241). In short,
political innovation requires that it be shrouded in the mystique of divine
authority.
The religion created by Numa is contrasted with what Machiavelli calls
in the next chapter “our religion” (I.12/244). He begins this chapter by ac-
knowledging—or pretending to acknowledge—the authority of existing
religion. It is important that the prince or rulers of a republic or a monar-
chy uphold the principles of the religion of their state. Machiavelli takes a
position of apparent neutrality toward the content of any particular reli-
gion; it is important that those in positions of political authority practice
the established religion. He goes on to contrast this with the way that
Christianity has historically evolved from its original teachings. “If such a
religious spirit had been kept up by the rulers of the Christian common-
wealth or as was ordained for us by its founder, Christian states and repub-
lics would have been much more united and much more happy than they
are” (I.12/244). The cause of political decline, he says in the next sentence,
can be laid at the doorstep of the Church of Rome. It is the church, more
than any other institution, that has kept Italy weak and divided. “The rea-
son why Italy is not in the same position,” he continues, “why there is not
one republic or one prince ruling there is due entirely to the Church”
(I.12/245). So far Machiavelli sounds like a critic of papal abuses of power,
a complaint quite common and even conventional in his day.
It is not until considerably later that Machiavelli lets the cat out of the
bag. In book 2, chapter 2, he asks the question, why it is that the ancients
seemed more fond of liberty than the moderns? The difference, he answers,
is due to the difference between our religion and theirs. It is not the corrup-
tion of Christianity that is responsible for the loss of liberty and the dis-
unity of Italy; the problem goes back to the founding principles themselves.
Machiavelli then goes on to provide a sharp and devastating series of con-
trasts: “Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather
than men of action. It has assigned as man’s highest good humility, abne-
gation, and contempt for mundane things, whereas the other identified it
with magnanimity, bodily strength, and everything else that conduces to
make men very bold. And if our religion demands that in you there be
strength, what it asks for is strength to suffer rather than strength to do bold
things” (II.2/364). Here is where Machiavelli drops his bombshell:
This pattern of life, therefore, appears to have made the world

weak, and to have handed it over as a prey to the wicked, who
run it successfully and securely since they are well aware that
the generality of men, with paradise for their goal, consider how
best to bear, rather than how best to avenge, their injuries. But,
though it looks as if the world were become effeminate and as if
heaven were powerless, this undoubtedly is due to the pusilla-
nimity of those who have interpreted our religion according to
idleness [l’ozio] and not in terms of virtue. For, had they borne
in mind that religion permits us to exalt and defend the father-
land, they would have seen that it also wishes us to love and
honor it, and to train ourselves to be such that we may defend it.
(II.2/364; translation modified)
What is Machiavelli saying here, and why does he wait until almost
the midpoint in the book to announce it? What does he want us to do?
Rather than simply advocating the reform of Christianity, he seems to be
advocating the creation of a wholly new religion to replace it, in the way
that Christianity once replaced the pagan Roman religion. The founder of a
new republic needs to be the founder of a new religion; he should follow the
example of Numa and create new rites and ceremonies from scratch. He will
be a transformative, even a redemptive, leader such as Machiavelli speaks
about in the final chapter of The Prince. But what would such a Machiavel-
lian civil religion look like? Here Machiavelli is tantalizingly and, I suspect,
deliberately obscure. One cannot legislate these matters in advance. This is
why the founder needs constantly to read history: to see what others have
done in the past so as to discover what to do and what to avoid and how to
make not only a new Rome but a new Jerusalem.
Machiavellianism Comes of Age

Machiavelli’s call for the replacement of Christianity by some kind of forti-
fied paganism did not fall on deaf ears. His most obvious disciples were those
who followed the “Erastian” creed of submitting religion to political control.
The most famous—or infamous—of these Erastians was Thomas Hobbes,
who in both his De Cive and his Leviathan defended the proposition that
religion is simply too important to be left to the priests. It must be put under
secular authority. Hobbes’s goal, as we will see in the next chapter, was to
establish religion on such a footing that it could not interfere with the
requirements of political order.
Yet the most ferocious Machiavellian of all was Rousseau. We have al-
ready seen how Rousseau, like Spinoza, interpreted Machiavelli as providing
a satire on monarchy and an esoteric defense of democracy. In the final
chapter of The Social Contract, he takes up Machiavelli’s unanswered ques-
tion, “What kind of religion can best serve republican government?” Like
Machiavelli, and almost all who went before him, Rousseau accepted the
sociological fact that “no state has ever been founded without religion serv-
ing as its base” (IV.8/146). He takes for granted the power or muscle of reli-
gion to serve as the foundation of political morality. But what kind of
religion will this be? Rousseau contrasted the various polytheisms of the
Greek and Roman world with the universalist monotheisms that emerged
first with Judaism and later with Christianity and Islam. The pagan religions
of the ancients drew no distinction between their gods and their laws. Reli-
gion could serve as a force of national strength and unity. It was also rela-
tively tolerant, since the power of the gods extended only as far as the city
walls. Even the Romans were inclined to leave peoples’ gods intact, a point
with which the Jerusalemites might have taken issue. All of this changed, so
Rousseau argues, with the introduction of Christianity.
Christianity was the first religion to offer itself as a purely “spiritual”

kingdom apart from politics. Rousseau even has some kind words for Islam:
“Muhammad had very sound views” in tying his system of law (Sharia) to his
form of government. But Christianity introduced a conflict of jurisdictions
between church and state, which will forever be at odds with each other.
Rather than a source of unity, Christianity became a source of conflict, and
religion became dominated by priests who would use it to advance their own
interests. Although he recognizes that the pure religion of the Gospels con-
tains teachings that are “saintly” and “sublime,” these are not fit for men in
society. “We are told,” he writes, “that a people of true Christians would form
the most perfect society imaginable. I see only one major difficulty with this
supposition; which is that a society of true Christians would no longer be a
society of men” (IV.8/148). He goes on to explain this point: “Christianity is a
wholly spiritual religion, exclusively concerned with the things of Heaven: the
Christian’s fatherland is not of this world. He does his duty, it is true, but he
does it with profound indifference to the success or failure of his efforts. . . .
True Christians are made to be slaves; they know it and are hardly moved by
it; this brief life has too little value in their eyes” (IV.8/148–49).
Rousseau’s attack on “the religion of the priest” was the reason why
The Social Contract was burned in his home city of Geneva. Nonetheless, the
attack on “the domineering spirit of Christianity” as a cause of political con-
flict was widely heralded by the French revolutionaries as a basis for their
new cults and rituals. These experiments with a religion of reason were
short-lived, but in fact these often became in a modified form the founda-
tion of the nationalisms of the nineteenth century, with their worship of the
nation, la patrie, and the fatherland. The nation and the sovereignty of the
people, as Tocqueville later saw, became substitutes for religion, or the place
where religion managed to live on in a kind of ghostly half-life. Rousseau’s
civil religion, which is nothing more than Machiavellianism come of age,
survives today in many of the debates over the secular identity of France
and its resistance to efforts—think of the debate over Muslim women wear-
ing head scarves—by religion to intrude into public life.
Machiavelli’s dream of a new political religion that would surpass or
supplant the revealed religions of the past was not confi ned to France. In
1967 the American sociologist Robert Bellah revived this debate in a
groundbreaking article called “Civil Religion in America.” “What we have
from the earliest years of the republic,” Bellah wrote, “is a collection of be-
liefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutional-
ized in a collectivity. This religion—there seems no other word for it—while
not antithetical to and indeed sharing much in common with Christianity,

was neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian.” This might be
called the domestication of Rousseau’s ferocious Machiavellianism. Ameri-
cans, Bellah claimed, maintained a civil religion that retained key elements
of the prophetic tradition but combined these with worship of the Constitu-
tion and reverence for the American Framers. “The American civil religion,”
he continued, “was never anticlerical or militantly secular. On the contrary, it
borrowed selectively from the religious tradition in such a way that the aver-
age American saw no conflict between the two.”
There has been no greater avatar of this American civil religion than
Abraham Lincoln. For him the Declaration of Independence and the Con-
stitution were sacred texts, and Washington and Jefferson like the prophets
who led their people out of tyranny. Nowhere does Lincoln give more pas-
sionate expression to this civil creed than in his 1838 address to the Young
Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institu-
tions.” Shocked at the recent rise of lawlessness and the outbreaks of mob
violence, Lincoln exhorted his listeners to reattach themselves to their form
of government. But how to do this, he asked, at a time when the living con-
nection to the revolution was fading, and the Founding was little more than
a distant memory? His answer is as follows:
Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his
posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in
the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate
their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the
support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of
the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his
property and his sacred honor;—let every man remember that to
violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear
the character of his own, and his children’s liberty. Let reverence
for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping
babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in semi-
naries, and in colleges;—let it be written in Primmers, spelling
books, and in Almanacs;—let it be preached from the pulpit, pro-
claimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And,
in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let
the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the
gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice
unceasingly upon its altars.
Lincoln’s effort to enlist the power of religion in support of the Consti-

tution and its laws has a distinctively Machiavellian ring to it. Religion is to
be made instrumental to the cause of liberty and republican government.
There is nothing here with which the great Florentine would have disagreed.
Are we to conclude, then, that America is a Machiavellian nation? Yes and
no. The idea of an American civil religion has always remained somewhat
disreputable. America may be overwhelmingly a nation of Christians, but it
is not and was not intended to be a Christian nation. The attempt to enlist
religion for the cause of the nation has always struck thoughtful observers as
a misuse both of religion and of the patriotic ideal. The American experi-
ence is no exception. A civil religion, however ennobling its goals, is less an
expression of religion than a substitute for it.

Smith - Political Philosophy - Chapter 7

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Smith - Political Philosophy - Chapter 7

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Smith - Political Philosophy - Chapter 7

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Political

New Haven and London

Copyright © 2012 by Yale University.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for

Set in Minion type by Westchester Book Group.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Steven B., 1951–

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469–1527. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

Machiavelli was a Florentine. To know that is to know virtually everything

On the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with

not terrified by death. I have jotted down what I have profited

The Prince is a deceptive book. What else would we expect? It is a work

The Form and Dedication of The Prince

Armed and Unarmed Prophets

Here Machiavelli gives a list of heroic founders of peoples and states:

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

attempt to take the extraordinary situation—the extreme—as the normal

the inner states or frames of mind of his heroes—Caesar, Hannibal, Borgia—

The Aesthetics of Violence

No one can read his descriptions of political assassination, conquest, and

Some readers—even some very astute readers—of Machiavelli have

without a redeemer. That Machiavelli expected such a redeemer-prince to

Machiavelli’s statement here tells us something about the subject

The Two Dedications

“New Modes and Orders”

Republics Ancient and Modern

a constitution as would ensure to it a long life of freedom, yet owing to fric-

liberty. He asks, is power better entrusted to the people or to the nobles?

Machiavelli’s arguments in defense of a democratic republic develop

political participation and civic engagement; it also encourages luxury that

imperialistic republic sound familiar? It should, because Machiavelli is de-

The New Christianity

This pattern of life, therefore, appears to have made the world

Machiavellianism Comes of Age

Christianity was the first religion to offer itself as a purely “spiritual”

not antithetical to and indeed sharing much in common with Christianity,

Lincoln’s effort to enlist the power of religion in support of the Consti-

You might also like

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.