I should say at the outset that Machiavelli’s Prince would seem on the surface to have little to do with the “body politic” in any formal sense. The Prince is a book of advice for rulers, devoted to precepts of princely governance rather than to exploring the theory of organized society. Its principal questions have to do with how a prince can acquire and maintain power, with defining the virtues or qualities that mark a successful ruler, and with asking for a new kind of vigorous leadership to confront the dangers afflicting contemporary Italy. At the same time, this deliberately provocative work challenged centuries of traditional thinking about the body politic and made Machiavelli the object of both fear and fascination as an anatomist of power politics.
My theme this afternoon has to do with the nature of Machiavelli’s assault on common assumptions about the political order. While focusing on The Prince, I will be talking also about Machiavelli’s other major work, his Discourses on Livy. It addresses some important issues that, while they are not explicitly raised in The Prince, are nonetheless critical to understanding its ideas. It helps us also to see beyond the standard stereotype of Machiavellianism so often associated with The Prince.
The name of Machiavelli became transmuted into the idea of Machiavellianism, with the Prince as its epitome, almost as soon as his major works appeared in print after Machiavelli’s death in 1527. In his King Henry VI Shakespeare gives us a good example of how Machiavelli was perceived in the 16th century: Plotting to become king, the scheming Duke of Gloucester (later Richard III) boasts that he will “set the murd’rous Machiavel to school” by outdoing him in arbitrary killing and violence by dagger and poison, in cunning and deceit, and in all the other evils that characterize the tyrant at his worst. This is the irreligious Machiavelli seen to have preached such evil for power’s sake and to have taught the philosophy that the end justifies the means. This is also the Machiavelli now charged with inspiring and instructing ruthless dictators (like Stalin, according to some recent biographers) and, sad to say, university presidents (according to their faculties.) And this is also, in slightly muted form, the Machiavelli who turns up in such contemporary manuals as Machiavelli for tennis players or for CEOs.
But there have been other Machiavelli’s, too. There is, for example, the republican Machiavelli much admired in the 17th and early 18th centuries by a succession of theorists who advocated republicanism in opposition to monarchy and who turned to Machiavelli’s Discourses for his analysis of the constitution of Rome and his ideal of a republic founded in a mixed or balanced form of constitution. There were and still are those who argue that Machiavelli wrote the Prince really as a cautionary tale to teach the horrors of tyranny and the supreme virtues of republican government rather than to expound the virtues of princes; in this interpretation, Machiavelli actually meant to teach the opposite of what The Prince appeared to teach.
Yet another Machiavelli is the patriot celebrated by those Italians of the 19th century who wanted to create a unified Italian nation and who read the final chapter of Machiavelli’s Prince as a passionate exhortation to doing so. They believed that this was the noble end, indeed the only end which for Machiavelli could justify extreme means, just as a war for liberation might require measures that would not be condoned in normal or peaceful times.
In the history of political thought the image of organized political society as a body reaches far back to antiquity. You will find it in Xenophon and Aristotle, in Cicero and Livy, and you will find it, too, in this case speaking to the idea of the church, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. (“But now are they many members, but yet one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. But now are they many members, yet but one body.” I.12) The metaphor of the body was invoked in different ways – for example, it could be used to describe a monarchy, with the king as the head, leading the other parts, representing the various classes and functions needed in the society, from the military and judicial acting as the arms to the farming and laboring classes down at the feet, in an ideally healthy and harmonious whole. This picture generally imagined a neat hierarchical world, where each group knew its place and kept within its role, and each made an essential and distinct contribution to the total order. But the body politic could also just as well represent a republic or any kind of community marked by a balanced collaboration between its different parts.
In the ancient secular rendering of the body politic, it was generally said that the body politic grew out of the nature of man as an inherently social animal, that its legitimacy arose from natural law and timeless moral imperatives, and that the highest aim of organized political society was to provide justice, and with it the good life, to all its members. In its medieval expressions, the vision of the body politic was thought to reflect God’s rule and providence. Some (like St. Augustine) believed that God had decreed it for man in order to enforce some basic law and order on sinful men as they pursued their pilgrimage on earth. Government, and its police power, had been made necessary by the sinfulness of humankind; were men good, there would be no need for either. In the view of others, (such as St. Thomas Aquinas) the body politic was part of God’s plan of giving man a positive opportunity to elevate his terrestrial life toward striving for justice and good in a world that God had created for man’s benefit. However used, the metaphor of the body pointed to the priorities of health and harmony and seamless cooperation between classes and functions within a community whose existence was founded on the principle of seeking to realize the common good.
Set against such idealized images of health and harmony, of stability and justice, were the dangers of disease and disorder, of internal strife and destructive change, of a body politic whose members looked not to the good of the whole but to the gratification and self-interest of each individual or group. Such dislocations might be diagnosed as failure to abide by ethical and legal norms, or as the growth of defective forms of governance – of tyranny as opposed to true kingship, oligarchy (rule by the few in their own interest) as opposed to responsible aristocracy, or even mob rule and anarchy as opposed to constitutional democracy. In the Christian context that interpreted human history as driven by transcendent goals, they might be seen to represent developments somehow related to inscrutable purposes of the almighty, or imposed as penalties for having fallen away from the precepts of faith and morality. Both Christian and secular explanations tended to assume that there had been a descent into corruption from some earlier and far better state. To reform any such disease meant to return the body politic to what it had once been by restoring and re-committing to its original purity– that is, by literally re-forming what had once existed and restoring its spirit.
Intellectuals of the early sixteenth century inherited this broad range of traditions associated with the metaphor of the body politic. It was a legacy that conceived what we would call political theory as a subdivision of moral philosophy. Over the preceding 150 years or so people had turned again to the full corpus of ancient writings, both Latin and Greek. It was now to these texts – to Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca -- that the writers of the time ascribed special authority in matters concerning the secular and political world. While believing that the ancient writers should be regarded as the ultimate sources of understanding human life in this world they believed, at the same time, that there could exist no serious conflict between the moral precepts taught by antiquity and those of the Christian faith. And so a more secularized version of political theory and of ethics had come again to the fore. It put forward a view of politics that subordinated the political to the ethical and that argued for the positive value of the civic order. It asserted that there could be no dichotomy between political imperatives and those of the moral order; the latter must always trump the former when such might appear to arise. Thus, for example, it was assumed that the good prince was also a good man, a tyrant an evil one. Similarly, it was assumed that what might be politically expedient could not contradict what was honorable ethically. In short, ends and means must agree within the consensus of the moral order.
In both The Prince and The Discourses, Machiavelli made clear that he regarded most of the European states of his day as almost hopelessly corrupt and the contemporary situation of the Italian peninsula as especially dire. It was, he thought, the worst of times, and with typical hyperbole he wrote the following:
… the human mind is perpetually discontented, and of its possessions is apt to grow weary. This makes it find fault with the present, praise the past, and long for the future; though for its doing so no rational cause can be assigned. [Old always think things used to better] Hence I am not sure but that I deserve to be reckoned among those who thus deceive themselves if … I have praised too much the days of the ancient Romans and have found fault with our own. Indeed, if the virtue which then prevailed and the vices which are prevalent today were not as clear as the sun, I should be more reserved in my statements lest I should fall into the very fault for which I am blaming others. But … the facts are there for anyone to see… [II. Pref.]
I would emphasize two points in this passage: (1) Machiavelli’s bitter, even despairing, view of his own time, and (2) his self-conscious profession of going against conventional wisdom in his conclusions.
As to the first, Machiavelli saw the Italian state system lying in ruins under the impact of foreign invasions beginning in 1494 that had deprived some states of their liberty and had reduced others, including his own city of Florence, to dependence on foreign powers. He watched the Italian peninsula become the battleground of a prolonged contest for European supremacy waged between Spain and France that was to last beyond his own life. In Florence, he had witnessed the dominance of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the expulsion of the Medici under the impact of the French invasions that began in 1494, the loss of Florentine territories in their wake, the long struggles to devise an effective republican constitution for Florence, the rise and fall of Savonarola, the factional conflicts that continued to destabilize the Florentine republic, and the restoration of the Medici in 1512 under the impact of yet other foreign invasions. He believed that liberty in two important senses had been lost: on the one hand, the autonomy of the individual states had disappeared; on the other, so, too, had the freedom, such as it was, of their subjects, a freedom that Machiavelli equated with the basic security that functioning states could provide their citizens.
How, Machiavelli asked himself, had all this come to pass? And what, if anything, could be done to redeem a political world so weak, so ineffectual, and so diseased? Those are the urgent questions that shape the substance and the rhetoric of The Prince. Why, he demands, have the princes of Italy lost their states? Surely not simply out of bad luck or some mysterious ill fortune. At least much of the blame, he argued, must be assigned to the princes themselves and not, as they claimed, to fate. He meant that these human actors had possessed, but had failed to exercise, some freedom of will. He wanted them to learn how to make better and better educated choices. But they could do so only if they came to understood the nature of politics, the difficult dilemmas of their world, and the forces behind human history now and in the past. And he, Machiavelli, would be happy to provide that education. He was writing to become the mentor to princes, a guide through the lessons of the past and advisor on the goals of the future – hence his call to action in the cause of regenerating Italy and driving out the foreign invaders at the close of The Prince.
The world Machiavelli described was a scene of constant flux and dynamic conflict in which the power of fortune, of the irrational and unpredictable forces that appeared to drive never-ending change in a dark and unreliable universe could yet be engaged, with some success, by the power of human will and purpose. He imagined fortune as a turbulent rushing river that could never be stopped but that could be partially controlled and even converted to constructive use by building dams and by anticipating and adapting to its tides. The waters would flow on forever bringing continual movement, they would always threaten to cause floods and other catastrophes, but timely and intelligent and decisive action could help avert or defend against at least some of that. “So as not to eliminate human freedom,” said Machiavelli, “I am disposed to hold that fortune is the arbiter of half our actions, but that it lets us control roughly the other half.”
Machiavelli introduced a view of history as propelled by an unceasing battle between human will and the forces of an unforgiving universe that contained no rational laws for creating human society. In addition, he put forward a view of human nature that ascribed to it no innate good. On the contrary, said Machiavelli, one must take it for granted that “all men are wicked and that they will always give vent to the malignity that is in their minds when opportunity offers,” adding that “men never do good unless necessity drives them to it.” [Disc. I.3] And again: “This may be said of men generally: they are ungrateful, fickle, feigners and dissemblers, avoiders of danger, eager for gain.” [Pr. xvii] Machiavelli’s version of the origins of organized society holds that men living in an anarchic dog-ear-dog environment came together simply for the purposes of self-defense. He describes what that society affords as essentially the minimal security of being protected from the aggression of others and having neither one’s property nor one’s family forcibly snatched away.
Machiavelli asserted that his descriptions of human nature and of human behavior were confirmed by both history and experience. He held that history, despite the dynamic of change and conflict that shaped its movement, was also, at another level, an unchanging history in the sense that human nature and its conditions were entirely constant over time. Further, he held that history proceeded in cycles of ascent and decline, undergoing the stages of human life from infancy to death, and that these cycles were, like human life, predictably repetitious. Finally, Machiavelli equated history with experience. History, in his view, preserved the breadth of past experience and so enlarged one’s own. One could learn from history because of the sameness of its dominant dynamic, the sameness of human nature, and the sameness of all those types of circumstances, events, needs, and motives that animated human life. Antiquity and its works were certainly greater and more glorious than the present, but its people were not essentially different. History dealt with the real world, with how things really work, with what had really happened, how people in fact really behaved, why some states had prospered and others not, what types of situations demanded what kinds of treatment, what kinds of qualities had proved effective for leadership, and so on. And politics, for Machiavelli, were of the essence of that real world and needed to be grounded in the study of history, that is of experience, both ancient and contemporary. He believed that in order to construct a useful account of the political order and in order to address the ills of his time, it was above all necessary to analyze the true nature of the world. From that one could learn what might actually be possible and necessary for the successful building of a political power that could create security for a leader or establish an enduring state. Hence, writing in The Prince in the hope of becoming a tutor and counselor to a Medici prince, Machiavelli offered as his qualification that “I have not found among my belongings anything that I hold more dear or valuable than my knowledge of the conduct of great men, learned through long experience of modern affairs and continual study of ancient history.” [Dedic.] And in the Discourses, Machiavelli again made history the primary source of true political wisdom: “[discourses will] comprise what I have arrived at by comparing ancient with modern events, and think necessary for the better understanding of them, so that those who read what I have to say may the more easily draw those practical lessons which one should seek to obtain from the study of history.” [Pref. 98] As he wrote The Prince, Machiavelli described, in a famous letter to a friend, his dialogues with the ancients and their histories. Before entering his study in the evening, he said, “I remove my everyday clothes … and put on clothes that are fit for a royal court. Being thus properly clad, I enter the ancient courts of the men of old, in which I am received affectionately by them and partake of the food that properly belongs to me, and for which I was born. There I do not hesitate to converse with them, and ask them why they acted as they did; and out of kindness they respond.” [To Vettori, Dec. 1513]
For his troubled world, Machiavelli prescribed not a new political science, as is often alleged, but a new art of politics:
In the Renaissance, as in antiquity, an “art” meant a body of rules discovered by generalizing from ancient practices and examples and applying these to present cases or actions. You might learn the art of rhetoric, for instance, by studying Cicero’s speeches and seeing how he worked his magic. Then you would assemble all this into a set of precepts and apply them to your oratory. In the same way, Machiavelli conceived an art of politics founded on studying past events in order to understand and deal with contemporary issues. For Machiavelli, those issues were embedded above all in the corruption of his day, and the situation cried out for reform.
Here is Machiavelli’s program:
“I have decided,” he wrote, “to enter upon a new way, as yet untrodden by anyone else.
… I notice that what history has to say about the highly virtuous actions performed by ancient kingdoms and republics, by their kings, their generals, their citizens, their legislators, and by others who have gone to the trouble of serving their country, is rather admired than imitated … so that of the virtue of bygone days there remains no trace …
[ Example of civil law first] Nor … is medicine anything but a record of experiments, performed by doctors of old, upon which the doctors of our day base their prescriptions. In spite of which in constituting republics, in governing kingdoms, in forming an army or conducting a war, in dealing with subjects, in extending the empire, one finds neither prince nor republic who repairs to antiquity for examples. This is due … to the lack of a proper appreciation of history … [Disc. I. Pref.]
Thus both enlightenment and reform were to be achieved by turning to ancient models and by assessing them not through the ethical prism of traditional political theory but by acting on a deep knowledge of the realities of human nature and human history. And those realities, according to Machiavelli, taught the fundamental lesson that the demands of seeking and sustaining political power had to be separated from the ideals and pieties of moral philosophy. The political leader had to look at what is, not what ought to be.
That brings us to the decisive passage of The Prince where Machiavelli defines what he believes is the ultimate truth of politics and history. Here he condemns as utopian, and therefore as useless, the preceding centuries’ stock of political philosophy. At one swift stroke, he sweeps aside both the ancient and the Christian traditions of the body politic, declaring his challenge to conventional premises in these words:
… I fear that I may be thought presumptuous, for what I have to say differs from the precepts offered by others, especially on this matter. But because I want to write what will be useful to anyone who understands, it seems to me better to concentrate on what really happens rather than on theories or speculations. For many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist. However, how men live is so different from how they should live that a ruler who does not do what is generally done, but persists in doing what ought to be done, will undermine his power rather than maintain it. If a ruler who wants always to act honorably is surrounded by many unscrupulous men his downfall is inevitable. Therefore, a ruler who wishes to maintain his power must be prepared to act immorally when this becomes necessary.
I shall set aside fantasies about rulers, then, and consider what happens in fact.
I know that everyone will acknowledge that it would be most praiseworthy for a ruler to have all the … qualities that are held to be good. But because it is not possible to have all of them, and because circumstances do not permit living a completely virtuous life, one must be sufficiently prudent to know how to avoid becoming notorious for those vices that would destroy one’s power … Yet one should not be troubled about becoming notorious for those vices without which it is difficult to preserve one’s power, because if one considers everything carefully, doing some things that seem virtuous may result in one’s ruin, whereas doing other things that seem vicious may strengthen one’s position and cause one to flourish. [Pr. xv]
Machiavelli then goes on to consider the virtues customarily assigned to good princes such as generosity or mercifulness or wanting to be loved rather than feared and turns them on their heads, pointing to the potentially destructive consequences, if one had to choose in certain extreme situations, of pursuing the so-called virtue rather than its opposite. Too much generosity, for example, and you can bankrupt the state and force unwanted taxes on your subjects. Too much mercy, and you can be crushed by your contemptuous enemies. Too much being loved, and you can be taken for a wimp, losing both respect and effective authority; there’s nothing better over the long term than some healthy fear.
In separating the art of politics from the embrace of moral philosophy, Machiavelli asserted that the politically expedient and the morally good might very well diverge. They are certainly not necessarily in harmony. But – and here is where we see the stereotype of Machiavellianism go wrong -- Machiavelli has not recommended a program of doing evil for its own sake. To the degree that he advocates doing evil in the interest of achieving and maintaining power, he is in favor of doing it as quickly and economically as possible and not in such a way as to weaken one’s position or one’s ultimate renown, or in such a way as to alienate one’s subjects by offending their beliefs and expectations. Machiavelli was not saying that nice guys finish last; only that their niceness was not naturally going to bring them success.
Machiavelli has in essence said that if you want to succeed in the world of politics, then you have to understand how you can do so; you have to learn, by close reading of actual experience, what virtues mark a virtuoso of politics. As a pianist is judged by the quality of his performance, his technical skills, his larger vision of music, and not by his moral character or behavior, so the prince or political leader should be judged by the effectiveness of his role, whether in acquiring and sustaining power or in founding and giving law to a state or in reforming a declining state or in creating and expanding an empire. And such a leader will possess the talent, energy, and intelligence, the discernment, intuition, and prudence, the willingness to act decisively, that in some combination make up his capacity to succeed and that can be defined as the virtues of political leadership. Those virtues, as they are employed in the leader’s task, may or may not overlap with traditional “virtue.” Machiavelli give us the telling examples of the Roman Scipio, who was nice as could be, and his enemy the Carthaginian Hannibal, who was vicious and cruel as could be. Both, in his view, were extremely successful leaders. In the end, their different qualities were those by virtue of which each reached his purpose, using them artfully as elements of strategy in accomplishing a significant goal.
Machiavelli frequently uses the metaphor of the sculptor in describing his art of politics. He treats the great leader as an artist of daring vision who finds or is given a certain kind of material to work with and who then shapes that material to a viable and impressive form. Machiavelli’s heroic political sculptors are the founders of states, the lawgivers, the reformers, the creative statesmen and empire builders and successful generals. They are the heroes of human society and its history. Without them, society would never have attained such freedom or strength as it has from time to time possessed. History reveals the means by which those goals have been realized. Since what has once been can occur again, and since the art of politics can be effective only by adapting itself to the material of human nature and historical circumstance, one can find in history the lessons of political reality and make them one’s own. To substitute what is (and what has been in fact) for what ought to be, to look to history rather than to abstract reason in making sense of the political world and realizing its potential, is Machiavelli’s lesson number one.
Machiavelli despised utopianism, but he did propound an ideal state. In his Discourses, he put forward Rome as that ideal. It was his ideal not because it represented a blueprint constructed out of a set of philosophical principles but because Rome was the most greatest and longest-lived commonwealth that had ever existed. Given his assumptions, the ideal state had to be an actual, not invented, organism. While praising Rome’s mixed constitution – he saw it as combining monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements– and military prowess, he still in the end emphasized that the power of individuals, both founders and reformers, had been critical in the forging and governance of the republic. So a good deal of what he advises for princes in The Prince he recommends also to republican statesmen in the Discourses.
It should be said that, while Machiavelli was undoubtedly a republican by conviction, he was not, nor was any republican of his time, a supporter of democracy in our sense. Nor was he at all an ideologue when it came to types of government. His reality principle led to the conviction that not all states were suited to a republican form of government, at least not at all times. He thought monarchy a perfectly good form of government, if not his own favorite, and he assumed that there would always be principalities in Italy as well as such city states as Florence and Venice. He deplored tyranny at its worst and labeled Caesar a villain. He thought (and of course saw in Rome’s evolution) that republics had to be founded and led at first by kings and only later turned into republics. Even then he found it essential to make provision, as Rome had done with the institution of dictators, for strong men to take charge at times of crisis and at times when the state needed urgently to be re-formed. Indeed, his ideal of a mixed constitution in which the three forms of government were represented in a dynamic balance, necessarily included a monarchical element.
There is much teaching for princes as well as for republican statesmen in the Discourses, and the basic understanding of what constitutes a code of political conduct remains the same. Thus, for example, Machiavelli condones Romulus’ killing of his brother Remus by arguing that the creation of the Roman state had demanded this act of fratricide:
“… the prudent organizer of a state whose intention it is to govern not in his own interests but for the common good, and not in the interest of his successors but for the sake of that fatherland which is common to all, should contrive to be alone in his authority. Nor will any reasonable man blame him for taking any action, however extraordinary, which may be of service in the organizing of a kingdom or the constituting of a republic. It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good, as it was in the case of Romulus, it always justifies the action. For it is the man who uses violence to spoil things, not the man who uses it to end them, that is blameworthy.” [Disc. I.9]
The idea that the end justifies the means appears in a somewhat different form in The Prince:
With regard to all human actions, and especially those of rulers, who cannot be called to account, men pay attention to the outcome. If a ruler, then, contrives to conquer, and to preserve the state, the means will always be judged to be honorable and be praised by everyone. [Pr. xviii]
Machiavelli’s statement that the public will regard desirable outcomes, or successfully realized ends, as resulting from good means even when the prince has in fact employed underhanded ones, says something more about his view of human nature and the ways in which the prince needs to take into account the character of those whom he wants to rule. People judge, he says, by appearances and by results. The upshot is that a ruler needs to know how to deceive – that is, how to seem what people think they want him to be (devout, merciful, trustworthy, humane, upright) while being willing, for the sake of power, to act quite differently when necessary. As the ultimate example, Machiavelli cites a ruler’s willingness not to keep one’s word, “nor should he, when such fidelity would damage him, and when the reasons that made him promise are no longer relevant. This advice,” he goes on, “would not be sound if all men were upright; but because they are treacherous and would not keep their promises to you, you should not consider yourself bound to keep your promises to them.” [Pr. xviii] Here, and quite deliberately, Machiavelli shattered the idea of a formal promise as an unbreakable contract with indissoluble mutual obligations that lay at the heart of the idea of the social bond and indeed of the traditional body politic.
As we have seen, Machiavelli locates the body politic not in the moral order of a natural or divine law, but in history and human fallibility. He sees its health not in the stability of a rational and harmonious collaboration of the body’s different parts but in the ability to adapt for as long as possible to constant flux and tension and to the selfish propensities of human nature, to be for as long as possible able to withstand the erosive effects of time and to resist the arbitrary forces of a history that can be brought only partially under human control and that will be always, in the end, its destroyer. His preoccupation is with mortality and loss, with the inevitable fading and death of every life, including that of the body politic. At the same time, he sees in politics the only hope of imposing, for at least a time (and in the case of the greatest states like Rome, for a very long time), some control and order, and consequently, some security, in a world in which there could otherwise exist no human freedom or significant accomplishment. The successful leaders in that effort find their reward both in their own creativity and in the kind of historical immortality their glory confers. The ends to which they have consecrated their lives have, in addition, benefited others. These heroes have created some space of freedom for themselves, and, for at least some time, health and independence for their states and security and protection for their citizens. The pursuit of power to its greatest extent has forged a work of art and order where anarchy and lawlessness would otherwise prevail.
The Machiavellian drama of combat between men’s free will and an impersonal and uncaring fortune is played out in The Prince to demonstrate the prime value of personal and political autonomy. Machiavelli gives priority attention to the new prince – the person who, without any tradition of family or special claim behind him embarks on carving out a state where none has existed. He is dependent therefore on himself, and that self-dependence is crucial in every area of his rule. Machiavelli’s contempt for mercenary armies and his insistence that civic militias should be employed instead, springs from this. So, too, does Machiavelli’s view that it is possible, not to destroy or ignore the force of fortune, but to adapt to its exigencies and possibilities and to harness it to one’s own purposes – understanding at the same time that adaptation to constant change cannot continue forever, that one must recognize, even while resisting, the limitations and mortality of all things.
Machiavelli stressed the singularity of the great practitioners of the art of politics. Their talents and achievements set them apart from ordinary people. They needed to rely on only one external condition in order to realize their potential, and that was to be born in or to find themselves in difficult circumstances that would suit and evoke their abilities. “If their deeds and careers are examined,” he wrote, “it will be seen that they owed nothing to fortune except the opportunity to shape the material into the form that seemed best to them.” Clearly, Machiavelli hoped that some contemporary hero would find the current condition of Italy to be such an opportunity. His repeated teachings of self-dependence take us back to his despair over the recent history of the Italian states and their loss of autonomy, his stubborn refusal to absolve their princes of responsibility for what had occurred and his belief that the art of politics can counter and even manipulate the deterministic powers of fortune.
Machiavelli was well aware that his views on the discordance between political and ethical imperatives were not only novel but probably offensive to the ordinary run of people: hence his teaching about the importance of appearance and of masking what really lay behind strategies adopted by princes. He claimed that people wanted to believe that things were as they ought to be and not as they actually were, and that this fiction was part of their reality. Machiavelli also took the position that no one had to engage in politics – his advice was that if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. He maintained that he was only pointing out that his depiction of human nature and the historical world represents accurately the way things are, not some invention of his own. He was just telling like it is. And if you don’t like it, he said, then stick to the private life. But if you want a reasonable private life, just remember that it is undoubtedly helpful to live in a decent principality or an excellent republic, so be grateful to those who have made these possible. In short, Machiavelli presented himself as a realist.
But, we may ask, was he one? Was it realistic to believe that the Italian peninsula could rid itself of the powerful invaders from the north and be free of their geo-political interests? Realistic to think that all life is in essence political and that no other motives exist? Was Machiavelli’s vision of antiquity and its exemplary history a realistic version of the past? Should realism be equated with cynicism? In believing that he had exposed the illusions and delusions of the body politic, had Machiavelli perhaps deluded himself?
It is not surprising, as one contemplates these questions and their different possible conclusions, that there should have emerged so many different Machiavelli’s over the course of time. Machiavelli declared that he had stripped the study of politics down to its essentials. His way of doing so and of painting a political world shorn of its accepted and expected garments made it impossible ever again to evade, however one answered, the conclusions he argued. The enduring resonance of the Prince lies in Machiavelli’s challenge to consider the relation of politics to ethics and the purposes and uses of power in the imperfect world of human history.
