Niccolo Machiavelli

Born: 1469, Florence, Italy Died: 1527, Florence, Italy

Major Works: The Prince (1513), Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (15 1317), The Art of War (1521), The History of Florence (1525) Major Ideas: Wisdom in the ways of the world can be achieved by careful observation of how people act and a study of history. Human nature is such that individuals will seek gratification of their lusting for power, pleasures, and profit. The essential feature of all society is struggle and intense competitiveness. The wise prince ought to do whatever is expedient to achieve and maintain power. Consideration of the dictates of traditional morality and religion are not relevant unless they aid in the enhancement of the goods of a well-ordered society. Human excellence is measured in terms of virtu, the capacity of intellect and will to act with dynamic vitality. The most vital states are those republics where their citizens enjoy the maximum freedom to be masters of their own destiny.

Niccolo Machiavelli was educated in the tradition of Greek and Roman writers, in accord with the prevailing custom of the Renaissance. Machiavelli's father, a lawyer in Florence, saw to it that his son received the best possible grounding in the humanities. This excellent education bore fruit, for at the age of twenty-nine, Machiavelli entered the service of the Florentine Republic, where as a secretary to the Chancellor he was responsible for the foreign and diplomatic relations of the Republic. He served the government for fourteen years on numerous difficult and delicate diplomatic missions throughout France, Germany, and Italy. Machiavelli had opportunities to observe firsthand some of the leading powers of the day, King Louis XII of France (1462-1515), Pope Alexander VI (1431-1503), Cesare Borgia (1476-1507), Pope Julius 11(1443-1513), and Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor (14591519). He watched and noted carefully the political intrigues of his time. He would later

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write with admiration about the cunning designs of Cesare Borgia, the conqueror of Romagna, an area south of Ravena on the Adriatic Sea. Machiavelli was greatly impressed with Cesare, thinking him superhuman in courage and grand designs, one who would control everything and was capable of governing with extreme secrecy, in essence, the very ideal of Machiavelli's later, most famous work, The Prince. For this young diplomat, Cesare Borgia was the embodiment of one who ruled with power and glory while laying the foundation for future power. As a keen observer of political events, Machiavelli realized that they who keep power were those able to accommodate their actions and personalities to the shifting circumstances of their situation. For him, the shrewdest rulers were those who acted when the moment required action and withdrew when withdrawal was mandated. Thus even his hero, Cesare Borgia, made the fatal mistake of backing Julius II for the papacy, failing to realize the wellconcealed hatred of the new pope toward him-in essence, failing to keep his judgments firmly rooted in reality. One needs, as Machiavelli put it in the eighteenth chapter of his Prince, "to turn and turn about as the winds and the variations of fortune dictate." Machiavelli's own fortunes also fell before Julius, who ordered his armies of the Holy League to suppress the Florentine Republic and thus restored the power of the Medici. This they accomplished in 1512, leaving Machiavelli, who sought to defend the city with a citizen army, in disgrace and without employment. He' returned to his country home and began a long period of reflection, which resulted in the works On political philosophy that have made his name immortal. Machiavelli's two most important works, The Prince and The 'Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, both deal with the rise and decline of states and the measures by which a leader can insure the states' continued existence. This issue is approached from different angles in the two works. The Prince, Machiavelli's most well-known work, focuses on the activity of the individual ruler, while The Discourses considers the constitutive elements that accounted for the success of the ancient Roman Empire. His approach in these works, which was carried on in his later Art of War and The History of Florence, was not to start from an assumption about the nature of a perfectly good society but rather to focus on how societies actually work His method was experiential and pragmatic Thus in the preface to The Prince, a work written in an attempt to gain employment with the new masters of Florence, the Medici, he writes that he bases his thoughts on his own "lengthy experience over many years" and with "many troubles and perils as well as his "continual reading of ancient history Machiavelli s works thus inaugurate a new development in the West s reflection on the key issues of political philosophy He thought that no longer should such discussions depend on the doctrine of theology or moral philosophy. Here is modern political science looking to what has happened and seeing :'in the interplay of natural forces reasons for events. Personal experience and a careful reading of history were for him indispensable tools for knowing the things of this world.

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With the writings of Machiavelli, politics establishes itself as an autonomous field of study, namely, the art of creating, perfecting, and enhancing the power of the state. Thus, the true prince seeks to establish a government that will bring honor to himself and benefit the whole body of his subjects. Corruption as the Key to Power Machiavelli's observations of the behavior of the rich and the powerful led him to the view that humanity is corrupt. Men and women will when given the chance, always turn toward evil and self-gratification. His writings were especially preoccupied with what one might call the pathology of states. He was interested in the reasons for the decline and fall of states. He gives careful attention to the tragedies of life because for him the wise student of history has much to learn from what has failed to work. Machiavelli always insisted on the uniformity of humanity. This theme that human beings are always the same in their nature was reiterated hundreds of times in his works. Standard was the formula "all men are born, live and die in the same way, and therefore resemble each other." All are animated by the same passions, the same desires, and the same impulses. The corruption of human nature was not a new idea, for many theologians and philosophers had made the same point when discussing the effects of Original Sin. Machiavelli, however, rarely thought in abstract theological terms. For him, the claim that humanity is ruthless, blindly abandoning itself to a lust for pleasures, power, and profit was a plain, observable fact. In The Discourses he cautions anyone who wishes to found a state and to give it laws to begin with the basic presupposition that everyone is evil and will show their vicious nature. Even if this evil disposition remains concealed for a time, the wise prince must never be deceived into thinking that his subjects will not, at the earliest opportunity, seek their own self-interest. For Machiavelli this acquisitiveness was normal, a natural fact. He, unlike innumerable medieval writers, accepted this as the human lot. On this point we find little of the preacher in him. He often notes throughout his History of Florence the many times Florentine rulers, like those throughout the history of Rome, were so enamored with their lives of wealth and comfort that they failed in the defense of their own city and thus hastened their own destruction. So Machiavelli's famous cynical remark that a man would more readily forgive the murder of his father than the confiscation of his patrimony. Thus the prudent ruler may kill, but ought not to plunder. The natural feature of all societies is struggle and intense competitiveness. Men, he writes, always commit the error of not knowing when to limit their hopes. For him, our passions are endless, our desires bottomless. So we read in the fifteenth chapter of The Prince: My intention being to write something of use to those who understand, it appears to me more proper to go to the real truth of the matter than to its imagination; . . . for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation. A man

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who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Previous to Machiavelli, there was a long discussion beginning with Plato (c. 429-347 B.C.) and carried throughout the Middle Ages that affirmed that the ruler ought to embody noble ideals and values, This tradition focused on the virtues of justice and mercy as essential for good government. Machiavelli turns away from this tradition and considers in The Prince what is necessary to be successful in a corrupt world. It is the situation at the moment that determines which actions are necessary. For Machiavelli, the goal is success, not the virtue or vice of the act. He does not advocate that the successful prince should always violate the rights of others but, rather, calculate what course of action will enhance the strength and vitality of the state. The Prince is, in essence, a technical book about how to grasp and hold power, rather than one focused on the issues of morality or immorality Machiavelli saw it as quite enough to offer his advice on what worked and what did not work in advancing a political career. Like a skilled physician, a skilled politician must be able to make an accurate diagnosis and then proceed with a proper course of treatment. Thus Machiavelli's works aim at offering an analysis of the ills of a state and the best possible corrective that should be prescribed. He does not let traditional questions of morality deter the ruler from proper action. Just as, in the hands of a skilled physician, poison may save the life of a patient, so force in the hands of a skilled ruler may eventuate in the health of the whole community. Or, to use another image, for Machiavelli political activity is like a game of chess with its rules, its proven gambits, and its successful strategies. The master player knows how to exploit the weaknesses and blu nders of his opponents to maximum advantage. The goal is finding the best move, the move that wins. The qualities needed to win may be judged as vices by others, but, as Machiavelli puts it in The Prince, they are "the vices by which you are able to rule." The crimes committed in order to preserve one's country are "glorious crimes." Thus, in the fifth chapter of his History of Florence we read, "No good man will ever reproach another who endeavors to defend his country whatever be his mode of doing so." It is much safer that the prince be feared than loved. Machiavelli advises princes not to be troubled if they are called cruel, for to be cruel is often necessary, especially if one is a commander of an army. Although in the Discourses he notes that "a multitude is more easily governed by humanity and gentleness than by haughtiness and cruelty," the point is that a wise ruler does whatever is necessary. What is unnecessary is for the prince actually to have good qualities; all that is necessary is for the prince to appear to have them in order to win the confidence of the people. We find in the seventeenth chapter of The Prince Machiavelli's use of the example of Pope Alexander VI, who did nothing else but deceive men, always finding victims, by successfully disguising his intentions. He, like his son Cesare Borgia, was as wise as a fox and as terrifying as a lion. All this is clearly summarized in the following passage from the second chapter of The Discourses: Government consists mainly in so keeping your subjects that they shall be neither able nor disposed to injure you; and this is done by depriving them of all means of injuring you, or by bestowing such benefits upon them that it would not be reasonable for them to desire any change of fortune.

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Religion and the State According to The Discourses, religion, in terms of its rituals and ceremonies, was "the instrument necessary. above all others for the maintenance of a civilized state The religion of ancient Rome, Machiavelli thought, helped to maintain the strength of the army, binding, it by loyalty to an oath. Also, all Roman legislators had recourse to the gods when they introduced laws to the people. For Machiavelli, a source of strength for a country lay in its uncorrupted ceremonies and its veneration of the gods because they instilled bravery and upheld the common good. This vitality was lost when Christianity began to preach an ethic of humility and docility. In his Discourses Machiavelli notes that Christ did not redeem humanity but through Christianity hastened its decline Christianity glorified the meek, leaving the world to the domination of the arrogant and the wicked. Machiavelli preferred a Roman ethic, which elevated self-preservation, to a Christian one of sacrifice. The necessities of war to maintain and enhance security makes Christian pacifism treasonable and dangerous. If the world were different, if the Church had retained the purity of its ideals, then men would certainly be far happier than they are at present. He writes in The Discourses: "And whoever examines the principles on which that religion is founded, and sees how widely different from those principles its present practice and application are will judge that her ruin or chastisement is at hand." This contemporary of Luther condemns the Roman Church not out of a religious zeal but rather from the perspective of a thoroughgoing secularism. In Machiavelli's writings the sacred side of the human soul disappears and only its secular elements (instinct, desire, appetite, emotions, and power) remain. Here is animality guided by intelligence. Religion has value not because it elevates and ennobles humanity but because it can serve as a vehicle of political order. For Machiavelli the focus is on the state; religion is useful if it inspires loyalty rather than salvation. We see here the challenge of a revived paganism to an aging Christianity. Virtu The Italian word virtu means "virtue," and was a very important term for Machiavelli. It represented a most basic quality for a successful leader. Early in The Discourses he declares that the fortunes of a city depend on the virtu of its founder. The term sometimes refers to the traditional moral and intellectual virtues emphasized in the writers of antiquity. Often, however, it becomes a key term for Machiavelli expressing the capacity for effective action, a vitality. Therefore we find the use of the term not so much in the medieval sense of a set of virtues but, rather, in the Roman sense of activity--activity that brings honor and glory to the one who acts. With this in mind, Machiavelli often describes as virtuosi those military leaders like Hannibal (247-c. 182 B.C.) who exhibit prowess in war. The men (vir) who exhibited virtu were alone able to bend fortune to their side. Machiavelli believed that only half of our lives is under our own control. The other half is under the sway of forces and factors beyond us. This is why history teaches that exactly the same acts at different times yield different results. For the Secretary of Florence, the success of every

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act depended on the relationship between it and its times. It was good fortune if such a harmonious relationship existed, bad fortune if it did not. As Virgil (70-19 B.C.) put it in his tenth book of The Aeneid, "Fortune befriends the bold." Machiavelli was sure that princes become great only when they overcome difficulties and obstacles. Here the Renaissance rediscovers the classical idea of fortune as a woman who looks kindly on men who exhibit the manly virtues of self-reliance and self-affirmation even in the worst of times. Self-determination The absolutistic and despotic features of Machiavelli's Prince have overshadowed another important dimension of his thought, the value of freedom as an essential element of a good state. Falsely read as a writer who advocated only the absolute will of one dictator at the expense of the free wills of his subjects, Machiavelli is often not credited for his attention to the value of self-determination as a general feature of a healthy state. Indeed, it was his lifelong dream that Italy would unite as one state to overcome her many foreign oppressors. Interestingly, one source of Machiavelli's hostility toward the Church of Rome stemmed from his belief that she stood in the way of complete Italian unity because of her intense preoccupation with control over the papal states. It was his view that the Church was too weak to control the whole of the peninsula, but too strong to permit anyone else from unifying all of Italy. Unity can be achieved only if people awake to their heritage of republican liberty. This, Machiavelli thought, was the secret of Greek and Roman glory. For Greece and Rome grew only when they were able to sustain themselves in liberty. These ancient states and the old Florentine Republic had as their aim the good of the whole. In strong states, all men freely seek the common good. The belief in the importance of freedom lies behind Machiavelli's advocacy that the people themselves defend their own territories. The entire population ought to be filled with that intense fervor, that virtu, to affirm their own rights. In The Art of War, Machiavelli, reflecting on why in 1494 the French had so easily triumphed over the Italians, concludes that it was due in large part to the dependence of the Italians on unreliable mercenary soldiers rather than, as ought to be the case, an army of patriots led courageously by their own prince. The key to power in the state is unity in diversity. In a healthy state all members would, in their diversity, be oriented toward the same noble ends. Here Cicero (106-43 B.C.) becomes Machiavelli's guide, for both saw in nature a model of diversity that acts as a vast interrelated system. It is in this vein that the Secretary of Florence looked with admiration on the Roman Republic and its practice of keeping a delicate balance between the opposing forces of rich and poor. This is why the Romans gave the nobles control of the Senate while assigning the Tribunate to the plebes. In this way, each faction could prevent the other from pushing to total dominance its own interests. Good laws emerge from that delicate equilibrium between competing groups who seek to affirm their own selfish aims while being kept in check by another equally powerful force. Here human societies can learn from the witness of nature.

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Machiavelli's sincere enthusiasm for Roman self-governance led him to consider the value of law and custom as a guarantor of free action. He looked upon his present age with its divisions, disorder, and corruption as helpless before foreign invaders and noted, as did Cicero, that nature instills in humanity the hunger for independence. Cities grow and acquire greatness, he writes, only if "the people are in control of them." This explains why cities under monarchical governments seldom go forward as do those that live in freedom. Therefore, the whole citizen body must keep the quality of virtu, while the prince most of all seeks to overcome all threats to the self-preservation and self-determination of a state. The great lawgivers of the past knew, as did Lycurgus, the traditional founder of Sparta, that good laws ensure civil greatness. We read in The Discourses, "Justas hunger and poverty make men industrious, it is the laws that make them good." Machiavellianism Machiavelli was laid to rest in the Church of Santa Croce. Over his remains there stands a stately monument bearing the words "Tanto nomini nullum par elogium" (No eulogy would do justice to so great a name). His name was so great that it quickly became an adjective and the focus of controversy. Before the end of the sixteenth century, "Machiavellian" came to mean a preference for expediency over morality, a practice of duplicity, cunning, and intrigue in statecraft. The Church did not take kindly to Machiavelli's separation of morality from politics, nor to his critical remarks about the institutions of religion. They placed his works on the Index in 1559. The Prince, nevertheless, was widely read, and it overshadowed his comments in The Discourses about the value of human freedom and the common good. It became popular to identify the name for the devil, "Old Nick," as an abbreviation for Machiavelli's first name. In a famous scene from Christopher Marlow's work The Jew of Malta, penned about 1589, Machiavel li enters in the prologue with the line, "I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but ignorance." Shakespeare (1564-1616) would later enhance the dramatic use of the Machiavellian image with his portraits of Iago in Othello and of Richard III. In an age that saw the rise of absolute monarchs, many thought that their grab for power was nothing but an action. foretold by Machiavelli. The most famous literary condemnation of Machiavelli was offered by Frederick the Great (1712-86) in his work Anti-Machiavel (1740), where he writes: I venture now to take up the defense of humanity against this monster who wants to destroy it; with reason and justice I dare to oppose Sophistry .and crime; and I put forth these reflections on The Prince of Machiavelli, chapter by chapter. so that the antidote may be found immediately following the poison. Considering the later career of Frederick, many would note that by appearing to repudiate Machiavelli he was behaving in true Machiavellian fashion. Today the term "Machiavellian" has entered the common lexicon of words that seem capable of a very wide range of diverse meanings. For some, the term is used to describe clever political maneuverings in every conceivable social context, while for others it implies a system of ethics where the ends justify the means. It is a label that seeks to characterize

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familiar uses of power, whether in the office politics of the modern corporation or in the ruthless tactics of dictators. This great name to which "No eulogy would do justice" marked an important moment in the creation of the secular world view. In Machiavelli we see a definite break with the concerns of a Saint Augustine preoccupied with the City of God. Machiavelli's entire attention is given to the City of Man (literally: Machiavelli was certainly no feminist). One of the first to develop what we now call modern political science, with its focus on the utility and maintenance of power, Machiavelli, the keen observer of contemporary events, looked to the interplay of natural causes and effects rather than to transcendent religious influences. This is why his portrait of Cesare Borgia in The Prince is the forerunner of the "modern man" who frees himself from the conventional morality by the power of his own intellect and will-in essence, by the force of his own virtu. Further Reading Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. New York: Modern Library, 1954. While not directly focused on Machiavelli, this most influential nineteenth-century study offers the reader a sweeping overview of the period. Gilbert, F. Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth Century Florence. New York: Norton, 1984. This is an outstanding study of Machiavelli's political thought wherein his views are compared with the Italian historian and political theorist Francisco Guicciardini (1483- 1540). Meineche, Friedrich. Machiavellianism: The Doctrine of Raison d'Etat and Its Place in Modern History. Translated by D. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. This is a translation of the 1924 classic study of the history of Machiavellianism. Pitkin, Hanna. Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984. A discussion of Machiavelli's focus on machismo as it emerges in his writings on authority, family life, the relationship between the sexes, and politics. Schmitt, Charles B. and Quentin Skinner, eds. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. This text is a comprehensive and exhaustive study of the key philosophical ideas to emerge from the Renaissance. Skinner, Quentin. Machiavelli. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981. A short and very readable overview of the Secretary's life and thought. ________________ This article is by Lawrence F. Hendersmarck, and was taken from Great Thinkers of the Western World, Annual 1999 p133. COPYRIGHT 1999 HarperCollins Publishers.

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