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Machiavelli

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 9, 2020 | Original: March 23, 2018

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

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

Before his exile, Machiavelli had navigated the volatile political environment of 16th-century Italy as a statesman. There were constant power struggles at the time between the city-states of Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, France and Spain.

As leaders rapidly rose and fell, Machiavelli observed traits that, he believed, bolstered power and influence. In 1513, after being expelled from political service with the takeover of Florence by the Medici family , Machiavelli penned his outline of what makes an effective leader in The Prince .

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

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

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

Cruelty can be better than kindness, he argued, explaining that “Making an example of one or two offenders is kinder than being too compassionate, and allowing disorders to develop into murder and chaos which affects the whole community.” Keeping one’s word can also be dangerous, he said, since “experience shows that those who do not keep their word get the better of those who do.”

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

Fortune and Virtù

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

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

Cesare Borgia

One of the real-life models Machiavelli took inspiration from when writing The Prince was Cesare Borgia, a crude, brutal and cunning prince of the Papal States whom Machiavelli had observed first-hand. During a visit with Borgia to discuss relations with Florence, Machiavelli witnessed as Borgia lured his enemies to the city of Senigallia with gifts and promises of friendship and then had them all assassinated.

Ultimately, even Borgia would succumb to ill fortune when his father, Pope Alexander VI, became ill and died. Borgia died a few years after the death of his father at the young age of 32.

Despite Borgia’s premature demise, Machiavelli believed that a strong leader like Borgia was just what Florence needed to raise morale, unite the people and raise the city state’s prominence to its former glory.

Machiavelli Quotes

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

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

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

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

"Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great."

"There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you."

"Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are."

Impact of The Prince

But Machiavelli would not find an audience for his work before his death and Florence was not restored to its former glory in his lifetime. France, then Spain and Austria, invaded Italy and its warring city-states were unable to defend themselves, leading to nearly 400 years of dominance by outside rulers.

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

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

The Art of War

Years after writing The Prince , Machiavelli penned  The Art of War , a treatise written in the form of a dialogue between a military expert and citizens. 

The Art of War discusses the role that citizens have in supporting and using military troops to the citizens' advantage, the role of training and the best use of artillery in disarming one's enemies. Drawing on themes he introduced in The Prince , Machiavelli also notes how deception and intrigue are valuable military strategies.

Machiavellian History

Machiavelli would be blamed for inspiring Henry VIII to defy the pope and seize religious authority for himself. William Shakespeare would cite Machiavelli as “the murderous Machiavel” in Henry VI , and many of his characters would embody Machiavellian traits.

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

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

Some scholars have questioned whether Machiavelli intended that readers take him at his word. Instead, they propose that The Prince was actually a satirical work and intended as a warning of what could happen if power is left unchecked.

But most take it at face value as a cold-blooded blueprint for how to gain and hold onto power. Francis Bacon , the English statesman-scientist-philosopher, was among those who appreciated Machiavelli’s frank reflections early on, writing in 1605, “We are much beholden to Machiavel and others that write what men do and not what they ought to do.”

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, published by Dover Publications, 1992. Machiavelli: Renaissance Political Analyst and Author by Heather Lehr Wagner, published by Chelsea House Publishers, 2006. Machiavelli: A Brief Insight by Quentin Skinner , published by Sterling, 1981. “The Florentine: The man who taught rulers to rule,” by Claudia Roth Pierpont, September 15, 2008, The New Yorker . “Machiavelli’s Dangerous Book for Men,” by Michael Arditti, January 19, 2008, The Telegraph “Machiavelli’s Main Man,” by Alexander Stille, March 11, 2007, The Los Angeles Times . “Machiavelli’s The Prince, part 1: The Challenge of Power,” by Nick Spencer, March 26, 2012, The Guardian . “Machiavelli’s The Prince, part 7: The Two Sides of Human Nature,” by Nick Spencer, May 7, 2012, The Guardian . “Have We Got Machiavelli All Wrong?” by Erica Benner, March 3, 2017, The Guardian . "The Art Of War, By Niccolò Machiavelli," by Angelo M. Codevilla, The Hoover Institution . "15 Surprisingly Great Leadership Quotes From Machiavelli," by Erika Andersen, Forbes . “Political Morality?” by Andrew Curry, January 13, 1999, The Washington Post .

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Early life and political career

• The Discourses on Livy
• The Florentine Histories
• The Art of War and other writings

What was Niccolò Machiavelli’s occupation?

Niccolò Machiavelli

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• Humanities LibreTexts - The Prince (Niccoló Machiavelli)
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• Table Of Contents

Who was Niccolò Machiavelli?

Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian  Renaissance  political philosopher and statesman and secretary of the Florentine   republic . His most famous work,  The Prince (1532), brought him a reputation as an atheist and an immoral cynic.

What did Niccolò Machiavelli write?

Niccolò Machiavelli’s two most important works are  Discourses on Livy  (1531) and  The Prince  (1532), both of which were published after his death. He wrote several other works, including Florentine Histories  (1532) and The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (1520).

From the age of 29, when he was placed in charge of the republic of Florence ’s foreign affairs in subject territories, Machiavelli held a series of governmental posts. Among his tasks were to establish a militia, undertake diplomatic and military missions, oversee fortifications, and write an official history of the republic.

Niccolò Machiavelli (born May 3, 1469, Florence [Italy]—died June 21, 1527, Florence) was an Italian Renaissance political philosopher and statesman, secretary of the Florentine republic , whose most famous work, The Prince ( Il Principe ), brought him a reputation as an atheist and an immoral cynic.

From the 13th century onward, Machiavelli’s family was wealthy and prominent, holding on occasion Florence’s most important offices. His father, Bernardo, a doctor of laws, was nevertheless among the family’s poorest members. Barred from public office in Florence as an insolvent debtor, Bernardo lived frugally, administering his small landed property near the city and supplementing his meagre income from it with earnings from the restricted and almost clandestine exercise of his profession.

Bernardo kept a library in which Niccolò must have read, but little is known of Niccolò’s education and early life in Florence , at that time a thriving centre of philosophy and a brilliant showcase of the arts. He attended lectures by Marcello Virgilio Adriani, who chaired the Studio Fiorentino. He learned Latin well and probably knew some Greek, and he seems to have acquired the typical humanist education that was expected of officials of the Florentine Chancery.

In a letter to a friend in 1498, Machiavelli writes of listening to the sermons of Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), a Dominican friar who moved to Florence in 1482 and in the 1490s attracted a party of popular supporters with his thinly veiled accusations against the government, the clergy, and the pope. Although Savonarola, who effectively ruled Florence for several years after 1494, was featured in The Prince (1513) as an example of an “unarmed prophet” who must fail, Machiavelli was impressed with his learning and rhetorical skill. On May 24, 1498, Savonarola was hanged as a heretic and his body burned in the public square. Several days later, emerging from obscurity at the age of 29, Machiavelli became head of the second chancery ( cancelleria ), a post that placed him in charge of the republic’s foreign affairs in subject territories. How so young a man could be entrusted with so high an office remains a mystery, particularly because Machiavelli apparently never served an apprenticeship in the chancery. He held the post until 1512, having gained the confidence of Piero Soderini (1452–1522), the gonfalonier (chief magistrate) for life in Florence from 1502.

During his tenure at the second chancery, Machiavelli persuaded Soderini to reduce the city’s reliance on mercenary forces by establishing a militia (1505), which Machiavelli subsequently organized. He also undertook diplomatic and military missions to the court of France; to Cesare Borgia (1475/76–1507), the son of Pope Alexander VI (reigned 1492–1503); to Pope Julius II (reigned 1503–13), Alexander’s successor; to the court of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (reigned 1493–1519); and to Pisa (1509 and 1511).

In 1503, one year after his missions to Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli wrote a short work, Del modo di trattare i sudditi della Val di Chiana ribellati ( On the Way to Deal with the Rebel Subjects of the Valdichiana ). Anticipating his later Discourses on Livy , a commentary on the ancient Roman historian, in this work he contrasts the errors of Florence with the wisdom of the Romans and declares that in dealing with rebellious peoples one must either benefit them or eliminate them. Machiavelli also was a witness to the bloody vengeance taken by Cesare on his mutinous captains at the town of Sinigaglia (December 31, 1502), of which he wrote a famous account. In much of his early writings, Machiavelli argues that “one should not offend a prince and later put faith in him.”

In 1503 Machiavelli was sent to Rome for the duration of the conclave that elected Pope Julius II , an enemy of the Borgias, whose election Cesare had unwisely aided. Machiavelli watched Cesare’s decline and, in a poem ( First Decennale ), celebrated his imprisonment, a burden that “he deserved as a rebel against Christ.” Altogether, Machiavelli embarked on more than 40 diplomatic missions during his 14 years at the chancery.

In 1512 the Florentine republic was overthrown and the gonfalonier deposed by a Spanish army that Julius II had enlisted into his Holy League . The Medici family returned to rule Florence, and Machiavelli, suspected of conspiracy , was imprisoned, tortured, and sent into exile in 1513 to his father’s small property in San Casciano, just south of Florence. There he wrote his two major works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy , both of which were published after his death. He dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (1492–1519), ruler of Florence from 1513 and grandson of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92). When, on Lorenzo’s death, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534) came to govern Florence, Machiavelli was presented to the cardinal by Lorenzo Strozzi (1488–1538), scion of one of Florence’s wealthiest families, to whom he dedicated the dialogue The Art of War (1521; Dell’arte della guerra ).

Machiavelli was first employed in 1520 by the cardinal to resolve a case of bankruptcy in Lucca, where he took the occasion to write a sketch of its government and to compose his The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (1520; La vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca ). Later that year the cardinal agreed to have Machiavelli elected official historian of the republic, a post to which he was appointed in November 1520 with a salary of 57 gold florins a year, later increased to 100. In the meantime, he was commissioned by the Medici pope Leo X (reigned 1513–21) to write a discourse on the organization of the government of Florence. Machiavelli criticized both the Medici regime and the succeeding republic he had served and boldly advised the pope to restore the republic, replacing the unstable mixture of republic and principality then prevailing. Shortly thereafter, in May 1521, he was sent for two weeks to the Franciscan chapter at Carpi, where he improved his ability to “reason about silence.” Machiavelli faced a dilemma about how to tell the truth about the rise of the Medici in Florence without offending his Medici patron.

After the death of Pope Leo X in 1521, Cardinal Giulio, Florence’s sole master, was inclined to reform the city’s government and sought out the advice of Machiavelli, who replied with the proposal he had made to Leo X. In 1523, following the death of Pope Adrian VI , the cardinal became Pope Clement VII , and Machiavelli worked with renewed enthusiasm on an official history of Florence. In June 1525 he presented his Florentine Histories ( Istorie Fiorentine ) to the pope, receiving in return a gift of 120 ducats. In April 1526 Machiavelli was made chancellor of the Procuratori delle Mura to superintend Florence’s fortifications. At this time the pope had formed a Holy League at Cognac against Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (reigned 1519–56), and Machiavelli went with the army to join his friend Francesco Guicciardini (1482–1540), the pope’s lieutenant, with whom he remained until the sack of Rome by the emperor’s forces brought the war to an end in May 1527. Now that Florence had cast off the Medici, Machiavelli hoped to be restored to his old post at the chancery. But the few favours that the Medici had doled out to him caused the supporters of the free republic to look upon him with suspicion. Denied the post, he fell ill and died within a month.

In office Machiavelli wrote a number of short political discourses and poems (the Decennali ) on Florentine history. It was while he was out of office and in exile, however, that the “Florentine Secretary,” as Machiavelli came to be called, wrote the works of political philosophy for which he is remembered. In his most noted letter (December 10, 1513), he described one of his days—in the morning walking in the woods, in the afternoon drinking and gambling with friends at the inn, and in the evening reading and reflecting in his study, where, he says, “I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for.” In the same letter, Machiavelli remarks that he has just composed a little work on princes—a “whimsy”—and thus lightly introduces arguably the most famous book on politics ever written, the work that was to give the name Machiavellian to the teaching of worldly success through scheming deceit.

About the same time that Machiavelli wrote The Prince (1513), he was also writing a very different book, Discourses on Livy (or, more precisely, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy [ Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio ]). Both books were first published only after Machiavelli’s death, the Discourses on Livy in 1531 and The Prince in 1532. They are distinguished from his other works by the fact that in the dedicatory letter to each he says that it contains everything he knows. The dedication of the Discourses on Livy presents the work to two of Machiavelli’s friends, who he says are not princes but deserve to be, and criticizes the sort of begging letter he appears to have written in dedicating The Prince . The two works differ also in substance and manner. Whereas The Prince is mostly concerned with princes—particularly new princes—and is short, easy to read, and, according to many, dangerously wicked , the Discourses on Livy is a “reasoning” that is long, difficult, and full of advice on how to preserve republics. Every thoughtful treatment of Machiavelli has had to come to terms with the differences between his two most important works.

Florentine Street Scene with Twelve Figures (Sheltering the Traveller) (1540-60), anonymous artist. Courtesy the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The battles over beginnings

Niccolò machiavelli’s profound insights about the violent origins of political societies help us understand the world today.

by David Polansky   + BIO

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: ‘Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind.’ With apologies to Nietzsche, the ‘questions of origins and beginnings’ are in fact more controversial and hotly debated. The ongoing Israel-Gaza war has reopened old debates over the circumstances of Israel’s founding and the origins of the Palestinian refugee crisis. Meanwhile, in a speech he gave on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin insisted that ‘since time immemorial’ Russia had always included Ukraine, a situation that was disrupted by the establishment of the Soviet Union. And in the US, The New York Times ’ 1619 Project generated no small amount of controversy by insisting that the United States’ real origins lay not with its formal constitution but with the introduction of slavery into North America.

In other words, many conspicuous political disputes today have a way of returning us to the beginnings of things, of producing and being waged in part through strong claims about origins. Yet doing so rarely helps resolve them. Because these debates have become ubiquitous, we may not realise how unusual our preoccupation with political origins really is. Beginnings are, after all, far removed from the issues at hand as to be a source of leverage in ongoing controversies or a source of controversy themselves. Why should the distant past matter more than the recent past or the present? To better understand why we remain bedevilled by the problem of origins, and perhaps to think more clearly about them in the first place, it may help to turn to a familiar but unexpected source: Machiavelli.

Niccolò Machiavelli is better known for his hard-headed political advice – it was he who wrote ‘it is better to be feared than loved’ – but he was also preoccupied with the role of violence in establishing (and re-establishing) political societies. Few thinkers have dealt so thoroughly and so troublingly with the theme of political origins as Machiavelli, leading the French philosopher Louis Althusser to call Machiavelli the ‘theorist of beginnings’. For Machiavelli, origins are chiefly of interest for two reasons: first, they reveal essential truths about the impermanence of political life that are otherwise obscured by ordinary politics; and, second, their violent conditions are in principle replicable always and everywhere.

Machiavelli’s perspective is moreover useful to us – because of the way he stands outside of our liberal tradition. Every society in history has had its origin stories, but the question of beginnings poses particular challenges for those of us living in the kinds of modern states that first began to take shape in the 17th century. For their legitimacy rests upon their deliberative and representative character. Nearly all existing states – even non-democratic ones – have some claim to represent a given people. Representative government is one of the ways that we assure ourselves that political power isn’t mere domination, and its rules and processes are intended to preserve the rights of the people who establish them. Consequently, we locate the origins of political society with that moment of establishment. The great liberal philosopher John Locke, for example, insists in the Second Treatise of Government (1689) that ‘the beginning of politic society depends upon the consent of the individuals, to join into, and make one society; who, when they are thus incorporated, might set up what form of government they thought fit.’

However, what about the right of any given people to establish political orders in the first place? And if some do claim to establish a new political order, who gets to decide which individuals are included among ‘the people’ and which are not? Who decides what territory is rightfully theirs for establishing government? And how did it happen in the first place?

T hese are questions that modern liberalism is largely unable to face. John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971), perhaps the most influential work of political theory in the past 50 years, admits that his considerations of justice simply assume the existence of a stable and self-contained national community. Earlier, Thomas Hobbes and, later, Immanuel Kant had faced this question more squarely, but both warned against enquiring about the origins of our societies at all, for, as Hobbes wrote in 1651, ‘there is scarce a commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified.’

It is not that the liberal political tradition (which is the tradition of most of the world’s developed countries) is simply unaware of political origins; but it deals with them in a deliberate and abstract way that is removed from the messy historical realities behind the formation of states and nations. The opening words of the ‘Federalist’ essay, written by Alexander Hamilton in defence of the nascent US Constitution, posed the question two and a half centuries ago:

whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

The US founders, in other words, consciously sought to create a wholly new society based upon just principles rather than the contingent events that gave rise to past governments, thus providing a model for future liberal constitutions. But accident and force are simply mainstays of history. And, as it happens, they are also Machiavelli’s bread and butter (or bread and olive oil).

Two of Machiavelli’s major political works, both published posthumously in 1531-32 – the Discourses on Livy , his magisterial treatment of the ancient Roman republic, and his Florentine Histories – open with discussions of the sources of populations themselves. Such questions concerning the origins of populations remain pressing even today, as indicated by the trendiness of the concept of ‘indigeneity’ – that is, the attempt to identify an authentically original people with a title to the land that precedes all others – which has been applied to places as disparate as Canada, Palestine, Finland and Taiwan. One sees a similar impulse behind certain Right-wing nationalist claims, like Jean-Marie Le Pen’s insistence that the true French nation traces back to the 5th-century coronation of Clovis I. We want an unambiguous point of origin to which a legitimate claim to territory might be fixed. Machiavelli, however, denies us such a stable point.

All natives were once foreign, their situation but the end result of some prior (possibly forgotten) conquest

At the outset of the Discourses , Machiavelli claims that all cities are built by either natives or foreigners, but then proceeds to give examples – such as Rome, Athens and Venice – consisting solely of peoples who were either dispersed or compelled to flee from their ancestral place into a new one by an invading force – that is to say, by foreigners. In many cases, the invaders who sent the natives fleeing were themselves fleeing conditions of war. Migrations, forced or voluntary, are very difficult to prevent. It is not the case, for example, that a general improvement of living conditions might ensure demographic stability. Desperation is only one cause of migrations. In the case of the Franks and Germans, not desperation but prosperity, leading to overpopulation, compelled men to find new lands to inhabit. Such was the origin of the populations that destroyed the Roman Empire, according to Machiavelli, reproducing the cycle that initially produced Rome in the first place by invading Italy and establishing the kingdoms of the early medieval period.

Machiavelli thus makes clear that all natives were once foreign (either the possibility of an ‘original’ people is ruled out or they are too archaic to speak of), and further that it may be assumed that their situation is but the end result of some prior (and possibly forgotten) conquest.

With this discussion of the foundation of Rome, Machiavelli illustrates the artificiality of ‘legitimate’ origins. He first claims that Rome had both a native founder in Romulus and a foreign founder in his ancestor, Aeneas, who settled in Latium after escaping the destruction of Troy. But this immediately undercuts any ancestral claim Romulus might have to the territory, insofar as it derives from the Trojan Aeneas’ conquest of the Latins (chronicled in Virgil’s Aeneid ).

Moreover, Romulus is compelled to replicate the actions of his ancestor – for, as Machiavelli sees it, the founding of a new society is always a violent affair, entailing a crime of some great magnitude. Romulus provides the paradigmatic example with the killing of his brother Remus and his ally Titus Tatius. Of these terrible acts, Machiavelli makes the striking remark that ‘while the deed accuses him, the effect excuses him’. That is to say, the extraordinary act of founding a new city (and ultimately an empire) absolves – and, for that matter, requires – the crimes committed in the process. Romulus is just one among a number of quasi-mythical founders whom Machiavelli exalts as the most ‘excellent’ examples in The Prince , along with Theseus, Cyrus, and Moses. All secured the establishment of their new societies through violence. Even for Moses, the most consequential act is not the flight from Egypt or receiving the Commandments at Sinai but the slaughter of 3,000 Israelites (a number Machiavelli raises to ‘infinite men’) for the sin of worshipping a golden calf.

The mythopoeic truths societies offer for their origins can still be truths, even when the first beginnings remain shrouded in myth. Machiavelli claims he could provide ‘infinite examples’ – a favourite term of his – of the role of violence in forming and reforming political societies.

Machiavelli adds that the example of Hiero of Syracuse may also serve as a useful model. This move, however, pulls the whole discussion sideways: first, Hiero did not found anything – the city of Syracuse already existed when he came to power; and second, though Machiavelli will not tell us this here, Hiero is more commonly known as a tyrant, which is to say someone who acquires monarchical power rather than inheriting it. Machiavelli’s description of how Hiero acquired power is amusing and brief: ‘Hiero eliminated the old military and organised a new one; he left his old friendships and made new ones. And when he had friendships and soldiers that were his, he could build any building on top of such a foundation. So, he made a great deal of effort to acquire power, but little to maintain it.’

Machiavelli subsequently reveals that Hiero came to power through a conspiracy – employing mercenaries to seize control of Syracuse and then brutally cutting them to pieces while claiming political power for himself. In other words, if we want to understand what the origins of things really look like, we must consult such troubling histories.

E arly in The Prince , Machiavelli notes of established rulers: ‘In the antiquity and continuity of the dominion, the memories and causes of innovations are eliminated …’ That is to say, most rulers – what he calls ‘hereditary princes’ – are the beneficiaries of some prior terrible actions on the part of a conquering ancestor who initially took the throne. To us they may not be soaked in blood but, go back far enough, and you will find a Romulus – or a Hiero.

Later in the work, Machiavelli remarks that it is relatively easy for a ruler to hold provinces with similar customs that he has already controlled for a long time. But by way of example, he offers France’s rule over Burgundy, Brittany, Gascony and Normandy; of these, the first two had been conquered only within Machiavelli’s own lifetime, and the third in 1453, less than two decades before Machiavelli’s birth. The ease with which the French crown held these possessions – as well as the fact that these regions are now simply thought of as French – is due not to their lasting ties but to the success with which they were initially pacified.

Whenever one identifies a situation of stable and orderly government, it can be traced back to some form of conquest, whether ancient or recent. The story of political societies is much like Woody Allen’s definition of comedy: tragedy plus time. As Machiavelli’s French examples indicate, the amount of time required may not even be significant if the act of conquest is a successful one.

You might have to kill your brother to found a great city, but what about your proposal on urban streetlights?

Machiavelli even emphasises that the violence involved in establishing societies can never be left fully behind. Machiavelli praises Cleomenes of Sparta for slaughtering the magistrates who stood in his way of renewing the laws of the city’s founder, Lycurgus – in an act that earns him comparison with Romulus himself. He also acknowledges the 15th-century Florentine rulers for their insight when they say it was necessary to put ‘that terror and that fear in men’ of the violence of foundings ‘every five years’.

Many readers of Machiavelli have difficulty reconciling his account of origins with our actual experience of political life. It is all well and good, they may think, to know that you might have to kill your brother to found a great city, but what if you just want to find a quorum for your proposal on urban streetlights?

Or, how does Machiavelli’s teaching about political origins help us understand the present world? For one thing, it offers insight into the recurring forms of violence that continue (and will continue) to break out along unstable borders and in places where states are still in the process of being formed.

The list of horrors surrounding the creations of 20th-century nation-states alone would include ( inter alia ): the genocidal expulsion of the Armenians in 1915; the postwar expulsions of ethnic Germans from neighbouring eastern European states; the mutual expulsions of Hindus and Muslims from Pakistan and India (respectively) during partition in 1947; the mutual expulsion of Arabs and Jews from Israel and its neighbours (respectively) from 1947-49; the flight of the pieds-noirs from Algeria in 1962; the displacement of Armenians and Azeris from Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1980s and ’90s; the mutual ethnic cleansings throughout the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and more. Yet we still see these as exceptions to the rule of political order.

The chain of events that we associate with the formation of our modern states (and that provide the source of much ongoing controversy) is really only the latest series of links in a much longer chain that has no known beginning.

A ccident and force still lie beneath the surface of our day-to-day politics, threatening to re-emerge. This is not an easy thing to accept. Even in quieter times, our consciences still trouble us, like Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke after he deposes Richard II. Moreover, we want to see our own foundations as not only just but secure . To see them otherwise is to acknowledge that our circumstances remain essentially in a state of flux. If all things are in motion, then what shall become of us?

Something like this anxiety seems to lie behind how we talk about political origins today. And, thinking with Machiavelli, we can see how the liberal tradition of political thought going back hundreds of years now has not prepared us well to think ethically about our historical origins. The result, when confronted with the subject, tends to be either a flight into defensive nationalism or moralistic condemnation.

While Machiavelli’s work can easily read like cynicism, a decent measure of cynicism is just realism. And an attitude of realism about political life can inoculate us from both sanctimony and despair, allowing us to honestly acknowledge the crimes that contributed to the formations of our own political societies without requiring us to become despisers of our countries.

We may learn from examples of the dramatic stakes involved in maintaining our political order

Similarly, it would be easy enough to read Machiavelli as debunking the edifying tales that surround the foundation of new societies, from the myths of ancient Greece to modern Independence Day celebrations. ‘This is what really happened,’ he seems to say. But it is important to recognise that his account of political origins is not intended to be incriminating but instructive.

For his work also bears a warning: the lawless and uncertain conditions surrounding our origins reflect enduring possibilities in political life. These are crucial moments in which our existing laws are revealed to be inadequate, because they were formulated under different circumstances than those we may presently face, thus requiring daring acts of restoration undertaken in the same spirit in which the laws were originally established.

We may not be obliged to follow directly in the footsteps of such tyrannical figures as Cleomenes of Sparta or the Medici of medieval Florence, all of whom employed terrible violence in the acts of restoration. But we may learn from such examples of the dramatic stakes involved in maintaining our political order – as the philosopher Claude Lefort put it in his magisterial 2012 work on Machiavelli: ‘This is the truth of the return to the origin; not a return to the past, but, in the present, a response analogous to the one given in the past.’

This is part of the value we gain from reading Machiavelli: facing the troubling implications of our own origins may help us better prepare ourselves for the continued vicissitudes of political life. After all, it may be that our own established order is the only thing standing in the way of someone else’s new origins.

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English literature essays, the devil's morals.

Ethics in Machiavelli's The Prince

by Souvik Mukherjee

Yet as I have said before, not to diverge from the good if he can avoid it, but to know how to set about it if compelled

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was an Italian statesman and political philosopher. He was employed on diplomatic missions as defence secretary of the Florentine republic, and was tortured when the Medici returned to power in 1512. When he retired from public life he wrote his most famous work, The Prince (1532), which describes the means by which a leader may gain and maintain power. The Prince has had a long and chequered history and the number of controversies that it has generated is indeed surprising. Almost every ideology has tried to appropriate it for itself - as a result everyone from Clement VII to Mussolini has laid claim to it. Yet there were times when it was terribly unpopular. Its author was seen to be in league with the devil and the connection between 'Old Nick' and Niccolo Machiavelli was not seen as merely nominal. The Elizabethans conjured up the image of the 'murdering Machiavel' [1] and both the Protestants and the later Catholics held his book responsible for evil things. Any appraisal of the book therefore involved some ethical queasiness. Modern scholarship may have removed the stigma of devilry from Machiavelli, but it still seems uneasy as to his ethical position. Croce [2] and some of his admirers like Sheldon Wolin [3] and Federic Chabod [4] have pointed out the existence of an ethics-politics dichotomy in Machiavelli. Isaiah Berlin [5] postulates a system of morality outside the Christian ethical schema. Ernst Cassirer [6] calls him a cold technical mind implying that his attitude to politics would not necessarily involve ethics. And Macaulay [7] sees him as a man of his time going by the actual ethical positions of Quattrocento Italy. In the face of so many varied opinions, it would be best to re-examine the texts and the environment in which they were written. Let us get a few fundamental facts clear. Nowhere in The Prince or The Discourses does Machiavelli explicitly make morality or ethics his concern. Nor does he openly eschew it. Only one specific ethical system, the Christian ethic has no place in Machiavelli. That is easily inferred because from the very first pages a system based more on the power of arms than on Christian love is spoken of. Murder is condoned when necessary. Virtue and vice are not seen so much as black and white as interchangeable shades of grey. This does not however exclude the possibility of a separate ethical paradigm which Machiavelli might have thought of for his state. This is in accordance with Berlin's suggestion of a 'pagan' paradigm [8]. Morality per se, comes in only when The Prince deems it compatible with Necessitas and Fortuna [9].The separate ethical paradigm must therefore be one founded on political necessities. The Prince itself is avowedly political. Its object is the clear and concise statement of a foolproof political program for Italian princes. It begins by clearly classifying the types of principality, how one wins them and how to hold them. There is a very well-informed section on the war tactics prevalent in the peninsula together with Machiavelli's own theories for improving these. And there is the unscrupulous advice, which gained the book so much infamy. But The Prince is not unique among Machiavelli's books. The Discourses carry on the ideas found in The Prince . Much of it is also there in The Art of War . So we get an expression of a clearly thought-out political programme in all the books of Machiavelli. In each case, Machiavelli harks back to the ancients to comment on recent events and to use them as exemplars. The main aim, however, is never lost sight of: to explain and improve on the contemporary political scenario. That, more than ethics, is his concern. As many scholars have commented, nowhere does Machiavelli try to form any new political model. He is quite content to work within the limits set by contemporary politics. In fact, much of what he says is subscribed to by other contemporaries. The controversial fluidity and interchangeability of vice and virtue, for example. J. R. Hale tells us that even Erasmus reminded his own ideal prince 'that the ways of some princes have slipped back to such a point that the two ideas of the 'good man' and 'prince' seem to be the very antithesis of each other. It is obviously considered ridiculous and foolish to mention a good man in speaking of a prince. [10] Guiccardini is even more cynical. Bishop Seyssel and Gulliame Budé both write of ideas similar to Machiavelli's in their books [11]. We must also remember that contemporary criticism of Machiavelli was directed not at his ideas but at the fact that he had dedicated the book to a Medici! This fact draws attention to another point. Almost the same ideas with often the same examples are expressed separately in The Prince and in the Discorsi . The former being addressed to princes and the latter to a republican government. His long service under the republican polity in Florence would have explained the latter. And true to its spirit he claims a superiority for the republican government. In this light it becomes difficult to account for his sudden shift of praise to princely governments. What really matters to him is a stable polity in Italy: when he sees the republican system failing, he adjusts his ideas to fit The Princedoms. The above points show two things. Firstly that if there is an ethics in The Prince at all it has not been specially moulded by Machiavelli. It is merely an expression of the practical ethics of his times. As Lord Macaulay puts it,

If we are to believe Berlin, the 'pagan' ethics in The Prince would be something like the above. Secondly, Machiavelli is not concerned overmuch about ethical nuances. Even though a republican, he does not mind dedicating his book to the conquering prince. And in both the Discorsi and The Prince , the Duke Valentino is as much his ideal ruler as the those from republican Rome. The major concern of Machiavelli is how states should be run and not how morals are to be followed. The Prince must be a beast if necessary. In the notorious chapter XV111 of The Prince , he advocates that The Prince be a mixture of the lion and the fox. The quality that a prince must have is virtu. This virtu can as J. H. Whitfield correctly suggests, mean 'virtue'. But as he further states, 'basically, virtu is the exercise of his freedoms by the man of energetic and conscious will' [13]. This approximates to the rough translation, 'power'. Virtu may mean 'virtue' but does not necessarily do so. Lastly, in considering Berlin's idea of the 'pagan' ethic in The Prince , one finds a few discrepancies. If we go by Aristotelian ethics, the idea of temperance occupies a primal position [14]. Temperance involves a mean position between absolute goodness and absolute badness. Machiavelli speaks differently. It is either being totally good or totally bad. The famous example of C. P. Baglioni and Julius II is a case in point. [15] And strictly speaking, there was no pagan code of morality which sanctioned vice in support of political power. From our analysis we have seen that The Prince carries in it an ethics of political convenience. It does not preclude morality, virtue or Christian values entirely but allows them only when opportune. Otherwise it sanctions in cold blood, massacres, deception and betrayal given that the state benefits from this. This ethic is entirely moulded from political conveniences and is subservient to the political dimension in The Prince . References 1. See the Prologue to Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta for further illustration of this point. 2. Croce, Benedetto. Machiavelli e Vico. 3. Wolin, Sheldon. Politics of Vision. Boston: Little, Brown. 1960 4. Chabod, Federico. Machiavelli and the Renaissance, translated by David Moore, 1958. Harvard univ. press 5. Berlin, Isaiah. The Question of Machiavelli. New York Review, November 4, 1971. 6. Cassirer, Ernst. Implications of the New Theory of the State (from The Myth Of The State) 7. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. Machiavelli http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1850Macaulay-machiavelli.html 8. Berlin, Isaiah. Ibid. 9. Machiavelli. Il Principe Ch XVIII 'Yet as I have said before, not to diverge from the good if he can avoid it, but to know how to set about it if compelled.' Trans. Marriott. The Project Gutenberg Internet Edition. 10. Erasmus. The Education of a Prince, quoted in J. R. Hale, Renaissance Europe 1480-1520 p. 309 11. Hale p. 308 12. Macaulay. Ibid. 13. Whitfield, J. H. Big Words, Exact Meanings. 14. Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. [trans. Sir David Ross] 15. Machiavelli. Discourses on Livy Ch XXVII, Project Gutenberg Internet Edition

© Souvik Mukherjee, July 2002

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Niccolò Machiavelli

(1469-1527)

Who Was Niccoló Machiavelli?

Niccolò Machiavelli was a diplomat for 14 years in Italy's Florentine Republic during the Medici family's exile. When the Medici family returned to power in 1512, Machiavelli was dismissed and briefly jailed. He then wrote The Prince , a handbook for politicians on the use of ruthless, self-serving cunning, inspiring the term "Machiavellian" and establishing Machiavelli as the "father of modern political theory." He also wrote several poems and plays. He died on June 21, 1527, in Florence, Italy.

Early Life and Diplomatic Career

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy, on May 3, 1469 — a time when Italy was divided into four rival city-states and, thusly, was at the mercy of stronger governments throughout the rest of Europe.

The young Machiavelli became a diplomat after the temporary fall of Florence's ruling Medici family in 1494. He served in that position for 14 years in Italy's Florentine Republic during the Medici family's exile, during which time he earned a reputation for deviousness, enjoying shocking his associates by appearing more shameless than he truly was.

After his involvement in an unsuccessful attempt to organize a Florentine militia against the return of the Medici family to power in 1512 became known, Machiavelli was tortured, jailed and banished from an active role in political life.

'The Prince'

Though it was initially a dark period for his career, Machiavelli's time away from politics gave him the opportunity to read Roman history and to write political treatises, most notably The Prince . The main theme of this short work about monarchal rule and survival is man's capacity for determining his own destiny in opposition to the power of fate, which has been interpreted as the political philosophy that one may resort to any means in order to establish and preserve total authority. The work has been regarded as a handbook for politicians on the use of ruthless, self-serving cunning, and inspired the term "Machiavellian." While many believe that the book's title character, "the prince," was based upon the infamous Cesare Borgia, some scholars consider it a satire.

Pope Clement VIII condemned The Prince for its endorsement of rule by deceit and fear. One excerpt from the book reads: "Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved."

Books and Other Works

In addition to The Prince , Machiavelli wrote the treatise On the Art of War (1521), among others, and several poems and plays, including 1524's satirical The Mandrake .

Later Years, Death and Legacy

In his later years, Machiavelli resided in a small village just outside of Florence. He died in the city on June 21, 1527. His tomb is in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, which, ironically, he had been banned from entering during the last years of his life. Today, Machiavelli is regarded as the "father of modern political theory."

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Niccolò Machiavelli
• Birth Year: 1469
• Birth date: May 3, 1469
• Birth City: Florence
• Birth Country: Italy
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli is best known for writing The Prince, a handbook for unscrupulous politicians that inspired the term "Machiavellian" and established its author as the "father of modern political theory."
• World Politics
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Taurus
• Nacionalities
• Death Year: 1527
• Death date: June 21, 1527
• Death City: Florence
• Death Country: Italy

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Niccolò Machiavelli Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/scholars-educators/niccolo-machiavelli
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 27, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
• Politics have no relation to morals.
• I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.
• It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

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by Niccolo Machiavelli

• The Prince Summary

The Prince begins with an address to Lorenzo de Medici, in which Machiavelli explains that he is seeking favor with the prince by offering him some of his knowledge. He then proceeds to classify the various kinds of states: republics, hereditary princedoms, brand-new princedoms, and mixed principalities. New states are his primary focus, for those are the hardest to deal with. A conquered state whose original prince was its sole ruler is difficult to conquer, but easy to maintain; a conquered state in which the prince shared power with the barons is easy to conquer, but difficult to maintain.

When possible, a prince should strive to rise to power on his own merits and with his own arms. Relying on friends, good luck, or other people’s arms may make the rise easier, but holding onto his newfound power will prove a difficult task. Machiavelli devotes almost an entire chapter to Cesare Borgia , who rose to prominence largely through connections and his father’s help, but was crafty enough to carve out his own niche – though he wound up failing in the end. Princes who rise to the throne through crime are another matter altogether: Machiavelli condemns them as wicked, and yet his words betray his admiration for their cleverness. Cruelty, when well-used, can be justified.

According to Machiavelli, reliance on mercenaries and auxiliaries for troops is a grave mistake. A prince must lay strong foundations – good laws and good arms – and if the latter is lacking, the former is rendered irrelevant. A state needs both to survive. Mercenaries are disloyal and divided; foreign auxiliaries come already united under another master, and so are in a way even more dangerous. The prince himself should be a student of war and an avid reader of military history.

Reputation is another important element to consider. The front princes put on to appeal to the populace is often a lie, as Machiavelli notes; the better the liar, the better the prince. That said, giving out money when it is fiscally irresponsible, just to appear generous, is a mistake; displaying excessive mercy in order to garner affection can prove fatal. Better safe than sorry; better to be feared than to be loved.

Machiavelli closes The Prince with a meditation on luck and its role in human affairs, and a call to unite Italy. He addresses much of this last argument to Lorenzo de Medici, thereby imposing some semblance of symmetry on his book’s structure and honing his theoretical musings into a direct exhortation.

The Prince Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Prince is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The chatterbox prince

Is this a book or short story? Who is the author?

What were the five errors committed by Louis XII of France? How did the ancient Romans and Alexander the Great avoid some of these mistakes?

From the text:

''Louis made these five errors: he destroyed the minor powers, he increased the strength of one of the greater powers in Italy, he brought in a foreign power, he did not settle in the country, he did not send colonies . ''

Suggests that the author mainly believes that people

Can you quote the first line of the paragraph so I know where you are meaning?

Study Guide for The Prince

The Prince study guide contains a biography of Niccolo Machiavelli, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Prince
• Character List

Essays for The Prince

The Prince literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Prince.

• How Aristotle and Machiavelli Use the Middle Class and the Masses to Achieve Stable Political Organizations
• Hamlet, the Machiavellian Prince: An Exploration of Shakespeare's Use of Machiavellian Politics
• The Christian Ethics of Machiavelli
• Did Machiavelli Feel That Autocracy Was the Best Form of Government?
• The Nation State: How Machiavelli Gave Birth To the Modern Conception of Rule

Lesson Plan for The Prince

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Introduction to The Prince
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Prince Bibliography

E-Text of The Prince

The Prince e-text contains the full text of The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.

• Introduction
• Chapters 1-5
• Chapters 6-10
• Chapters 11-15

Wikipedia Entries for The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli's Life, Philosophy, & Influence

• Major Philosophers
• Philosophical Theories & Ideas

• Ph.D., Philosophy, Columbia University
• M.A., Philosophy, Columbia University
• B.A., Philosophy, University of Florence, Italy

Niccolò Machiavelli was one of the most influential political theorists of Western philosophy. His most read treatise, The Prince , turned Aristotle ’s theory of virtues upside down, shaking the European conception of government at its foundations. Machiavelli lived in or nearby Florence Tuscany his whole life, during the peak of the Renaissance movement , in which he took part. He is also the author of a number of additional political treatises, including The Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius , as well as of literary texts, including two comedies and several poems.

Machiavelli was born and raised in Florence , Italy, where his father was an attorney. Historians believe his education was of exceptional quality, especially in grammar, rhetoric, and Latin. He seems not to have been instructed in Greek, though, despite Florence having been a major center for the study of the Hellenic language since the middle of the fourteen hundreds.

In 1498, at age twenty-nine Machiavelli was called to cover two relevant governmental roles in a moment of social turmoil for the newly constituted Republic of Florence: he was named chair of the second chancery and – a short time after – secretary of the Dieci di Libertà e di Pace , a ten-person council responsible for maintaining diplomatic relationships with other States. Between 1499 and 1512 Machiavelli witnessed first-hand the unfolding of Italian political events.

In 1513, the Medici family returned to Florence. Machiavelli was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to overthrow this powerful family. He was first imprisoned and tortured then sent into exile. After his release, he retired to his country house in San Casciano Val di Pesa, about ten miles southwest of Florence. It is here, between 1513 and 1527, that he wrote his masterpieces.

De Principatibus (literally: "On Princedoms") was the first work composed by Machiavelli in San Casciano mostly during 1513; it was published only posthumously in 1532. The Prince is a short treatise of twenty-six chapters in which Machiavelli instructs a young pupil of the Medici family on how to acquire and maintain political power. Famously centered on the right balancing of fortune and virtue in the prince, it is by far the most read work by Machiavelli and one of the most prominent texts of Western political thought.

The Discourses

Despite the popularity of The Prince , Machiavelli’s major political work is probably The Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius . Its first pages were written in 1513, but the text was completed only between 1518 and 1521. If The Prince instructed how to govern a princedom, The Discourses were meant to educate future generations to achieve and maintain political stability in a republic. As the title suggests, the text is structured as a free commentary on the first ten volumes of Ab Urbe Condita Libri , the major work of Roman historian Titus Livius (59B.C.-17A.D.)

The Discourses are divided into three volumes: the first devoted to internal politics; the second to foreign politics; the third one to a comparison of the most exemplary deeds of individual men in ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy. If the first volume reveals Machiavelli’s sympathy for the republican form of government, it is especially in the third that we find a lucid and pungent critical gaze at the political situation of Renaissance Italy.

Other Political and Historical Works

While carrying forward his governmental roles, Machiavelli had the opportunity to write about the events and issues he was witnessing first-hand. Some of them are critical to understanding the unfolding of his thought. They range from the examination of the political situation in Pisa (1499) and in Germany (1508-1512) to the method used by the Valentino in killing his enemies (1502).

While in San Casciano, Machiavelli wrote also a number of treatises on politics and history, including a treatise on war (1519-1520), a recount of the life of the condottiero Castruccio Castracani (1281-1328), a history of Florence (1520-1525).

Literary Works

Machiavelli was a fine writer. He left us two fresh and entertaining comedies, The Mandragola (1518) and The Clizia (1525), both of which are still represented in these days. To these we shall add a novel, Belfagor Arcidiavolo (1515); a poem in verses inspired to Lucius Apuleius’s (about 125-180 A.D.) major work, L’asino d’oro (1517); several more poems, some of which amusing, the translation of a classical comedy by Publius Terentius Afer (circa 195-159B.C.); and several other smaller works.

Machiavellianism

By the end of the sixteenth century, The Prince had been translated into all major European languages and was the subject of heated disputes into the most important courts of the Old Continent. Often misinterpreted, the core ideas of Machiavelli were so despised that a term was coined to refer to them: ​ Machiavellianism . To these days the term indicates a cynical attitude, according to which a politician is justified to do any tort if the end requires it.

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45 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Dedication-Chapter 11

Chapters 12-14

Chapters 15-23

Chapters 24-26

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise of the Renaissance period written by Italian diplomat and philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli . The work, which was likely distributed for years prior to its official publication in 1532, is one of the most influential works of political philosophy in human history. Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a guide for new and future rulers, instructing them on how to seize and hold onto power, frequently citing specific examples from history as lessons. Each of the book’s primary themes focus on ways in which a ruler can and should manipulate the citizenry, often through the use of immoral means for a desired result . As such, The Prince and Machiavelli spawned the pejorative term “Machiavellian” to represent this type of manipulation in politics.

Plot Summary

Although The Prince eventually found widespread circulation and fame, its original intent was to serve as a handbook for one specific ruler and to ingratiate Machiavelli back into the political elite. He begins the book with a dedication to Lorenzo de Medici, a member of the ruling Medici family which had previously imprisoned, tortured, and banished Machiavelli following its rise to power. Early in his work, Machiavelli lays out two disclaimers important to his philosophy of how princes should seize and maintain power. The first is to explain his usage of the word state to refer to any distinct sovereign region and to clarify that all states are either republics, in which the people hold power through electing a representative, or principalities, which are monarchies. The second disclaimer explains that his discussions will concern only principalities because he has written of republics at length in other works.

Each of the book’s 26 chapters explains Machiavelli’s vision as to what actions that a prince should take in order to maintain power. The chapters can be divided into four basic sections: types of principalities, defense and military, the qualities and behavior of a prince, and prudence and fate. Chapters 1 through 11 discuss the several different types of principalities, such as those inherited by the ruler through family, those which are a mixture of inherited and newly annexed territories, those which are entirely new and have been acquired through force, and those which are Ecclesiastical in nature and under the direct sovereign rule of the Pope. Chapters 12 through 14 discuss the prince as military leader and the different types of armies, including those consisting entirely of native troops, those consisting entirely of hired mercenary soldiers , those consisting of auxiliary troops borrowed from other rules, and those which consist of a mixture of native, mercenary, or auxiliary troops. Chapters 15-23 discuss the behavior of a prince in regard to characteristics such as generosity, cruelty, faithfulness, and reputation. Over the final three chapters Machiavelli discusses Italy’s current political state and how the issues of prudence, chance, and free will contributed to it being under the control of foreign powers. 

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Niccolo Machiavelli’s Philosophy Essay (Critical Writing)

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Introduction

Machiavelli’s philosophy as immoral, machiavelli’s philosophy as amoral, machiavelli’s philosophy as moral utilitarianism.

Niccolo Machiavelli’s insertion that ‘the ends justify the means’ has coined numerous reactions and controversies in regard to its morality stand. His work, ‘ The Prince ’, is associated with trickery, duplicity, disparagement, and all other kinds of evil (Machiavelli and Marriott, 2009). According to him, his view that ‘the ends justify the means’ implies that the rulers eliminate any hindrances that they are bound to encounter during their reign. It is for this reason that his work has been met with lots of criticism.

Most of his critics associate him with ‘ruthlessness’ and condemn his work as being immoral. However, other philosophers who have developed a deeper acquaintance with Machiavelli’s work have elicited a different reaction from his critics. This paper will therefore bring out both arguments with the aim of ascertaining whether Machiavelli’s philosophy that ‘the ends justify the means’ is actually an immoral doctrine.

Machiavelli’s philosophy has received a considerable amount of criticism. The ‘acceptable’ actions contravene the acknowledged standard of ethical behavior hence declaring the philosophy immoral. His assertion that ‘ A prince wishing to hold his own must be aware of how to do wrong’ is seen as upholding immoral activities in a bid to preserve political power. He avers that the prince should avoid two things in the course of his reign. First, the prince should ensure that he avoids internal rebellion by his subjects and secondly, any external hostility by alien powers.

How then is his principle viewed as immoral? According to Machiavelli, it is the duty of the prince to protect his realm and to further enhance his sovereignty. He provides various ‘means’ that the prince need in order to achieve his goal and it is these ‘means’ that the critics view as being immoral. One method that Machiavelli upholds as important is the ability of being greedy. He asserts that a prince should not be generous when spending the State’s wealth as generosity results to his collapse and that of the principality.

Although he argues that at times generosity may act in favor of the ruler, he highly discourages it and accredits it to a failed political framework. The greedy nature of the ruler ensures that he saves enough funds to finance the military. The major source of power is through acquisition of military defense which ensures that his reign is defended from any kind of attack. This approach is criticized as lacking in morality as the ruler is said to be governed by his desires and interests hence disregarding those of his subjects.

The prince, by using state’s money to fund the military in order to ensure perpetual power, is an immoral conduct that the society views as ‘bad’. According to Machiavelli, the interests of the ruler differ with those of his subjects hence the need to acquire total power. The philosophy therefore encourages the prince to take away the societal freedoms and privileges by being cruel and greedy.

He asserts that, “ As long as the prince maintains a sense of unity and loyalty he ought not to care about the reproach of cruelty ”. What this implies is that the means of being cruel justifies the ends of achieving some sense of civil orderly. This assertion promotes immorality in the sense that it breeds antagonism and vengeance. Cruelty cultivates hatred and fear, the very same traits that Machiavelli tells the prince to be wary of. The critics condemn Machiavelli’s argument in regards to the existing relationship between the prince and his subjects. According to them, a cordial relationship can be achieved through social contracts hence promoting security and justice.

The amoral structure of deliberation in Machiavelli’s work has been argued as being neither ‘moral’ nor ‘immoral’. It assumes an ‘amoral’ context whereby his assertions are said to be ‘absent of morals’. This does not render his assertions immoral. This is evident from the political guidance that he gives to the prince. According to him, any action that the prince decides to dwell on in an attempt to reach his goal is automatically justified, whether the action is judged as good or bad. His concept of amorality provides that in certain circumstances faced by a ruler, the rules of supremacy precede those of ethics and morality. According to him, the leaders are governed by the ‘ends’ hence resulting to various ‘means’. He further asserts that the actions of the rulers are determined by the humankind who he describes as being ‘ basically inflexible and incapable of proving any advancement’ .

His advice therefore allows for some flexibility as long as the course of action adopted by the prince is suitable to ensure his success. He is careful not to differentiate between moral and immoral actions. A good example is the fact that his philosophy that ‘the ends justifies the means’ provides a very important restraint that he calls upon the rulers to exercise if they want to protect their power.

The rulers should exercise control over his subjects’ women and property. The unjust enrichment is bound to yield hatred and contempt that the prince should inherently avoid. Failure to comply can end the reign of the prince. However, though this argument can be said to have a moral standing, it is by all standards amoral. The need for the prince to restrain himself is not meant to convert him to be morally upright, but to make certain that he protects and secures his reign.

Accordingly, immense virtue is crucial if the ruler is to accomplish his quest of protecting and maintaining his reign whilst attaining respect and grandeur. However, Machiavelli’s ‘virtue’ is not the same as the virtue that highlights the morality of a trait. His kind of ‘virtue’ includes various traits such as greatness, deception and greediness. A good example is his appraisal of the deceptive virtue adopted by Septimius Severus who sought to eradicate impending usurpers of the Roman territory. On the other hand, he detests the excessive action of deceit taken by Agathocles to exercise his power. The implication derived from this argument is the fact that virtue is a notion that challenges morality’s definition of ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’. For example, the notion of deceit according to Machiavelli can be declared as being either legitimate or illegitimate depending on the ruler’s situation. This renders his argument in regards to virtue as being amoral.

The application of utilitarianism is vital to ascertaining morality. Machiavelli’s proponents argue that his critics fail to interpret his work and are therefore quick to jump into unwarranted conclusions. For example, the notion that Machiavelli encourages meanness and deceit is not true. According to his proponents, Machiavelli only asserts that the notions of meanness and deceit should only be applied when necessary. He views the ultimate goal as being the determining factor of adopting a particular method of governance. In what extent is the philosophy considered as being moral?

The proponents argue that Machiavelli’s principle concerns are ethical in nature. His philosophical policy is attributed to a non-consequential description of morality. His contribution towards the moral duties and values such as companionship and impartiality is evident. Accordingly, he does not give an option of transgression but rather, he demands for compliance. Further, Machiavelli does not disregard the conventional values in his argument, but rather raises questions in regards to their usage.

This does not render his philosophy immoral. What of his definition of ‘virtues’? Machiavelli’s critics have been dismissed in their assertion that his philosophical ‘virtues’ promote immorality. However, it is arguable that his virtue doctrine should not be completely distanced from the moral field. Machiavelli regularly criticizes a prince who fails to correctly use his power for the good of human kind as being either immoral or amoral. According to him, virtue can either be good or bad depending on the situation that the prince decides to apply it. This renders this particular virtue to be viewed as solely utilitarian hence gaining a moral standing.

Further, Machiavelli’s principles are actually practical. This is evident in the fact that his political system does not rely on any predetermined moral codes. For example, critics seem to capitalize on his ‘hypocrisy’ insistence. However, they disregard the fact that Machiavelli treats the term solely as a political tool hence lacking any moral element. According to him, “ The prince must be willing not only to engage in bad actions whenever necessary but to also pretend to be good in the event he results to bad deeds. Hypocrisy is efficient, while candid knavery would not be.” Generally speaking, Machiavelli only advocates for unethical behaviors only in situations where the prince is faced with no available option and this action is morally justifiable. Humankind is naturally viewed as evil and conniving and a political ruler should not allow himself to be trapped.

Machiavelli’s argument therefore renders him to be viewed as a ‘utilitarian’. According to him, he avers that the worthiness of a moral deed is primarily established by its involvement to overall efficacy thereby concluding that ‘the ends justify the means’.

Is Machiavelli’s philosophy an immoral doctrine? In arguing that the ‘ends justify the means’, Machiavelli provides a practical guide to princes in a bid to achieve their success. It is therefore important to fairly tackle this question by viewing Machiavelli’s work as being less of a philosophical discourse than a mere political guide. Machiavelli’s main concern is to bring to fore his primary suggestions hence disregarding their logical foundation.

Further, the ‘means’ that are highly regarded and justified by Machiavelli would benefit any ruler who seek to abide by his advise. However, this fact does not render the aforementioned philosophy credible. It is manned by various flaws in its utilitarian thinking, political objectives and meticulous tactics. It can be argued that this particular philosophy was premised in the context of utilitarian morality. Thus, an action that a ruler decides to take is excusable if the same justifies its ends. He also relies on the conception of incontrovertible rulers in incontrovertible principalities without worrying of any impending variance between the two. Further, his recommendable advice seems to justify immoral behaviors. In conclusion, it is therefore safe to declare that the philosophy is an immoral doctrine.

Machiavelli, N., and Marriott, W. (2009). The Prince . New York: Veroglyphic Publishing.

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IvyPanda. (2020, May 21). Niccolo Machiavelli’s Philosophy. https://ivypanda.com/essays/niccolo-machiavellis-philosophy/

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Niccolo Machiavelli’s Philosophy." May 21, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/niccolo-machiavellis-philosophy/.

1. IvyPanda . "Niccolo Machiavelli’s Philosophy." May 21, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/niccolo-machiavellis-philosophy/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Niccolo Machiavelli’s Philosophy." May 21, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/niccolo-machiavellis-philosophy/.

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There is something surprising about the sheer number of interpretations of Machiavelli’s political opinions. There exist, even now, over a score of leading theories of how to interpret The Prince and The Discourses —apart from a cloud of subsidiary views and glosses. The bibliography of this is vast and growing faster than ever. While there may exist no more than the normal extent of disagreement about the meaning of particular terms or theses contained in these works, there is a startling degree of divergence about the central view, the basic political attitude of Machiavelli.

This phenomenon is easier to understand in the case of other thinkers whose opinions have continued to puzzle or agitate mankind—Plato, for example, or Rousseau or Hegel or Marx. But then it might be said that Plato wrote in a world and in a language that we cannot be sure we understand; that Rousseau, Hegel, Marx were prolific theorists and that their works are scarcely models of clarity or consistency. But The Prince is a short book: its style is usually described as being singularly lucid, succinct, and pungent—a model of clear Renaissance prose. The Discourses are not, as treatises on politics go, of undue length and they are equally clear and definite. Yet there is no consensus about the significance of either; they have not been absorbed into the texture of traditional political theory; they continue to arouse passionate feelings; The Prince has evidently excited the interest and admiration of some of the most formidable men of action of the last four centuries, especially our own, men not normally addicted to reading classical texts.

There is evidently something peculiarly disturbing about what Machiavelli said or implied, something that has caused profound and lasting uneasiness. Modern scholars have pointed out certain real or apparent inconsistencies between the (for the most part) republican sentiment of The Discourses (and The Histories ) and the advice to absolute rulers in The Prince . Indeed there is a great difference of tone between the two treatises, as well as chronological puzzles: this raises problems about Machiavelli’s character, motives, and convictions which for three hundred years and more have formed a rich field of investigation and speculation for literary and linguistic scholars, psychologists, and historians.

But it is not this that has shocked Western feeling. Nor can it be only Machiavelli’s “realism” or his advocacy of brutal or unscrupulous or ruthless politics that has so deeply upset so many later thinkers and driven some of them to explain or explain away his advocacy of force and fraud. The fact that the wicked are seen to flourish or that wicked courses appear to pay has never been very remote from the consciousness of mankind. The Bible, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle—to take only some of the fundamental works of Western culture—the characters of Jacob or Joshua, Samuel’s advice to Saul, Thucydides’ Melian dialogue or his account of at least one ferocious but rescinded Athenian resolution, the philosophies of Thrasymachus and Callicles, Aristotle’s more cynical advice in The Politics , and, after these, Carneades’ speeches to the Roman Senate as described by Cicero, Augustine’s view of the secular state from one vantage point, and Marsilio’s from another—all these had cast enough light on political realities to shock the credulous and naïve out of uncritical idealism.

The explanation can scarcely lie in Machiavelli’s tough-mindedness alone, even though he did perhaps dot the i’s and cross the t’s more sharply than anyone before him. Even if the initial shock—the reactions of, say, Pole or Gentillet—is to be so explained, this does not account for the reactions of one who had read or even heard about the opinions of Hobbes or Spinoza or Hegel or the Jacobins and their heirs. Something else is surely needed to account both for the continuing horror and for the differences among the commentators. The two phenomena may not be unconnected. To indicate the nature of the latter phenomenon one may cite only the best known interpretations of Machiavelli’s political views produced since the sixteenth century.

According to Alberico Gentile and the late Professor Garrett Mattingly, the author of The Prince wrote a satire—for he certainly cannot literally have meant what he said. For Spinoza, Rousseau, Ugo Foscolo, Signor Ricci (who introduces The Prince to the readers of the Oxford Classics), it is a cautionary tale; for whatever else he was, Machiavelli was a passionate patriot, a democrat, a believer in liberty, and The Prince must have been intended (Spinoza is particularly clear on this) to warn men of what tyrants could be and do, the better to resist them. Perhaps the author could not write openly with two rival powers—those of the Church and of the Medici—eying him with equal (and not unjustified) suspicion. The Prince is therefore a satire (though no work seems to me to read less like one).

For Professor A. H. Gilbert it is anything but this—it is a typical piece of its period, a mirror for princes, a genre exercise common enough in the Renaissance and before (and after) it, with very obvious borrowings and “echoes”; more gifted than most of these, and certainly more hard-boiled (and influential), but not so very different in style, content, or intention.

Professors Giuseppe Prezzolini and Hiram Haydn, more plausibly, regard it as an anti-Christian piece (in this following Fichte and others) and see it as an attack on the Church and all her principles, a defense of the pagan view of life. Professor Toffanin, however, thinks Machiavelli was a Christian, though a somewhat peculiar one, a view from which Marchese Ridolfi, his most distinguished living biographer, and Father Leslie Walker (in his English edition of The Discourses ) do not wholly dissent. Alderisio, indeed, regards him as a passionate and sincere Catholic, although he does not go quite so far as the anonymous nineteenth-century compiler of Religious Maxims faithfully extracted from the works of Niccolò Machiavelli (referred to by Ridolfi in the last chapter of his biography).

For Benedetto Croce and all the many scholars who have followed him, Machiavelli is an anguished humanist, and one who, so far from seeking to soften the impression made by the crimes that he describes, laments the vices of men which make such wicked courses politically unavoidable—a moralist who wrings his hands over a world in which political ends can only be achieved by means that are morally evil, and therefore the man who divorced the province of politics from that of ethics. But for the Swiss scholars Wälder, Kaegi, and von Muralt, he is a peace-loving humanist, who believed in order, stability, pleasure in life, in the disciplining of the aggressive elements of our nature into the kind of civilized harmony that he found in its finest form among the well-armed Swiss democracies of his own time.

For the great sixteenth-century neo-Stoic Justus Lipsius and later for Algarotti (in 1759) and Alfieri (in 1796) he was a passionate patriot who saw in Cesare Borgia the man who, if he had lived, might have liberated Italy from the barbarous French and Spaniards and Austrians who were trampling on her and had reduced her to misery and poverty, decadence and chaos. The late Professor Mattingly could not credit this because it was obvious to him, and he did not doubt that it must have been no less obvious to Machiavelli, that Cesare was incompetent, a mountebank, a squalid failure; while Professor Vögelin seems to suggest that it is not Cesare, but (of all men) Tamerlane who was hovering before Machiavelli’s fancy-laden gaze.

For Cassirer, Renaudet, Olschki, and Sir Keith Hancock, Machiavelli is a cold technician, ethically and politically uncommitted, an objective analyst of politics, a morally neutral scientist, who (K. Schmid tells us) anticipated Galileo in applying inductive methods to social and historical material, and had no moral interest in the use made of his technical discoveries—being equally ready to place them at the disposal of liberators and despots, good men and scoundrels. Renaudet describes his method as “purely positivist,” Cassirer, as concerned with “political statics.” But for Federico Chabod he is not coldly calculating at all, but passionate to the point of unrealism. Ridolfi, too, speaks of il grande appassionato and De Caprariis thinks him positively visionary.

For Herder he is, above all, a marvelous mirror of his age, a man sensitive to the contours of his time, who faithfully described what others did not admit or recognize, an inexhaustible mine of acute contemporary observation; and this is accepted by Ranke and Macaulay, Burd, and, in our day, Gennaro Sasso. For Fichte he is a man of deep insight into the real historical (or super-historical) forces that mold men and transform their morality—in particular, a man who rejected Christian principles for those of reason, political unity, and centralization. For Hegel he is the man of genius who saw the need for uniting a chaotic collection of small and feeble principalities into a coherent whole. His specific nostrums may excite disgust, but they are accidents due to the conditions of their own time, now long past. Yet, however obsolete his precepts, he understood something move important—the demands of his own age—that the hour had struck for the birth of the modern, centralized, political state, for the formation of which he “established the truly necessary fundamental principles.”

The thesis that Machiavelli was above all an Italian and a patriot, speaking above all to his own generation, and if not solely to Florentines, at any rate only to Italians, and that he must be judged solely, or at least mainly, in terms of his historical context is a position common to Herder and Hegel, Macaulay and Burd. 1 Yet for Professors Butterfield and Ramat he suffers from an equal lack of scientific and historical sense. Obsessed by classical authors, his gaze is on an imaginary past; he deduces his political maxims in an unhistorical and a priori manner from dogmatic axioms (according to Professor Huovinen)—a method that was already becoming obsolete at the time at which he was writing. In this respect his slavish imitation of antiquity is judged to be inferior to the historical sense and sagacious judgment of his friend Guicciardini (so much for the discovery in him of inklings of modern scientific method).

For Bacon (as for Spinoza, and later for Lassalle) he is above all the supreme realist and avoider of utopian fantasies. Boccalini is shocked by him, but cannot deny the accuracy or importance of his observations; so is Meinecke for whom he is the father of Staatsraison , with which he plunged a dagger into the body politic of the West, inflicting a wound which only Hegel would know how to heal. (This is Meinecke’s optimistic verdict half a century ago, implicitly withdrawn after the Second World War.)

But for Koenig he is not a tough-minded cynic at all, but an aesthete seeking to escape from the chaotic and squalid world of the decadent Italy of his time into a dream of pure art, a man not interested in practice who painted an ideal political landscape much (if I understand this view correctly) as Piero della Francesca painted an ideal city. The Prince is to be read as an idyl in the best neoclassical, neo-pastoral, Renaissance style. Yet De Sanctis in the second volume of his History of Italian Literature denies The Prince a place in the humanist tradition on account of Machiavelli’s hostility to imaginative visions.

For Renzo Sereni it is a fantasy indeed but of a bitterly frustrated man, and its dedication is the “desperate plea” of a victim of “severe and constant misfortune.” A psychoanalytic interpretation of one queer episode in Machiavelli’s life is offered in support of this thesis.

For Macaulay he is a political pragmatist and a patriot who cared most of all for the independence of Florence, and acclaimed any form of rule that would ensure it. Marx calls The Discourses a “genuine masterpiece,” and Engels (in the Dialectics of Nature ) speaks of Machiavelli as “one of the giants of the Enlightenment,” a man “free from petit-bourgeois outlook….” Soviet criticism is more ambivalent. 2

For the restorers of the short-lived Florentine republic he was evidently nothing but a venal and treacherous toady, anxious to serve any master, who had unsuccessfully tried to flatter the Medici in the hope of gaining their favor. Professor Sabine in his well-known textbook views him as an anti-metaphysical empiricist, a Hume or Popper before his time, free from obscurantist, theological, and metaphysical preconceptions. For Antonio Gramsci he is above all a revolutionary innovator who directs his shafts against the obsolescent feudal aristocracy and Papacy and their mercenaries. His Prince is a myth which signifies the dictatorship of new, progressive forces: ultimately of the coming role of the masses and of the need for the emergence of new politically realistic leaders— The Prince is “an anthropomorphic symbol” of the hegemony of the “collective will.”

Like Jakob Burckhardt and Friedrich Meinecke, Professors C. J. Friedrich and Charles Singleton maintain that he has a developed conception of the state as a work of art. The great men who have founded or maintain human associations are conceived as analogous to artists whose aim is beauty, and whose essential qualification is understanding of their material—they are molders of men, as sculptors are molders of marble or clay. Politics, in this view, leaves the realm of ethics and approaches that of aesthetics. Singleton argues that Machiavelli’s originality consists in his view of political action as a form of what Aristotle called “making”—the goal of which is a non-moral artifact, an object of beauty or use external to man (in this case a particular arrangement of human affairs)—and not of “doing” (where Aristotle and Aquinas had placed it), the goal of which is internal and moral, not the creation of an object, but a particular kind—the right way—of living or being.

This position is not distant from that of Villari, Croce, and others, inasmuch as it ascribes to Machiavelli the divorce of politics from ethics. Professor Singleton transfers Machiavelli’s conception of politics to the region of art, which is conceived as being amoral. Croce gives it an independent status of its own: of politics for politics’ sake.

But the commonest view of him, at least as a political thinker, is still that of most Elizabethans, dramatists and scholars alike, for whom he is a man inspired by the Devil to lead good men to their doom, the great subverter, the teacher of evil, le docteur de la scélératesse , the inspirer of St. Bartholomew’s Eve, the original of Iago. This is the “murderous Machiavel” of the famous 400 references in Elizabethan literature.

His name adds a new ingredient to the more ancient figure of Old Nick. For the Jesuits he is “the devil’s partner in crime,” “a dishonorable writer and an unbeliever,” and The Prince is, in Bertrand Russell’s words, “a handbook for gangsters” (compare with this Mussolini’s description of it as a “ vade mecum for statesmen,” a view tacitly shared, perhaps, by other heads of state). This is the view common to Protestants and Catholics, Gentillet and François Hotman, Cardinal Pole, Bodin, and Frederick the Great, followed by the authors of all the many anti-Machiavels, the latest of whom are Jacques Maritain and Professor Leo Strauss.

There is prima facie something strange about so violent a disparity of judgments. What other thinker has presented so many facets to the students of his ideas? What other writer—and he not even a recognized philosopher—has caused his readers to disagree about his purposes so deeply and so widely? Yet I must repeat, Machiavelli does not write obscurely; nearly all his interpreters praise him for his terse, dry, clear prose.

What is it that has proved so arresting to so many?

Machiavelli, we are often told, was not concerned with morals. The most influential of all modern interpretations—that of Benedetto Croce, followed to some extent by Chabod, Russo, and others—is that Machiavelli, in E. W. Cochrane’s words, “did not deny the validity of Christian morality, and did not pretend that a crime required by political necessity was any the less a crime. Rather he discovered…that this morality simply did not hold in political affairs, and that any policy based on the assumption that it did, would end in disaster. His factual objective description of contemporary practices is a sign not of cynicism or detachment but of anguish.”

This account, it seems to me, contains two basic misinterpretations. The first is that the clash is one between “this [i.e., Christian] morality” and “political necessity.” The implication is that there is an incompatibility between, on the one hand, morality—the region of ultimate values sought after for their own sakes, values recognition of which alone enables us to speak of “crimes” or morally to justify and condemn anything; and on the other, politics—the art of adapting means to ends, the region of technical skills, of what Kant was to call “hypothetical imperatives,” which take the form “If you want to achieve x, do y” (e.g., betray a friend, kill an innocent man) without necessarily asking whether x is itself intrinsically desirable or not. This is the heart of the divorce of politics from ethics which Croce and many others attribute to Machiavelli. But this seems to me to rest on a mistake.

If ethics is confined to, let us say, Stoic or Christian or Kantian, or even some types of utilitarian ethics, where the source and criterion of value are the word of God, or eternal reason, or some inner sense or knowledge of good and evil, of right and wrong, voices which speak directly to the individual consciousness with absolute authority, this might have been tenable. But there exists an equally time-honored ethics, that of the Greek polis , of which Aristotle provided the clearest exposition. Since men are beings made by nature to live in communities, their communal purposes are the ultimate values from which the rest are derived, or with which their ends as individuals are identified. Politics—the art of living in a polis —is not an activity that can be dispensed with by those who prefer private life: it is not like seafaring or sculpture which those who do not wish to do so need not undertake. Political conduct is intrinsic to being a human being at a certain stage of civilization, and what it demands is intrinsic to living a successful human life.

Ethics so conceived—the code of conduct or the ideal to be pursued by the individual—cannot be known save by understanding the purpose and character of his polis ; still less be capable of being divorced from it, even in thought. This is the kind of pre-Christian morality that Machiavelli takes for granted. “It is well-known,” says Benedetto Croce, “that Machiavelli discovered the necessity and autonomy of politics, which is beyond moral good and evil, which has its own laws against which it is useless to rebel, which cannot be exorcised and made to vanish by holy water.” Beyond good and evil in some non-Aristotelian, religious, or liberal-Kantian sense; but not beyond the good and evil of those communities, ancient or modern, whose sacred values are social through and through. The arts of colonization or of mass murder (let us say) may also have their “own laws against which it is useless to rebel” for those who wish to practice them successfully. But if or when these laws collide with those of morality, it is possible, and indeed morally imperative, to abandon such activities.

But if Aristotle and Machiavelli are right about what men are (and should be—and Machiavelli’s ideal is, particularly in The Discourses , drawn in vivid colors), political activity is intrinsic to human nature, and while individuals here and there may opt out, the mass of mankind cannot do so; and its communal life determines the moral duties of its members. Hence in opposing the “laws of politics” to “good and evil” Machiavelli is not contrasting two “autonomous” spheres of acting—the “political” and the “moral”: he is contrasting his own “political” ethics with another ethical conception which governs the lives of persons who are of no interest to him. He is indeed rejecting one morality—the Christian—but not in favor of something that is not a morality at all but a game of skill, an activity called political, which is not concerned with ultimate human ends and is therefore not ethical at all.

He is indeed rejecting Christian ethics, but in favor of another system, another moral universe—the world of Pericles or of Scipio, or even of the Duke Valentino, a society geared to ends just as ultimate as the Christian faith, a society in which men fight and are ready to die for (public) ends which they pursue for their own sakes. They are choosing not a realm of means (called politics) as opposed to a realm of ends (called morals), but opt for a rival (Roman or classical) morality, an alternative realm of ends. In other, words the conflict is between two moralities, Christian and pagan (or as some wish to call it, aesthetic), not between autonomous realms of morals and politics.

Nor is this a mere question of nomenclature, unless politics is conceived as being concerned (as it usually is) not with means, skills, methods, technique, “knowhow” (whether or not governed by unbreakable rules of its own), but with an independent kingdom of ends of its own, sought for their own sake; unless politics is conceived as a substitute for ethics. When Machiavelli said (in a letter to Guicciardini) that he loved his country more than his soul, he revealed his basic moral beliefs—a position with which Croce does not credit him.

The second implausible hypothesis in this connection is the idea that Machiavelli viewed the crimes of his society with anguish. (Chabod in his excellent study, unlike Croce and some Croceans, does not insist on this.) This entails that he accepts the dire necessities of the raison d’état with reluctance, because he sees no alternative. But there is no evidence for this: there is no trace of agony in his political works, any more than in his plays or letters.

The pagan world that Machiavelli prefers is built on recognition of the need for systematic guile and force by rulers, and he seems to think it natural and not at all exceptional or morally agonizing that they should employ these weapons wherever they are needed. Nor does he seem to think exceptional the distinction he draws between the rulers and the ruled. The subjects or citizens must be Romans too: they do not need the virtù of the rulers, but if they also cheat, Machiavelli’s maxims will not work; they must be poor, militarized, honest, and obedient; if they lead Christian lives, they will accept too uncomplainingly the rule of mere bullies and scoundrels. No sound republic can be built of such materials as these. Theseus and Romulus, Moses and Cyrus did not preach humility or a view of this world as but a temporary resting place for their subjects.

But it is the first misinterpretation that goes deepest, that which represents Machiavelli as caring little or nothing for moral issues. This is surely not borne out by his own language. Anyone whose thought revolves round central concepts such as the good and the bad, the corrupt and the pure, has an ethical scale in mind in terms of which he gives moral praise and blame. Machiavelli’s values are not Christian, but they are moral values.

On this crucial point Professor Hans Baron’s criticism of the Croce-Russo thesis seems to me correct. Against the view that for Machiavelli politics were beyond moral criticism Professor Baron cites some of the passionately patriotic, republican, and libertarian passages in The Discourses in which the (moral) qualities of the citizens of a republic are favorably compared with those of the subjects of a despotic prince. The last chapter of The Prince is scarcely the work of a detached, morally neutral observer, or of a self-absorbed man, preoccupied with his own inner personal problems, who looks on public life “with anguish” as the graveyard of moral principles. Like Aristotle’s or Cicero’s, Machiavelli’s morality was social and not individual: but it was a morality no less than theirs, not an amoral region, beyond good or evil.

It does not, of course, follow that he was not often fascinated by the techniques of political life as such. The advice given equally to conspirators and their enemies, the professional appraisal of the methods of Oliverotto or Sforza or Baglioni spring from typical humanist curiosity, the search for an applied science of politics, fascination by knowledge for its own sake, whatever the implications. But the moral ideal, that of the citizen of the Roman Republic, is never far away. Political skills are valued solely as means—for their effectiveness in re-creating conditions in which sick men recover their health and can flourish. And this is precisely what Aristotle would have called the moral end proper to man.

This leaves still with us the thorny problem of the relation of The Prince to The Discourses . But whatever the disparities, the central strain which runs through both is one and the same. The vision, the dream—typical of many writers who see themselves as tough-minded realists—of the strong, united, effective, morally regenerated, splendid, and victorious patria , whether it is saved by the virtù of one man or many, remains central and constant. Political judgments, attitudes toward individuals or states, toward Fortuna and necessità , evaluation of methods, degree of optimism, the fundamental mood—these vary between one work and another, perhaps within the same exposition. But the basic values, the ultimate end—Machiavelli’s beatific vision—does not vary.

His vision is social and political. Hence the traditional view of him as simply a specialist in how to get the better of others, a vulgar cynic who says that Sunday school precepts are all very well, but in a world full of evil men, a man must lie, kill, and betray if he is to get somewhere, is incorrect. The philosophy summarized by “eat or be eaten, beat or be beaten”—the kind of worldly wisdom to be found in, say, Lappo Mazzei or Giovanni Morelli, with whom he has been compared, is not what is central in him. Machiavelli is not specially concerned with the opportunism of ambitious individuals; the ideal before his eyes is a shining vision of Florence or of Italy. In this respect he is a typically impassioned humanist of the Renaissance, save that his ideal is not artistic or cultural but political, unless the state—or regenerated Italy—is considered, in Burckhardt’s sense, as an artistic goal. This is very different from mere advocacy of tough-mindedness as such, or of a realism irrespective of its goal.

Machiavelli’s values, I should like to repeat, are not instrumental but moral and ultimate, and he calls for great sacrifices in their name. For them he rejects the rival scale—the Christian principles of ozio and meekness, not, indeed, as being defective in themselves, but as inapplicable to the conditions of real life; and real life for him means not merely (as is sometimes alleged) life as it was lived around him in Italy—the crimes, hypocrisies, brutalities, follies of Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan. This is not the touchstone of reality. His purpose is not to leave unchanged or to reproduce this kind of life, but to lift it to a new plane, to rescue Italy from squalor and slavery, to restore her to health and sanity.

The moral ideal for which he thinks no sacrifice too great—the welfare of the patria —is for him the highest form of social existence attainable by man; but attainable, not unattainable; not a world outside the limits of human capacity, given human beings as we know them, that is, creatures compounded out of those emotional, intellectual, and physical properties of which history and observation provide examples. He asks for men improved but not transfigured, not superhuman; not for a world of angelic beings unknown on this earth, who, even if they could be created, could not be called human.

If you object to the political methods recommended because they seem to you morally detestable, if you refuse to embark upon them because they are, to use Ritter’s word, “ erschreckend ,” too frightening, Machiavelli has no answer, no argument. In that case you are perfectly entitled to lead a morally good life, be a private citizen (or a monk), seek some corner of your own. But, in that event, you must not make yourself responsible for the lives of others or expect good fortune; in a material sense you must expect to be ignored or destroyed.

In other words you can opt out of the public world, but in that case he has nothing to say to you, for it is to the public world and to the men in it that he addresses himself. This is expressed most clearly in his notorious advice to the victor who has to hold down a conquered province. He advises a clean sweep: new governors, new titles, new powers, and new men; “He should make the poor rich and the rich poor, as David did when he became king…who heaped riches on the needy and dismissed the wealthy empty-handed.” Besides this, he should destroy the old cities and build new ones, and transfer the inhabitants from one place to another. In short, he should leave nothing unchanged in that province, so that there should be “neither rank, nor grade, nor honor, nor wealth that would not be recognized as coming from him.” He should take Philip of Macedon as his model, who “by proceeding in that manner became…master of all Greece.”

Now Philip’s historian informs us—Machiavelli goes on to say—that he transferred the inhabitants from one province to another “as shepherds move their flocks” from one place to another. “Doubtless,” Machiavelli continues, “these means are cruel and destructive of all civilized life, and neither Christian nor even human, and should be avoided by everyone. In fact, the life of a private citizen would be preferable to that of a king at the expense of the ruin of so many human beings. Nevertheless, whoever is unwilling to adopt the first and humane course must, if he wishes to maintain his power, follow the latter evil course. But men generally decide upon a middle course which is most hazardous; for they know neither how to be wholly good nor wholly bad, and so lose both worlds.”

This is plain enough. There are two worlds, that of personal morality and that of public organization. There are two ethical codes, both ultimate; not two “autonomous” regions, one of “ethics,” another of “politics,” but two (for him) exhaustive alternatives between two conflicting systems of value. If a man chooses the “first, humane course,” he must presumably give up all hope of Athens and Rome, of a noble and glorious society in which human beings can thrive and grow strong, proud, wise, and productive. Indeed, he must abandon all hope of a tolerable life on earth: for men cannot live outside society; they will not survive collectively if they are led by men who (like Soderini) are influenced by the first, “private” morality; they will not be able to realize their minimal goals as men; they will end in a state of moral, not merely political, degradation. But if a man chooses, as Machiavelli himself has done, the second course, then he must suppress his private qualms, if he has any, for it is certain that those who are too squeamish during the remaking of a society, or even during its pursuit and maintenance of its power and glory, will go to the wall. Whoever has chosen to make an omelette cannot do so without breaking eggs.

Machiavelli is sometimes accused of too much relish at the prospect of breaking eggs—almost for its own sake. This is unjust. He thinks these ruthless methods are necessary—necessary as means to provide good results, good in terms not of a Christian, but of a secular, humanistic, naturalistic morality. His most shocking examples show this. The most famous, perhaps, is that of Giovanpaolo Baglioni, who caught Julius II during one of his campaigns, and let him escape, when in Machiavelli’s view he might have destroyed him and his cardinals and thereby committed a crime “the greatness of which would have overshadowed the infamy and all the danger that could possibly result from it.”

Like Frederick the Great (who called Machiavelli “the enemy of mankind” and followed his advice), 3 Machiavelli is, in effect, saying “ Le vin est tiré: il faut le boire .” Once you embark on a plan for the transformation of a society you must carry it through no matter at what cost: to fumble, to retreat, to be overcome by scruples is to betray your chosen cause. To be a physician is to be a professional, ready to burn, to cauterize, to amputate; if that is what the disease requires, then to stop halfway because of personal qualms, or some rule unrelated to your art and its technique, is a sign of muddle and weakness, and will always give you the worst of both worlds. And there are at least two worlds: each of them has much, indeed everything, to be said for it; but they are two and not one. One must learn to choose between them and, having chosen, not look back.

There is more than one world, and more than one set of virtues: confusion between them is disastrous. One of the chief illusions caused by ignoring this is the Platonic-Hebraic-Christian view that virtuous rulers create virtuous men. This, according to Machiavelli, is not true. Generosity is a virtue, but not in princes. A generous prince will ruin the citizens by taxing them too heavily, a mean prince (and Machiavelli does not say that meanness is a good quality in private men) will save the purses of the citizens and so add to public welfare. A kind ruler—and kindness is a virtue—may let intriguers and stronger characters dominate him, and so cause chaos and corruption.

Other writers of “Mirrors for Princes” are also rich in such maxims, but they do not draw the implications. Machiavelli’s use of such generalizations is not theirs; he is not moralizing at large, but illustrating a specific thesis: that the nature of men dictates a public morality that is different from, and may come into collision with, the virtues of men who profess to believe in, and try to act by, Christian precepts. These may not be wholly unrealizable in quiet times, in private life, but they lead to ruin outside this. The analogy between a state and people and an individual is a fallacy: “The state and people are governed in a different way from an individual.” “It is not the well-being of individuals that makes cities great, but of the community.”

One may disagree with this. One may argue that the greatness, glory, and wealth of a state are hollow ideals, or detestable, if the citizens are oppressed and treated as mere means to the grandeur of the whole. Like Christian thinkers, or like Constant and the liberals, or like Sismondi and the theorists of the welfare state, one may prefer a state in which citizens are prosperous even though the public treasury is poor, in which government is neither centralized nor omnipotent, nor, perhaps, sovereign at all, but the citizens enjoy a wide degree of individual freedom; one may contrast this favorably with the great authoritarian concentrations of power built by Alexander or Frederick the Great or Napoleon, or the great autocrats of the twentieth century.

If so, one is simply contradicting Machiavelli’s thesis: he sees no merit in such loose political textures. They cannot last. Men cannot long survive in such conditions. He is convinced that states that have lost the appetite for power are doomed to decadence and are likely to be destroyed by their more vigorous and better armed neighbors; and Vico and modern “realistic” thinkers have echoed this.

Machiavelli is possessed by a clear, intense, narrow vision of a society in which human talents can be made to contribute to a powerful and splendid whole. He prefers republican rule in which the interests of the rulers do not conflict with those of the ruled. But (as Macaulay perceived) he prefers a well-governed principate to a decadent republic, and the qualities he admires and thinks capable of being welded into—indeed, indispensable to—a durable society are not different in The Prince and The Discourses : energy, boldness, practical skill, imagination, vitality, self-discipline, shrewdness, public spirit, good fortune, antiqua virtus, virtù —firmness in adversity, strength of character, as celebrated by Xenophon or Livy. All his more shocking maxims—those responsible for the “murderous Machiavel” of the Elizabethan stage—are descriptions of methods of realizing this single end: the classical, humanistic, and patriotic vision that dominates him.

Let me cite the best known of his most notoriously wicked pieces of advice to princes. One must employ terrorism or kindness, as the case dictates. Severity is usually more effective, but humanity, in some situations, brings better fruit. You may excite fear but not hatred, for hatred will destroy you in the end. It is best to keep men poor and on a permanent war footing, for this will be an antidote to the two great enemies of obedience—ambition and boredom—and the ruled will then feel in constant need of great men to lead them (the twentieth century offers us only too much evidence for this sharp insight). Competition—divisions between classes—in a society is desirable, for it generates energy and ambition in the right degree.

Religion must be promoted even though it may be false, provided it is of a kind that preserves social solidarity and promotes manly virtues, as Christianity has historically failed to do. When you confer benefits (he says, following Aristotle), do so yourself; but if dirty work is to be done, let others do it, for then they, not the prince, will be blamed and the prince can gain favor by duly cutting off their heads: for men prefer vengeance and security to liberty. Do what you must do in any case, but try to represent it as a special favor to the people. If you must commit a crime do not advertise it beforehand, since otherwise your enemies may destroy you before you destroy them. If your action must be drastic, do it in one fell swoop, not in agonizing stages. Do not be surrounded by over-powerful servants—victorious generals are best got rid of, otherwise they may get rid of you.

You may be violent and use your power to overawe, but you must not break your own laws, for that destroys confidence and disintegrates the social texture. Men should either be caressed or annihilated; appeasement and neutralism are always fatal. Excellent plans without arms are not enough or else Florence would still be a republic. Rulers must live in the constant expectation of war. Success creates more devotion than an amiable character; remember the fate of Pertinax, Savonarola, Soderini. Severus was unscrupulous and cruel, Ferdinand of Spain is treacherous and crafty: but by practicing the arts of both the lion and the fox they escaped both snares and wolves. Men will be false to you unless you compel them to be true by creating circumstances in which falsehood will not pay. And so on.

These examples are typical of “the devil’s partner.” Now and then doubts assail our author: he wonders whether a man high-minded enough to labor to create a state admirable by Roman standards will be tough enough to use the violent and wicked means prescribed; and, conversely, whether a sufficiently ruthless and brutal man will be disinterested enough to compass the public good which alone justifies the evil means. Yet Moses and Theseus, Romulus and Cyrus combined these properties. 4 What has been once can be again: the implication is optimistic.

These maxims have one property in common: they are designed to create or resurrect or maintain an order that will satisfy what the author conceives as men’s most permanent interests. Machiavelli’s values may be erroneous, dangerous, odious; but he is in earnest. He is not cynical. The end is always the same: a state conceived after the analogy of Periclean Athens, or Sparta, but above all the Roman Republic. Such an end, for which men naturally crave (of this he thinks that history and observation provide conclusive evidence), “excuses” any means. In judging means, look only to the end: if the state goes under, all is lost. Hence the famous paragraph in the forty-first chapter of the third book of The Discourses where he says:

When the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no considerations of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, not of glory or of infamy, should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the only question should be “What course will save the life and liberty of the country?”

The French have reasoned thus, and the “majesty of their King and the greatness of France” have come from it. Romulus could not have founded Rome without killing Remus. Brutus would not have preserved the republic if he did not kill his sons. Moses and Theseus, Romulus, Cyrus, and the liberators of Athens had to destroy in order to build. Such conduct, so far from being condemned, is held up to admiration by the classical historians and the Bible. Machiavelli is their admirer and faithful spokesman.

What is there, then, about his words, about his tone, which has caused such tremors among his readers? Not, indeed, in his own lifetime—there was a delayed reaction of some quarter of a century. But after that it is one of continuous and mounting horror. Fichte, Hegel, Treitschke “reinterpreted” his doctrines and assimilated them to their own views. But the sense of horror was not thereby greatly mitigated. It is evident that the effect of the shock that he administered was not a temporary one: it has lasted almost into our own day.

Leaving aside the historical problem of why there was no immediate contemporary criticism, let us consider the continuous discomfort caused to its readers during the four centuries that have passed since The Prince was placed upon the Index. The great originality, the tragic implications of Machiavelli’s theses seem to me to reside in their relation to a Christian civilization. It was all very well to live by the light of pagan ideals in pagan times; but to preach paganism more than a thousand years after the triumph of Christianity was to do so after the loss of innocence—and to be forcing men to make a conscious choice. The choice is painful because it is a choice between two entire worlds. Men have lived in both, and fought and died to preserve them against each other. Machiavelli has opted for one of them, and he is prepared to commit crimes for its sake.

In killing, deceiving, betraying, Machiavelli’s princes and republicans are doing evil things not condonable in terms of common morality. It is Machiavelli’s great merit that he does not deny this. Marsilio, Hobbes, Spinoza, and, in their own fashion, Hegel and Marx did try to deny it. So did many a defender of the raison d’état , Imperialist and Populist, Catholic and Protestant. These thinkers argue for a single moral system, and seek to show that the morality which justifies, and indeed demands, such deeds is continuous with, and a more rational form of, the confused ethical beliefs of the uninstructed morality which forbids them absolutely.

From the vantage point of the great social objectives in the name of which these (prima facie wicked) acts are to be performed, they will be seen (so the argument goes) as no longer wicked, but as rational—demanded by the very nature of things, by the common good, or man’s true ends, or the dialectic of history—condemned only by those who cannot or will not see a large enough segment of the logical or theological or metaphysical or historical pattern; misjudged, denounced only by the spiritually blind or short-sighted. At worst, these “crimes” are discords demanded by the larger harmony, and therefore, to those who hear this harmony, no longer discordant.

Machiavelli is not a defender of any such abstract theory. It does not occur to him to employ such casuistry. He is transparently honest and clear. In choosing the life of a statesman, or even the life of a citizen with enough civic sense to want his state to be as successful and splendid as possible, a man commits himself to rejection of Christian behavior. 5 It may be that Christians are right about the well-being of the individual soul, taken outside the social or political context. But the well-being of the state is not the same as the well-being of the individual—“they cannot be governed in the same way.” You have made your choice: the only crimes are weakness, cowardice, stupidity which may cause you to draw back in midstream and fail.

Compromise with current morality leads to bungling, which is always despicable, and when practiced by statesmen involves men in ruin. The end “excuses” the means, however horrible these may be in terms of even pagan ethics, if it is (in terms of the ideal of Thucydides or Polybius, Cicero or Livy) lofty enough. Brutus was right to kill his children: he saved Rome. Soderini did not have the stomach to perpetrate such deeds, and ruined Florence. Savonarola, who had sound ideas about austerity and moral strength and corruption, perished because he did not realize that an unarmed prophet will always go to the gallows.

If one can produce the right result by using the devotion and affection of men, let this be done by all means. There is no value in causing suffering as such. But if one cannot, then Moses, Romulus, Theseus, Cyrus are the exemplars, and fear must be employed. There is no sinister satanism in Machiavelli, nothing of Dostoevsky’s great sinner, pursuing evil for evil’s sake. To Dostoevsky’s famous question “Is everything permitted?” Machiavelli, who for Dostoevsky would surely have been an atheist, answers, “Yes, if the end—that is, the pursuit of a society’s basic interests in a specific situation—cannot be realized in any other way.”

This position has not been properly understood by some of those who claim to be not unsympathetic to Machiavelli. Figgis, for example, thinks that he “permanently suspended the habeas corpus of the human race,” that is to say, that he advocated methods of terrorism because for him the situation was always critical, always desperate, so that he confused ordinary political principles with rules needed, if at all, only in extreme cases.

Others—perhaps the majority of his interpreters—look on him as the originator, or at least a defender, of what later came to be called “ raison d’état,” “Staatsraison,” “Ragion di Stato “—the justification of immoral acts when undertaken on behalf of the state in exceptional circumstances. More than one scholar has pointed out, reasonably enough, that the notion that desperate cases require desperate remedies—that “necessity knows no law”—is to be found not only in antiquity but equally in Aquinas and Dante and other medieval writers long before Bellarmine or Machiavelli.

These parallels seem to me to rest on a deep but characteristic misunderstanding of Machiavelli’s thesis. He is not saying that while in normal situations current morality—that is, the Christian or semi-Christian code of ethics—should prevail, yet abnormal conditions can occur, in which the entire social structure in which alone this code can function becomes jeopardized, and that in emergencies of this kind acts that are usually regarded as wicked and rightly forbidden are justified.

This is the position of, among others, those who think that all morality ultimately rests on the existence of certain institutions—say, Roman Catholics who regard the existence of the Church and the Papacy as indispensable to Christianity, or nationalists who see in the political power of a nation the sole source of spiritual life. Such persons maintain that extreme and “frightful” measures needed for protecting the state or the Church or the national culture in moments of acute crisis may be justified, since the ruin of these institutions may fatally damage the indispensable framework of all other values. This is a doctrine in terms of which both Catholics and Protestants, both conservatives and communists have defended enormities which freeze the blood of ordinary men.

But it is not Machiavelli’s position. For the defenders of the raison d’état , the sole justification of these measures is that they are exceptional—that they are needed to preserve a system the purpose of which is precisely to preclude the need for such odious measures, so that the sole justification of such steps is that they will end the situations that render them necessary. But for Machiavelli these measures are, in a sense, themselves quite normal. No doubt they are called for only by extreme need; yet political life tends to generate a good many such needs, of varying degrees of “extremity”; hence Baglioni, who shied from the logical consequences of his own policies, was clearly unfit to rule.

The notion of raison d’état entails a conflict of values which may be agonizing to morally good and sensitive men. For Machiavelli there is no conflict. Public life has its own morality, to which Christian principles (or any absolute personal values) tend to be a gratuitous obstacle. This life has its own standards: it does not require perpetual terror, but it approves, or at least permits, the use of force where it is needed to promote the ends of political society.

Professor Sheldon Wolin 6 seems to me right in insisting that Machiavelli believes in a permanent “economy of violence”—the need for a consistent reserve of force always in the background to keep things going in such a way that the virtues admired by him, and by the classical thinkers to whom he appeals, can be protected and allowed to flower. Men brought up within a community in which such force, or its possibility, is used rightly will live the happy lives of Greeks or Romans during their finest hours. They will be characterized by vitality, genius, variety, pride, power, success (Machiavelli scarcely ever speaks of arts or sciences); but it will not, in any clear sense, be a Christian commonwealth. The moral conflict which this situation raises will trouble only those who are not prepared to abandon either course: those who assume that the two incompatible lives are, in fact, reconcilable.

But to Machiavelli the claims of the official morality are scarcely worth discussing: they are not translatable into social practice. “If men were good…” but he feels sure that they can never be improved beyond the point at which power considerations are relevant. If morals relate to human conduct, and men are by nature social, Christian morality cannot be a guide for normal social existence. It remained for someone to state this. Machiavelli did so.

One is obliged to choose: and in choosing one form of life, give up the other. That is the central point. If Machiavelli is right, if it is in principle (or in fact: the frontier seems dim) impossible to be morally good and do one’s duty as this was conceived by common European, and especially Christian, ethics, and at the same time build Sparta or Periclean Athens or the Rome of the Republic or even of the Antonines, then a conclusion of the first importance follows: that the belief that the correct, objectively valid solution to the question of how men should live can in principle be discovered is itself, in principle, not true. This was a truly erschreckend proposition. Let me try to put it in its proper context.

One of the deepest assumptions of Western political thought is the doctrine, scarcely questioned during its long ascendancy, that there exists some single principle that not only regulates the course of the sun and the stars, but prescribes their proper behavior to all animate creatures. Animals and subrational beings of all kinds follow it by instinct; higher beings attain to consciousness of it, and are free to abandon it, but only to their doom. This doctrine in one version or another has dominated European thought since Plato; it has appeared in many forms, and has generated many similes and allegories. At its center is the vision of an impersonal Nature or Reason or cosmic purpose, or of a divine Creator whose power has endowed all things and creatures each with a specific function; these functions are elements in a single harmonious whole, and are intelligible in terms of it alone.

This was often expressed by images taken from architecture: of a great edifice of which each part fits uniquely in the total structure; or from the human body as an all-embracing organic whole; or from the life of society as a great hierarchy, with God as the ens realissimum at the summit of two parallel systems—the feudal order and the natural order—stretching downward from Him, and reaching upward to Him, obedient to His will. Or it is seen as the Great Chain of Being, the Platonic-Christian analogue of the world-tree Ygdrasil, which links time and space and all that they contain. Or it has been represented by an analogy drawn from music, as an orchestra in which each instrument or group of instruments has its own tune to play in the infinitely rich polyphonic score. When, after the seventeenth century, harmonic metaphors replaced polyphonic images, the instruments were no longer conceived as playing specific melodies, but as producing sounds which, although they might not be wholly intelligible to any given group of players (and even sound discordant or superfluous if taken in isolation), yet contributed to the total pattern perceptible only from a loftier stand-point.

The idea of the world and of human society as a single intelligible structure is at the root of all the many various versions of Natural Law—the mathematical harmonies of the Pythagoreans, the logical ladder of Platonic Forms, the genetic-logical pattern of Aristotle, the divine logos of the Stoics and the Christian churches and of their secularized offshoots. The advance of the natural sciences generated more empirically conceived versions of this image as well as anthropomorphic similes: of Dame Nature as an adjuster of conflicting tendencies (as in Hume or Adam Smith), of Mistress Nature as the teacher of the best way to happiness (as in the works of some French Encyclopaedists), of Nature as embodied in the actual customs or habits of organized social wholes; biological, aesthetic, psychological similes have reflected the dominant ideas of an age.

This unifying monistic pattern is at the very heart of traditional rationalism, religious and atheistic, metaphysical and scientific, transcendental and naturalistic, which has been characteristic of Western civilization. It is this rock, upon which Western beliefs and lives had been founded, that Machiavelli seems, in effect, to have split open. So great a reversal cannot, of course, be due to the acts of a single individual. It could scarcely have taken place in a stable social and moral order; many besides him, ancient Skeptics, medieval nominalists and secularists, Renaissance humanists, doubtless supplied their share of the dynamite. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that it was Machiavelli who lit the fatal fuse.

If to ask what are the ends of life is to ask a real question, it must be capable of being correctly answered. To claim rationality in matters of conduct was to claim that correct and final solutions to such questions can in principle be found.

When such solutions were discussed in earlier periods, it was normally assumed that the perfect society could be conceived, at least in outline; for otherwise what standard could one use to condemn existing arrangements as imperfect? It might not be realizable here, below. Men were too ignorant or too weak or too vicious to create it. Or it was said (by some materialistic thinkers in the centuries following The Prince ) that it was technical means that were lacking, that no one had yet discovered methods of overcoming the material obstacles to the golden age; that we were not technologically or educationally or morally sufficiently advanced. But it was never said that there was something incoherent in the very notion itself.

Plato and the Stoics, the Hebrew prophets and Christian medieval thinkers, and the writers of utopias from More onward had a vision of what it was that men fell short of; they claimed, as it were, to be able to measure the gap between the reality and the ideal. But if Machiavelli is right, this entire tradition—the central current of Western thought—is fallacious. For if his position is valid then it is impossible to construct even the notion of such a perfect society, for there exist at least two sets of virtues—let us call them the Christian and the pagan—which are not merely in practice, but in principle, incompatible.

If men practice Christian humility, they cannot also be inspired by the burning ambitions of the great classical founders of cultures and religions; if their gaze is centered upon the world beyond—if their ideas are infected by even lip-service to such an outlook—they will not be likely to give all that they have to an attempt to build a perfect city. If suffering and sacrifice and martyrdom are not always evil and inescapable necessities, but may be of supreme value in themselves, then the glorious victories over fortune, which go to the bold, the impetuous, and the young, might neither be won nor thought worth winning. If spiritual goods alone are worth striving for, then of how much value is the study of necessita —of the laws that govern nature and human lives—by the manipulation of which men might accomplish unheard-of things in the arts and the sciences and the organization of social lives?

To abandon the pursuit of secular goals may lead to disintegration and a new barbarism; but even if this is so, is this the worst that could happen? Whatever the differences between Plato and Aristotle, or of either of these thinkers from the Sophists or Epicureans or the other Greek schools of the fourth and later centuries, they and their disciples, the European rationalists and empiricists of the modern age, were agreed that the study of reality by minds undeluded by appearances could reveal the correct ends to be pursued by men—that which would make men free and happy, strong and rational.

Some thought that there was a single end for all men in all circumstances, or different ends for men of different kinds or in dissimilar historical environments. Objectivists and universalists were opposed by relativists and subjectivists, metaphysicians by empiricists, theists by atheists. There was profound disagreement about moral issues; but what none of these thinkers, not even the Skeptics, had suggested was that there might exist ends—ends in themselves in terms of which alone everything else was justified—which were equally ultimate, but incompatible with one another, that there might exist no single universal overarching standard that would enable a man to choose rationally between them.

This was indeed a profoundly upsetting conclusion. It entailed that if men wished to live and act consistently, and understand what goals they were pursuing, they were obliged to examine their moral values. What if they found that they were compelled to make a choice between two incommensurable systems? To choose as they did without the aid of an infallible measuring rod which certified one form of life as being superior to all others and which could be used to demonstrate this to the satisfaction of all rational men? Is it, perhaps, this awful truth, implicit in Machiavelli’s exposition, that has upset the moral consciousness of men, and has haunted their minds so permanently and obsessively ever since?

Machiavelli did not himself propound it. There was no problem and no agony for him; he shows no trace of skepticism or relativism; he chose his side, and took little interest in the values that this choice ignored or flouted. The conflict between his scale of values and that of conventional morality clearly did not ( pace Croce and the other defenders of the “anguished humanist” interpretation) seem to worry Machiavelli himself. It upset only those who came after him, and were not prepared, on the one hand, to abandon their own moral values (Christian or humanist) together with the entire way of thought and action of which these were a part; nor, on the other, to deny the validity of, at any rate, much of Machiavelli’s analysis of the political facts, and the (largely pagan) values and outlook that went with it, embodied in the social structure which he painted so brilliantly and convincingly.

Whenever a thinker, however distant from us in time or culture, still stirs passion, enthusiasm, or indignation, any kind of intense debate, it is generally the case that he has propounded a thesis that upsets some deeply established idée reçue , a thesis that those who wish to cling to the old conviction nevertheless find it hard or impossible to dismiss or refute. This is the case with Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx.

I should like to suggest that it is Machiavelli’s juxtaposition of the two outlooks—the two incompatible moral worlds, as it were—in the minds of his readers, and the collision and acute discomfort that follow that, over the years, has been responsible for the desperate efforts to interpret his doctrines away, to represent him as a cynical and therefore ultimately shallow defender of power politics; or as a diabolist; or as a patriot prescribing for particularly desperate situations which seldom arise; or as a mere time server; or as an embittered political failure; or as a mere mouthpiece of truths we have always known but did not like to utter; or again as the enlightened translator of universally accepted ancient social principles into empirical terms; or as a crypto-republican satirist (a descendant of Juvenal, a forerunner of Orwell); or as a cold scientist, a mere political technologist free from moral implications; or as a typical Renaissance publicist practicing a now obsolete genre; or in any of the numerous other roles that have been and are still being cast for him.

Machiavelli may have possessed some of these attributes, but concentration on one or other of them as constituting his essential, “true” character seems to me to stem from reluctance to face and, still more, discuss the uncomfortable truth that Machiavelli had, unintentionally, almost casually, uncovered: namely, that not all ultimate values are necessarily compatible with one another—that there might be a conceptual (what used to be called “philosophical”), and not merely a material, obstacle to the notion of the single ultimate solution which, if it were only realized, would establish the perfect society.

Yet if no such solution can, even in principle, be formulated, then all political and, indeed, moral problems are thereby transformed. This is not a division of politics from ethics. It is the uncovering of the possibility of more than one system of values, with no criterion common to the systems whereby a rational choice can be made between them. This is not the rejection of Christianity for paganism (although Machiavelli clearly prefers the latter), nor of paganism for Christianity (which, at least in its historical form, he thought incompatible with the basic needs of normal men), but the setting of them side by side with the implicit invitation to men to choose either a good, virtuous private life or a good, successful social existence, but not both.

What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of “false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality.

But the question that his writings have dramatized, if not for himself, then for others in the centuries that followed, is this: what reason have we for supposing that justice and mercy, humility and virtù , happiness and knowledge, glory and liberty, magnificence and sanctity will always coincide, or indeed be compatible at all? Poetic justice is, after all, so called not because it does, but because it does not, as a rule, occur in the prose of ordinary life, where, ex hypothesi , a very different kind of justice operates. “States and people are governed in a different way from an individual.” Hence what talk can there be of indestructible rights, either in the medieval or the liberal sense? The wise man must eliminate fantasies from his own head, and should seek to dispel them from the heads of others; or, if they are too resistant, he should at least, as Pareto or Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor recommended, exploit them as a means to a viable society.

“The march of world history stands outside virtue, vice and justice,” said Hegel. If for the march of history you substitute “a well governed patria ,” and interpret Hegel’s notion of virtue as it is understood by Christians or ordinary men, then Machiavelli is one of the earliest proponents of this doctrine. Like all great innovators, he is not without ancestry. But the names of Palmieri and Pontano, and even of Carneades and Sextus Empiricus, have left little mark on European thought.

Croce has rightly insisted that Machiavelli is not detached nor cynical nor irresponsible. His patriotism, his republicanism, his commitment are not in doubt. He suffered for his convictions. He thought continually about Florence and Italy, and of how to save them. Yet it is not his character, nor his plays, his poetry, his histories, his diplomatic or political activities that have gained him his unique fame. 7 Nor can this be due only to his psychological or sociological imagination. His psychology is often excessively primitive. He scarcely seems to allow for the bare possibility of sustained and genuine altruism, he refuses to consider the motives of men who are prepared to fight against enormous odds, who ignore necessità and are prepared to lose their lives in a hopeless cause.

His distrust of unworldly attitudes, absolute principles divorced from empirical observation, is fanatically strong—almost romantic in its violence; the vision of the great prince playing upon human beings like an instrument intoxicates him. He assumes that different societies must always be at war with each other, since they have conflicting purposes. He sees history as one endless process of cutthroat competition, in which the only goal that rational men can have is to succeed in the eyes of their contemporaries and of posterity. He is good at bringing fantasies down to earth, but he assumes, as Mill was to complain about Bentham, that this is enough. He allows too little to the ideal impulses of men. He has no historical sense and little sense of economics. He has no inkling of the technological progress that is about to transform political and social life, and in particular the art of war. He does not understand how either individuals, communities, or cultures develop and transform themselves. Like Hobbes, he assumes that the argument or motive for self-preservation automatically outweighs all others.

He tells men above all not to be fools: to follow a principle when this may involve you in ruin is absurd, at least if judged by worldly standards; other standards he mentions respectfully, but takes no interest in them: those who adopt them are not likely to create anything that will perpetuate their name. His Romans are no more real than the stylized figures in his brilliant comedies. His human beings have so little inner life or capacity for cooperation or social solidarity that, as in the case of Hobbes’s not dissimilar creatures, it is difficult to see how they could develop enough reciprocal confidence to create a lasting social whole, even under the perpetual shadow of carefully regulated violence.

Few would deny that Machiavelli’s writings, more particularly The Prince , have scandalized mankind more deeply and continuously than any other political treatise. The reason for this, let me say again, is not the discovery that politics is the play of power—that political relationships between and within independent communities involve the use of force and fraud, and are unrelated to the principles professed by the players. That knowledge is as old as conscious thought about politics—certainly as old as Thucydides and Plato. Nor is it merely caused by the examples that he offers of success in acquiring or holding power—the descriptions of the massacre at Sinigaglia or the behavior of Agathocles or Oliverotto da Fermo are no more or less horrifying than similar stories in Tacitus or Guicciardini. The proposition that crime can pay is nothing new in Western historiography.

Nor is it merely his recommendation of ruthless measures that so upsets his readers. Aristotle had long ago allowed that exceptional situations might arise, that principles and rules could not be rigidly applied to all situations; the advice to rulers in The Politics is tough-minded enough. Cicero is aware that critical situations demand exceptional measures; ratio publicae utilitatis, ratio status were familiar in the thought of the Middle Ages. “Necessity is not subject to law” is a Thomist sentiment; Pierre d’Auvergne says much the same. Harrington said this in the following century, and Hume applauded him.

These opinions were not thought original by these, or perhaps any, thinkers. Machiavelli did not originate nor did he make much use of the notion of raison d’état . He stressed will, boldness, address, at the expense of the rules laid down by the calm ragione , to which his colleagues in the Pratiche Fiorentine , and perhaps the Oricellari Gardens, may have appealed. So did Leon Battista Alberti when he declared that fortuna crushes only the weak and propertyless; so did contemporary poets; so, too, in his own fashion, did Pico della Mirandola in his great apostrophe to the powers of man the creator, who, unlike the angels, can transform himself into any shape—the ardent image that lies at the heart of European humanism in the North as well as the Mediterranean.

Far more original, as has often been noted, is Machiavelli’s divorce of political behavior as a field of study from the theological world picture in terms of which this topic was discussed before him (even by Marsilio) and after him. Yet it is not his secularism, however audacious in his own day, that could have disturbed the contemporaries of Voltaire or Bentham or their successors. What shocked them is something different.

Machiavelli’s cardinal achievement is his uncovering of an insoluble dilemma, the planting of a permanent question mark in the path of posterity. It stems from his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration, and that not merely in exceptional circumstances, as a result of abnormality or accident or error—the clash of Antigone and Creon or in the story of Tristan—but (this was surely new) as part of the normal human situation.

For those who look on such collisions as rare, exceptional, and disastrous, the choice to be made is necessarily an agonizing experience for which, as a rational being, one cannot prepare (since no rules apply). But for Machiavelli, at least in The Prince, The Discourses, Mandragola , there is no agony. One chooses as one chooses because one knows what one wants, and is ready to pay the price. One chooses classical civilization rather than the Theban desert, Rome and not Jerusalem, whatever the priests may say, because such is one’s nature, and—he is no existentialist or romantic individualist avant la parole —because it is that of men in general, at all times, everywhere. If others prefer solitude or martyrdom, he shrugs his shoulders. Such men are not for him. He has nothing to say to them, nothing to argue with them about. All that matters to him and those who agree with him is that such men be not allowed to meddle with politics or education or any of the cardinal factors in human life; their outlook unfits them for such tasks.

I do not mean that Machiavelli explicitly asserts that there is a pluralism or even a dualism of values between which conscious choices must be made. But this follows from the contrasts he draws between the conduct he admires and that which he condemns. He seems to take for granted the obvious superiority of classical civic virtue and brushes aside Christian values, as well as conventional morality, with a disparaging or patronizing sentence or two, or smooth words about the misinterpretation of Christianity. 8 This worries or infuriates those who disagree with him the more because it goes against their convictions without seeming to be aware of doing so—and recommends wicked courses as obviously the most sensible, something that only fools or visionaries will reject.

If what Machiavelli believed is true, this undermines one major assumption of Western thought: namely, that somewhere in the past or the future, in this world or the next, in the church or the laboratory, in the speculations of the metaphysician or the findings of the social scientist or in the uncorrupted heart of the simple good man, there is to be found the final solution of the question of how men should live. If this is false (and if more than one equally valid answer to the question can be returned, then it is false) the idea of the sole true, objective, universal human ideal crumbles. The very search for it becomes not merely utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent.

One can surely see how this might seem unfaceable to men, believers or atheists, empiricist or apriorists, brought up on the opposite assumption. Nothing could well be more upsetting to those brought up in a monistic religious or, at any rate, moral, social, or political system than a breach in it. This is the dagger of which Meinecke speaks, with which Machiavelli inflicted the wound that has never healed; even though Professor Felix Gilbert is right in thinking that he did not bear the scars of it himself. For he remained a monist, albeit a pagan one.

Machiavelli was doubtless guilty of much confusion and exaggeration. He confused the proposition that ultimate ideals may be incompatible with the very different proposition that the more conventional human ideals—founded on ideas of Natural Law, brotherly love, and human goodness—were unrealizable and that those who acted on the opposite assumption were fools, and at times dangerous ones; and he attributed this dubious proposition to antiquity and believed that it was verified by history.

The first of these assertions strikes at the root of all doctrines committed to the possibility of attaining, or at least formulating, final solutions; the second is empirical, commonplace, and not self-evident. The two propositions are not, in any case, identical or logically connected. Moreover he exaggerated wildly: the idealized types of the Periclean Greek or the Roman of the old Republic may be irreconcilable with the ideal citizen of a Christian commonwealth (supposing such were conceivable), but in practice—above all in history, to which our author went for illustrations if not for evidence—pure types seldom obtain: mixtures and compounds and compromises and forms of communal life that do not fit into easy classifications, but which neither Christians nor liberal humanists nor Machiavelli would be compelled by their beliefs to reject, can be conceived without too much intellectual difficulty. Still, to attack and inflict lasting damage on a central assumption of an entire civilization is an achievement of the first order.

He does not affirm this dualism. He merely takes for granted the superiority of Roman antiqua virtus (which may be maddening to those who do not) over the Christian life as taught by the Church. He utters a few casual words about what Christianity might have become, but does not expect it to change its actual character. There he leaves the matter. Anyone who believes in Christian morality regards the Christian Commonwealth as its embodiment, but at the same time largely accepts the validity of Machiavelli’s political and psychological analysis and does not reject the secular heritage of Rome—a man in this predicament is faced with a dilemma which, if Machiavelli is right, is not merely unsolved, but insoluble. This is the Gordian knot which, according to Vanini and Leibniz, the author of The Prince had tied, a knot which can only be cut, not untied. Hence the efforts to dilute his doctrines, or interpret them in such a way as to remove their sting.

After Machiavelli, doubt is liable to infect all monistic constructions. The sense of certainty that there is somewhere a hidden treasure—the final solution to our ills—and that some path must lead to it (for, in principle, it must be discoverable); or else, to alter the image, the conviction that the fragments constituted by our beliefs and habits are all pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which (since there is an a priori guarantee for this) can, in principle, be solved; so that it is only because of lack of skill or stupidity or bad fortune that we have not so far succeeded in discovering the solution whereby all interests will be brought into harmony—this fundamental belief of Western political thought has been severely shaken. Surely in an age that looks for certainties, this is sufficient to account for the unending efforts, more numerous today than ever, to explain The Prince and The Discourses , or to explain them away?

This is the negative implication. There is also one that is positive, and might have surprised and perhaps displeased Machiavelli. So long as only one ideal is the true goal, it will always seem to men that no means can be too difficult, no price too high, to do whatever is required to realize the ultimate goal. Such certainty is one of the great justifications of fanaticism, compulsion, persecution. But if not all values are compatible with one another, and choices must be made for no better reason than that each value is what it is, and we choose it for what it is, and not because it can be shown on some single scale to be higher than another. If we choose forms of life because we believe in them, because we take them for granted, or, upon examination, find that we are morally unprepared to live in any other way (although others choose differently); if rationality and calculation can be applied only to means or subordinate ends, but never to ultimate ends; then a picture emerges different from that constructed round the ancient principle that there is only one good for men.

If there is only one solution to the puzzle, then the only problems are first how to find it, then how to realize it, and finally how to convert others to the solution by persuasion or by force. But if this is not so (Machiavelli contrasts two ways of life, but there could be, and, save for fanatical monists, there obviously are, more than two), then the path is open to empiricism, pluralism, toleration, compromise. Toleration is historically the product of the realization of the irreconcilability of equally dogmatic faiths, and the practical improbability of complete victory of one over the other. Those who wished to survive realized that they had to tolerate error. They gradually came to see merits in diversity, and so became skeptical about definitive solutions in human affairs.

But it is one thing to accept something in practice, another to justify it rationally. Machiavelli’s “scandalous” writings begin the latter process. This was a major turning point, and its intellectual consequences, wholly unintended by its originator, were, by a fortunate irony of history (which some call its dialectic), the basis of the very liberalism that Machiavelli would surely have condemned as feeble and characterless, lacking in single-minded pursuit of power, in splendor, in organization, in virtù , in power to discipline unruly men against huge odds into one energetic whole. Yet he is, in spite of himself, one of the makers of pluralism, and of its—to him—perilous acceptance of toleration.

By breaking the original unity he helped to cause men to become aware of the necessity of making agonizing choices between incompatible alternatives, incompatible in practice or, worse still, for logical reasons, in public and private life (for the two could not, it became obvious, be genuinely kept distinct). His achievement is of the first order, if only because the dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light (it remains unsolved, but we have learned to live with it). Men had, no doubt, in practice, often enough experienced the conflict that Machiavelli made explicit. He converted its expression from a paradox into something approaching a commonplace.

The sword of which Meinecke spoke has not lost its edge: the wound has not healed. To know the worst is not always to be liberated from its consequences; nevertheless it is preferable to ignorance. It is this painful truth that Machiavelli forced on our attention, not by formulating it explicitly, but perhaps the more effectively by relegating much uncriticized traditional morality to the realm of utopia. This is what, at any rate, I should like to suggest. Where more than twenty interpretations hold the field, the addition of one more cannot be deemed an impertinence. At worst it will be no more than yet another attempt to solve the problem, now more than four centuries old, of which Croce at the end of his long life spoke as “ una questione che forse non si chiuderà mai: la questione de Machiavelli .”

November 4, 1971

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Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was a philosopher and historian of ideas who held the Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. The final volume of his correspondence, Affirming: Letters 1975–1997 , was published in December 2015.

Ernst Cassirer makes the valid and relevant point that to value—or justify—Machiavelli’s opinions solely as a mirror of their times is one thing; to maintain that he was himself consciously addressing only his own countrymen, and, if Burd is to be believed, not even all of them, is a very different one, and entails a false view of him and the civilization to which he belonged. The Renaissance did not view itself in historical perspective. Machiavelli was looking for—and thought that he had found—timeless, universal laws of social behavior.  ↩

The only extended treatment of Machiavelli by a prominent Bolshevik intellectual known to me is in Kamenev’s short-lived introduction to the Russian translation of The Prince (Akademia, Moscow, 1934). This unswervingly follows the full historicist-sociological approach criticized by Cassirer. Machiavelli is described as an active publicist, preoccupied by the “mechanism of the struggles for power” within and between the Italian principalities, a sociologist who gave a masterly analysis of the “sociological” jungle that preceded the formation of “a powerful, national, essentially bourgeois” Italian state. His almost “dialectical” grasp of the realities of power and freedom from metaphysical and theological fantasies establish him as a worthy forerunner of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.  ↩

It is still not clear how much of this Frederick owed to his mentor Voltaire.  ↩

Professor H.L. Trevor-Roper has drawn my attention to the irony of the fact that the heroes of this supreme realist are all, wholly or in part, mythical.  ↩

At the risk of exhausting the patience of the reader, I must repeat that this is a conflict not of pagan statecraft with Christian morals, but of pagan morals (indissolubly connected with social life and inconceivable without it) with Christian ethics which, whatever its implication for politics, can be stated independently of it, as, e.g., Aristotle’s or Hegel’s ethics cannot.  ↩

In his book Politics and Vision (Little, Brown, 1960).  ↩

The moral of his best comedy, Mandragola , seems to me close to that of the political tracts: that the ethical doctrines professed by the characters are wholly at variance with what they do to attain their various ends. Virtually every one of them in the end obtains what he wants; if Callimaco had resisted temptation, or the lady he seduces had been smitten with remorse, or Fra Timoteo attempted to practice the maxims of the Fathers and the Schoolmen with which he liberally seasons his speeches, this could not have occurred. But all turns out for the best, though not from the point of view of accepted morality. If the play castigates hypocrisy and stupidity, the standpoint is not that of virtue but of candid hedonism. The notion that Callimaco is a kind of Prince in private life, successful in creating and maintaining his own world by the correct use of guile and fraud, the exercise of virtù and a bold challenge to fortuna , appears highly plausible. For this, see Henry Paolucci, Introduction to Mandragola (Library of Liberal Arts, 1957).  ↩

E.g., in the passages from The Discourses cited above, or as when he says, “I believe that the greatest good that can be done, and the most pleasing to God, is that which is done to one’s country.” My thanks are due to Professor Myron Gilmore for this reference to The Discourse on Reforming Florence . This sentiment is by no means unique in Machiavelli’s works: but, leaving aside his wish to flatter Leo X, or the liability of all authors to fall into the clichés of their own time, are we to suppose that Machiavelli means us to think that when Philip of Macedon transplanted populations in a manner that (unavoidable as it is said to have been) caused even Machiavelli a qualm, what Philip did, provided it was good for Macedon, was pleasing to God and, per contra , that Giovanpaolo Baglioni’s failure to kill the Pope and the Curia were displeasing to Him? Such a notion of the deity is, to say the least, remote from that of the New Testament. Are the needs of the patria automatically identical with the will of the Almighty? Are those who permit themselves to doubt this in danger of heresy?  ↩

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