Machiavelli was a Florentine patriot, civil servant and political theorist. Entering the service of the Council of Ten which ruled republican Florence in 1498, he was sent abroad on diplomatic missions which provided much of the experience later to be distilled as advice on political and military skill. In 1512 the republic crumbled and the Medici family, who had long dominated Florentine politics, returned to power. Accidentally and unjustly implicated in a plot against them, Machiavelli was arrested and tortured. On his release he was exiled from the city, and retired to a small farm in Sant’ Andrea, seven miles south of the city. The remainder of a disappointed life was devoted to writings, some of them intended to persuade the new rulers to restore him to the centre of affairs which he so dearly loved.
The Prince (1513), written soon after his downfall, was a short work of advice to princes, focused in its last chapter on the local problem of liberating Italy from foreign domination. Some writers (Spinoza and Rousseau most notably) have taken the work as a satire on monarchy, but it seems evidently a piece of self-advertisement in the service of ingratiation. Settling in to a life of exile, Machiavelli farmed, and wrote the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius ([1532] 1950), a sequence of reflections on political skill, largely as exemplified in the Roman republic. His republican sympathies are evident in this work, but the frank discussion of ruthless and immoral options, for which he is notorious, is no less to be found here than in The Prince. By 1520 he had written on The Art of War and commenced The History of Florence. His comedy Mandragola is one of the classics of Italian literature. In 1525, the Medici regime was overthrown and a republic restored, but the new regime failed to employ him. He died in 1526.
Machiavelli criticized previous writers on politics for dealing with ideal and imaginary states, and claimed himself to deal with the ‘effective truth’ (verita effettuale) of politics. Situated firmly within the tradition of civic humanism, he was deeply preocuppied with the constitution of cities and the glory of heroes. His contribution to the unblinking realism of the period was to recognize that the heroes of statesmanship had not invariably followed the moral advice current in a Christian community, and indeed that some of the maxims conventionally pressed upon princes might well lead directly to their ruin. A prince must therefore know, he argued, how not to be good, and to use this knowledge according to necessity Beyond that, however, he thought that those rulers who are in the process of consolidating their power must know how to dominate the imaginations of men. One who did was Cesare Borgia, a prince with whom Machiavelli dealt while serving the Florentine republic. Borgia had used one of his lieutenants, Ramirro da Orca, to pacify, with all necessary brutality, the newly conquered Romagna; he then had da Orca killed, and his body cut in two, and left in the piazza, at Cesena, to satisfy the grievances and no doubt dominate the imaginations of the people. The ferocity of this spectacle, he wrote in chapter VII of The Prince, ‘caused the people both satisfaction and amazement’. It is often said that Machiavelli believed in one kind of morality for private life, another for statesmen. Yet for all his cynicism, there is nothing actually relativist to be detected in his straightforward recognition of good and evil. Rulers are not accorded a different morality; they are merely construed as the guardians of morality itself and accorded a licence to violate moral norms when necessary. Transposed out of the idiom of advice to princes and into a characterization of the emerging modern state (of which Machiavelli was an acute observer) this became the idea of reason of state.
Machiavelli was very far from encouraging any sort of enormity. Statesmen are the creators of civilization, and their ambitions are without glory unless they serve the public good. Machiavelli talked with some diffidence of the proper use of cruelty in politics. The test of necessary cruelty is that it is economical, and this combination of utility with an ethic of honour was highly distinctive of his attitude. ‘When the act accuses him, the outcome should excuse him,’ wrote Machiavelli, in a passage often translated as ‘the end justifies the means’. But Machiavelli is concerned not with moral justification but with the proper judgement to be made by subjects, and historians. From this technical point of view, religion is important because it binds men to commitments and intensifies their virtue. Machiavelli is deeply anticlerical in a Latin style, and often directly hostile to Christianity because its ethic of humility weakens governments and discourages a serious military ferocity. His admiration goes to the heroic actor in this world rather than to the pious devotee of the next.
The Machiavelli of the Discourses is less well known but more enduring. Here we find a conflict theory of society, with men struggling to hold states together against the tendencies of dissolution. Machiavelli bequeathed to later thinkers the classical idea that any enduring constitution must balance monarchic, aristocratic and democratic elements. To create and sustain such a state, in which mere private and familial preoccupations are transcended in the public realm of citizenship, is the supreme human achievement, but contains its own ultimate doom. For states create peace, and peace allows prosperity, and when men grow accustomed to peace and prosperity, they lose their civic virtue and indulge private passions: liberty, to use Machiavelli’s terms, gives way to corruption. This tradition of thought, with its emphasis on citizenly participation never ceased to be cultivated even in the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe, and became dominant from the time of the French Revolution onwards. It composes much of what the modern world calls ‘democracy’.
The Machiavelli of popular imagination, however, has always been the exponent of the pleasures of manipulation, the supreme pornographer of power. Many revolutionary adventurers have found in him conscious formulae to cover what they were inclined to do by instinct. In this role, Machiavelli has been remembered by social psychologists constructing a questionnaire to measure the manipulative tendencies of personality. Those who score high are called ‘high machs’, while less manipulative people are called ‘low machs’.
Kenneth Minogue
London School of Economics and Political Science
Further reading
Chabrol, F. (1958) Machiavelli and the Renaissance, London.
Hale, J.R. (1961) Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy, London.
Parel, Anthony J. (1992) The Machiavellian Cosmos, Oxford.
Pocock, J. (1975) The Machiavellian Moment, Oxford.
Skinner, Q. (1981) Machiavelli, London.
This is the complete article, containing 1,110 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
