Florentine political advisor and historian often regarded as the first Modern Western Political Theorist. After
the fall of Savonarola’s administration, Machiavelli became head of the Second Chancery of Florence at the
age of 29. As a member of Florentine diplomatic delegations, Machiavelli became acquainted with the chief
political actors of his region and time – notably, Cesare Borgia, Maximilian (the Holy Roman Emperor), and
Pope Julius II. Following the invasion of Florence and restoration of the Medici family, Machiavelli was sacked
and imprisoned for conspiracy. Upon his release in 1513 he sought employment as a political adviser to the
new Medici Pope (Giovanni), to whom he dedicated The Prince. Political ambitions frustrated, Machiavelli
turned to scholarship in the company of a group of ‘literati’ at the ‘Orti Oricellari’. During this period he wrote
(among other works) three Discourses on the first ten books of Livy’s history of Rome (completed in 1519).
From 1521 until his death, Machiavelli devoted his attention to writing a commissioned history of Florence.
Machiavelli’s main contributions to political science are to be found in The Prince and the Discourses. Both
works can be seen as expounding the requirements for the maintenance of political stability in two different
regimes (principalities in The Prince, republics in the Discourses), addressing similar themes, and offering
similar counsel to political leaders. The primary goal of political leaders must be to sustain government, and to
acquire glory, honour, and riches for the rulers and their people. The bulk of discussion in these works is
concerned with what is required of those in power in order to secure these goods. Machiavelli’s answer rests
on the interplay of two key classical concepts – fortune and virtú.
Machiavelli’s concept of fortune is very much a Roman rather than a Christian inheritance. Fortune is not a
synonym for ‘fate’ or ‘Providence’ in Machiavelli’s usage. Rather, it is a ‘force’ with which a state must ‘ally’
itself in order to reap greatness. Machiavelli argues that princes (and in republics the whole citizen body) must
be prepared to do whatever is necessary to preserve liberty and earn glory on behalf of the state. This is the
quality of virtú. Virtú uses luck and fortune when it can, but princes who possess it can achieve great things
even without luck or fortune. In an evil world, Machiavelli warns, the wise prince must recognize that it is not
always prudent to act according to conventional maxims of private morality. Nothing other than necessity
should dictate prince’s actions. Much of The Prince is devoted to examples (drawn largely from Machiavelli’s
own diplomatic experience) of the art of political leadership – princes must imitate the cunning of the fox and
the brawn of the lion; they must avoid the people’s hatred but sustain their awe; they must consistently
project an image of nobility and virtue irrespective of their deeds; they must be prepared to be cruel. His name
became associated with the exercise of cunning and expediency.
Whereas The Prince is concerned with the qualities of princes, the Discourses place a greater emphasis on the
civic demands on citizens. Machiavelli’s central claim in the Discourses is that liberty is a necessary
precondition for the accumulation of power and riches. The protection of liberty is therefore the fundamental
political task in a republic, and requires first and foremost a citizen body of the highest ‘virtue’. What role
should rulers play in a republic? Machiavelli’s answer is that they should organize the polity in such a way as to
promote the virtue of its citizens, and prevent its corruption (either by the substitution of private for general
interests, or by creeping indifference). This requires men of great stature, exhibiting those qualities detailed in
The Prince. In addition, a state can only secure its liberty through a perennial quest for dominion over other
states (for which a large population, citizen militias, and strong allies are indispensable). Internally, a strong
republic is characterized by a wisely designed constitution and basic institutions (ordini) whose chief function is
to promote the civic patriotism required to secure liberty. Central to this project is state sponsorship of divine
worship in order to inspire individuals to strive for excellence and glory. However, Machiavelli is at his most
radical in urging that this utilitarian function is better fulfilled by Roman religion than by Christianity (with its
enervating values of piety, humility, and general ‘other-worldliness’). Machiavelli also rejects conventional
1 Following introductory section is heavily borrowed from Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan (eds.), The Concise Dictionary of Politics, (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).
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Christian affirmation of social harmony by emphasizing the instrumental value of preserving the distinction
between the ‘orders’ of rich and poor. Fearing the domination of one order by the other, Machiavelli
embraced the notion of a ‘mixed constitution’, neither aristocracy nor democracy, but embracing elements of
both forms. Similarly, laws should be designed not only to protect the rich (e.g. prohibition on slander) as well
as the masses (e.g. limitation of emergency power provisions), but to keep people poor in order to avoid the
dangers of factionalism.
Machiavelli remains an impenetrable figure – as Sabine observes: ‘He has been represented as an utter cynic,
an impassioned patriot, an ardent nationalist, a political Jesuit, a convinced democrat, and an unscrupulous
seeker after the favor of despots.’ His work excites similar controversy. Civic republican commentators (e.g.
Skinner, Pocock) see Machiavelli as part of a broader contemporary renaissance of the virtues of classical
humanism. Straussians (e.g. Strauss, Mansfield), in contrast, view Machiavelli as a pivotal figure in the history
of political philosophy in his elevation of ‘liberty’ above ‘nature’ as the defining object of political inquiry. To
these interpreters, Machiavelli is the first modern political philosopher.
Machiavelli is not interested in the religious and ecclesiastical issues so characteristic of medieval political
thought.2 He is on the whole hostile to Christianity, believing that a people genuinely committed to the
Christian virtues of meekness and submission would not thrive in the cut-throat world of politics. He is a
republican and a patriot interested in the establishment and maintenance of a strong state in the face of
foreign aggression and domestic upheaval. This interest expresses itself in two main ways. In The Prince,
Machiavelli’s concern is with how one man can maintain his sway over subjects; The Discourses, he addresses
the question of how a republic can be made to endure and prosper by channeling the fundamentally selfish
vigour of its citizens in publicly beneficial ways. Machiavelli’s method is historical and comparative, relying
especially upon illustrations furnished by classical antiquity. His purpose is to show how events are conditioned
by the circumstances in which they occurred, to identify their causes, and to lay bare the general principles
underlying human relationships and behavior. His underlying hope seems to be that a strong prince will one
day unify Italy and that a republican form of government will thereafter emerge.
Throughout his writings, Machiavelli subscribes to a consistent theory of human nature. An important aspect
of this theory is the assumption that human nature is changeless. It is this that enables us to make
generalization about politics. Although their behavior is always in some respects modified by their conditions
of life, human beings exhibit the same essential characteristics, and these characteristics are not of the kind
traditionally admired. Machiavelli says in The Prince,
One can make this generalization about men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and
deceivers; they shun danger and are greedy for profit; while you treat them well they are
yours… but when you are in danger they turn against you. (The Prince ch. 17)
In The Discourses (3:4) he remarks that
All men are bad, and ready to display their vicious nature whenever they find occasion for it.
If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time, this must be attributed to some
unknown reason, and we must assume that it has lacked occasion to show itself; but time,
which has been said to be the father of all truth, does not fail to bring it to light.
The root of man’s ‘evil disposition’, Machiavelli believes, is inveterate (arch) selfishness. This selfishness
manifests itself primarily in the desire for self-preservation and security; then, when security has been
achieved, it becomes a single-minded devotion to personal power and the glory inseparable from it. Also,
power means freedom: this is one of the main reasons why people value it. Even those who do not wish to rule
2 The following section is drawn from Ian Adams and R.W. Dyson, Fifty Great Political Thinkers, (London & New York, Routledge, 1st Indian
reprint, 2004), pp. 38-46.
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others at least wish to have enough power to prevent themselves from falling too completely under the
control of others. The world is divided into those who dominate and those who strive not to be dominated.
It is because this desire for power plays so prominent a part in human behavior. Machiavelli believes, that
political life has always been characterized by strife. Politics is not, and cannot be, about the kind of cooperation
and organic interdependence that Plato and Aristotle assumed to be possible. People are able to cooperate,
but they do so only in so far and for as long as co-operation serves their turn. The traditional
suggestion that the point of politics is to achieve a harmonious common good is humbug. Politics necessarily
involves struggle. In a monarchy, Machiavelli suggests, the struggle is that of one man to dominate all others. It
is true that the prince’s private gratification can also be a public good. The decisive qualities of the ruthless
Italian Cesare Borgia are just what are needed to unite Italy. But the prince’s primary purpose is his own secure
tenure and free enjoyment of power. The struggle can be seen most clearly in the case of prince who has just
seized power, and whose position is therefore not buttressed by custom, apathy or the people’s veneration for
his family. The ‘new’ prince has to maintain and consolidate his position by his own adroitness alone.
Ostensibly, The Prince is a treatise on how he may do so.
Machiavelli suggests that the prince must rely chiefly on the judicious use of force and deceit. Because we
must assume that man is the slave of his own selfish passions, it is pointless and unsafe to suppose that
subjects may be ruled by obtaining their rational consent or setting them a good moral example. Whereever
there is a choice, men will respond to the dictates of passion rather than to the requirements of moral reason.
It is therefore by manipulating the passions of others that they can be made to do what one wants them to do.
There is, in politics, no such thing as an effective appeal to reason. Machiavelli suggests that there are four
passions that govern human behavior: love, hatred, fear and contempt. Love and hatred are mutually
exclusive: clearly it is not possible simultaneously to love and hate someone. By the same token, it is not
possible to both fear and despise someone: fear and contempt are also incompatibles. However, love and fear
are compatible; so are hatred and contempt, hatred and fear, and love and contempt. The passions that the
prince will most obviously seek to inspire are the compatibles of love and fear. If people hate and despise their
ruler, they cannot be controlled and they will, indeed, be anxious to act against him. Love and fear are
therefore to be induced, and contempt and hatred avoided. The worst thing that can happen to a ruler in
seeking to maintain his power, Machiavelli suggests, is that he be despised. Thus, though love and fear are
best, hatred and fear are to be preferred to love and contempt. Any combination with fear will be good
because it will mean that subjects can be controlled through their fear. Any combination with contempt,
however, even if that combination is love, is to be avoided because it will rob the ruler of his power to coerce:
fear and contempt are incompatibles. It is not essential to be loved, but it is essential to be feared – and it is
even more essential not to be despised.
What this means, in plain terms, is that the foundation of the prince’s power is force and his willingness to use
it ruthlessly. This accounts for Machiavelli’s assertion that the only arts that the prince need acquire are the
military arts. Many of Machiavelli’s Renaissance contemporaries, and many of his forbears in the history of
political thought, had taken it as a truism that the prince should be a cultivated and humane man: a patron of
the arts, godly, wise, learned and so forth. To Machiavelli, though, the proper study of the prince is the art of
war. This is because, for Machiavelli, politics itself is only a kind of muted or ritualized warfare. His takes it for
granted that, in quality if not in scale, the relations between a ruler and his subjects are the same as those
between sovereign states. It is as if subjects are perpetually at war with their ruler, just as states are always
potentially or actually at war with one another. The prince’s correct general policy, therefore, is to ensure that
there is no one who has sufficient power to challenge him, because, if such persons exist, he must assume that
lust for power will induce them to challenge him indeed. Moreover, war between states, Machiavelli thinks,
can never be avoided, only postponed: the prince who does not realize this is heading for disaster. If there are
neighbouring powers capable of challenging the power of the prince, war is inevitable, because neither side
can rest secure until the threat from the other is removed. So it is always best to attack if one has the
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advantage or to destroy the other’s advantage by diplomacy if not. War should never be postponed to one’s
own detriment. Above all, if the prince is forced to injure others, he should do it in such a way as to deprive
them of power permanently or destroy them altogether. If he does not do this, desire for revenge will
augment their natural ambition and they will leave no stone unturned in their efforts to undermine him.
Machiavelli’s view of morality and politics is, then, very different from the traditional insistence that the food
ruler is necessarily also a good man: that he will exhibit moral virtue in his own life and conduct; that he will
set a good example to his subjects; that he will seek to secure the common good rather than his own good
merely; that he will submit to the guidance of the Church. To the Machiavelli of The Prince, politics is simply
about getting and keeping power. He attaches to the word ‘virtue’ a quasi-technical meaning. Virtue, to
Machiavelli – it is the custom in discussing his view to retain the Italian spelling, virtú – is not moral virtue;
rather, it is a particular kind of skill or aptitude, combined, of course, with the will to use it.
We can amplify this idea by examining the relationship, which Machiavelli sketches in The Prince, between
virtú and fortuna. There is, he remarks, a considerable extent to which we are all in the hands of the fickle
goddess Fortuna, and experience teaches us that there is no necessary connection between traditional moral
virtues and the incidence of good and ill fortune. An honest and skilful merchant may have all his ships sunk in
a storm, and his honesty will not help him. A diligent and godfearing farmer may still have all his corps
destroyed in a storm. Life does not run in comfortable grooves; unpredictable and unexpected things happen;
we inhabit a morally incoherent world in which there is no necessary relation between what one deserves and
what one gets. And nowhere is this unpredictability and moral incoherence more evident than in the political
forum. Those who occupy the shifting and unstable world of politics are pre-eminently in the hands of fortune.
For them, there is certainly no connection between desert and reward. They do not know from one day to the
next what will happen, how loyalties will change, how the balance of force will alter, and so on.
In contrast to the unstable and contingent world of practical affairs, however, stands the fact that, on the
whole, human beings have rigid and inflexible temperaments. A man’s character and disposition, Machiavelli
observes, and therefore his mode of procedure, are normally fairly fixed and constant. Indeed, what might be
termed a traditional moral education calls upon one to cultivate such a fixed and constant disposition (one is
brought up, after all, to be virtuous only sometimes or when it serves one’s purposes). But what is the good of
having an inflexible mode of procedure in a world where the necessities under which fortune places one are
subject to such variation? Always to act in the same way regardless of the circumstances in which you find
yourself is, Machiavelli insists, a recipe for disaster. This is particularly true, of course, if you are a prince –
especially a new prince – trying to survive in the volatile and merciless world of politics.
In a nutshell, then, we can say that, for Machiavelli, virtú is that quality or prowess which enables an individual
to encounter the blows of fortune and overcome them by whatever means are necessary. Fortune, he tells us,
uttering in the process a celebrated piece of political incorrectness, is like a willful and headstrong woman. A
man should cope with her, just as he would with any willful and headstrong woman, by beating her into
submission. In his encounters with fortune, it will not do for the prince to be bound by a rigid moral
temperament. He must be adaptable. He must be ready and able to use both the lion and the fox in him: he
must be able to be both man and beast. When mercy is appropriate, let him be merciful; but when it is
appropriate for him to be merciless, savage and terrifying, let him be these things too. Let him be honest and
truthful where necessary; but let him lie and break faith if he must. The prince must do whatever
circumstances require, and if those circumstances require him to disregard traditional moral values and
Christian ways of behaving, then so be it. It is self-defeating to behave in ways that will increase one’s chances
of losing power or to omit to behave in ways that will increase one’s chances of keeping it.
Many of Machiavelli’s contemporaries held, and many of his subsequent critics have held, that he is a teacher
of evil. By the early 17th century, Machiavelli’s name had become synonym for tyranny and perfidy. But it is
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easy enough to see that Machiavelli does not counsel wickedness and that his prince is not a wicked man.
Machiavelli is quite ready to concede that, from the point of view of ordinary morality, necessity requires
political actors to do deplorable things. This may be regrettable, but the fact remains that the prince who can
not alter his mode of procedure to suit changing circumstances will not be a prince for long. This is a fact of life
and there is no point, Machiavelli thinks, in wringing one’s hands about it. Most people can not deviate from
what their character or education predisposes them to; or perhaps, having prospered by walking in one path,
they cannot persuade themselves to adopt another. If one could change one’s mode of procedure and
character to suit the varying conditions of one’s life, one’s fortune would never change. The successful prince,
Machiavelli thinks, is a man who can do precisely this. The ability by which he counteracts the effects of
fortune is the ability to be infinitely flexible, to bend with the breeze. Everything he does is done because
circumstances require it; he does nothing merely because his character or moral principle dictates it. We
might, therefore, most easily describe the prince as amoral. He is neither good nor bad, neither wicked nor the
reverse. He has no moral character in the traditional sense of the term. He does not have a fixed disposition or
habit of mind to act in a certain way. Unlike most men, who do have such fixed dispositions, he is able to be
either completely virtuous or utterly vicious, and he knows how to be both. The traditional moral virtues are
simply no part of his character. They are not absolutes to which he adheres through thick and thin. They are
simply modes of action, which he can pick up and discard at will.
Machiavelli’s assumption about human nature and behavior lead him to conclude that, though power is most
easily studied in the case of the new prince, a republic is a healthier and more successful form of government
than a monarchy. This is the theme of The Discourses: a quite different work from The Prince, but resting on
the same presuppositions. In a monarchy, one man has supreme power. One man is in a position to stifle –
and, if he is to survive, must stifle – the manly impulses of all those subject to him. In a republic, every
individual is a prince: every individual is able to develop and deploy his own virtú in defence of his security,
freedom and property, thereby producing a kind of collective or public virtú that conduces to the welfare and
safety of all. In a monarchy, Machiavelli says, only one man is free; in a republic, all are free. This collective
virtú does not arise out of friendship or altruism. Men co-operate because they know that collective wisdom
and effort is, on the whole, better than that of any individual. Each man co-operates with others so far as is
necessary to secure his own good, while at the same time competing with others for the things that men value
– glory, honour, riches. A republic furnishes everyone with both the benefits of co-operation and the
opportunity to develop virtú by striving with others to assert himself in an open forum. Republics will be more
stable than monarchies, more able to defend themselves and more successful at extending their territories by
war, not because they somehow submerge or counteract human self-assertiveness, but because they give it
freer range and so produce sturdy, indomitable, self-reliant individuals.
Human nature being what it is, the problem confronting a republic is that of ensuring that it does not become
a tyranny; or, at any rate, of delaying the process of deterioration for as long as possible. Republics can only be
stable if they enable men to compete with one another creatively without allowing anyone to acquire so much
power that he can simply dominate everyone else. There is bound to be conflict between the aristocracy or
commercial elites and the mass of the people. The former will wish to dominate the latter; the latter will wish
to remain free. Such conflict is inevitable and energizing. The struggle between the plebeians and the Senate in
the Roman republic is the example to which Machiavelli looks. Opposing interests produce the force by which
good laws are generated, provided such conflict is kept in bounds by properly designed political institutions.
Machiavelli realizes that actual governmental forms will vary according to the circumstances of the people in
question, but the best form of state, he thinks, will be a republic with a mixed constitution rather like that
favoured by Aristotle. Where the people have a meaningful share in government, all are able to feel secure in
their honour, property and person. The laws must be clear and made known: the citizens must know with a
high degree of certainty what they can and cannot do with impunity. General economic prosperity should be
encouraged, but excessive individual wealth and luxury prevented by the laws. Due recognition must be given
to the merits of citizens, and advancement in the service of the state should be open to those who seek
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honour and glory. There should be a state religion for the inculcation and maintenance of civic virtue. The
religion should not, however, be Christianity, which encourages weakness and submission. There should be a
citizen army, both to defend the republic and to extend its possessions by wars of aggression. The army should
serve an educational as well as a military purpose: it should instill in citizens a respect for authority, patriotism
and martial virtues. It will also provide a means for individual ambition to find its natural and healthy
expression. Life in a republic should not be too comfortable. Social cohesion and vigour are most readily
secured in conditions of hardship and crisis. Such conditions bring out the best in a people and encourage
them to work together. Ease and security are consistent with public virtú not because they make people
selfish, but because they turn their natural selfishness inwards and make it destructive.
In short, Machiavelli regards political activity as being the activity of individuals with power of various kinds
and degrees who are trying to keep what they have and acquire more. The Prince and The Discourses are not
radically different; nor are they contradictory. Both share a view of human nature as individualistic,
competitive and, where necessary, ruthless and unscrupulous. The Prince is an essay on how the prince is to
control the forces of human nature to his own advantage; The Discourses is a treatise on how these forces can
be harnessed in such a way as to secure unity and public safety. But the forces involved in each case are the
same. It is often said that Machiavelli is the first political theorist to give serious attention to the idea of raison
d’état. This may be so, but it is not the whole story. Machiavelli admires the combination of practical qualities
that he calls virtú, even where no particular raison d’état is at stake. He does so because, at heart, he is
fascinated not so much by outcomes as by the phenomenon of power itself. One cannot help forming the
impression that, for Machiavelli, the ends to which power is applied are of secondary importance. He admires
Cesare Borgia – an individual who, by all ordinary standards, is a cruel and vicious tyrant – for his effectiveness,
not his moral character. Unlike the great majority of his forbears and contemporaries, Machiavelli really does
believe that politics is a morally neutral art. The fact that he, more than anyone, established this as a
respectable view of how political events and relationships are to be analysed is what gives his career its
significance in the history of political thought.
o “Right and wrong have nothing to do with government”
o The prince must “know well how to use both the beast and the man”
o The Renaissance produced no important theoretical philosopher yet produced one man of supreme
eminence in political philosophy. His political philosophy is scientific and empirical.
o His interest in politics – completely absorbed in the technique of influence – the chessboard of power
politics.
The Burden of New Republic: Whither a Machiavellian Spirit in Democratic Nepal? (Topical Class Discussion)
Further Reading
Primary sources
The Discourses, ed. L.J. Walker and B. Crick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970)
The Prince, ed. Q. Skinner and R. Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Secondary sources
Pocock, J.G.A.: The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975)
Skinner, Q.R.D.: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. I: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)
__ Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)
Viroli, M.: Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
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