THE SUMMARY OF MACHIAVELLI LIFE

BY. KEVINA ARDANS ASIDIQI

Niccolò Machiavelli
(1469–1527)

Niccolò Machiavelli would have undoubtedly secured enduring

fame for any one of the roles he mastered during his life in and out of
Renaissance Florence: historian, diplomat, military strategist, civil
servant, poet, playwright.
However, it was in his capacity as political philosopher that
Machiavelli earned eternal renown by sparking some of the most intense
scholarly controversies in Western intellectual history.
Not without reason, many commentators consider Machiavelli the
father of modern political thought or modern political science—some
even ordain him the founder of “modernity” itself. Yet the specific content
and precise objectives of his political remain elusive: Was Machiavelli an
advisor of tyranny or a partisan of liberty? A neutral technician of power
politics or an Italian patriot? An anti-clerical reviver of pagan virtue or a
devious initiator of modern nihilism? Put simply, to what extent was
Machiavelli a “Machiavellian”? These questions, among countles others
concerning the essence of Machiavelli’s thought, will continue to
generate contentious debates for as long as people reflect seriously on
political affairs.
Machiavelli’s most famous work, On Principalities [1512], or, as it
was titled by others, The Prince, certainly announced a dramatic break
with previous political doctrines anchored in moral and religious systems
of thought. Unlike his classical or medieval predecessors, who took their
political bearings from transcendentally valid or divinely sanctioned
conceptions of justice, Machiavelli oriented himself to the “effectual truth”
of politics; how the world actually “is” rather than how it “ought” to be.
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 Indeed, Machiavelli’s brutally realistic advice seems intended to
contravene all previous, socially respectable forms of political reflection.
For instance, he boldly declares that it is safer for a prince to be feared
rather than loved (if he must choose between these two forms of regard)
because subjects love at their own pleasure while they fear at the
pleasure of a prince. Moreover, Machiavelli steadfastly insists that
violence and cruelty are necessary means of effective political action
(even if their deployment must be circumscribed meticulously to avoid
unintended, deleterious consequences for a prince’s rule).
Apologetically inclined commentators, in efforts to soften
Machiavelli’s radically severe political advice, consistently emphasize--
indeed, too often overemphasize--the qualifications of his doctrines
contained in the preceding parentheses.
In The Prince, Machiavelli barely feigns hesitation about
recommending as exemplars of “well-used” fear and cruelty individuals,
such as Agathocles the Sicilian, Cesare Borgia and Liverotto of Fermo,
whom historians and contemporary opinion-setters considered criminals.
And yet Machiavelli demonstrates that figures such as Moses,
Romulus and Cyrus, whom established authors attempt to elevate
beyond moral reproach, themselves achieved political greatness by
recourse to crimes.
One prominent difference between the first and second set of
princes, Machiavelli insinuates, is that the latter’s crimes were minimized
or obscured by the legendary attributes bestowed on them as a result of
the logevity of the “new modes and orders” they founded.
Machiavelli appropriately praises these successful founders of
long-enduring republics, empires and religions as the most virtuous
princes in history. Yet his desire to lay bare the effectual truth of politics,
stripped of its idealistic and mythic veneers, compels Machiavelli to
devote considerable space in The Prince to generally underappreciated,

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less successful and, much more disreputable historical figures like
Agathocles and Borgia.
Precisely because the latter two accomplished demonstrably less
than Romulus and Moses, perhaps their motivations, deeds and genuine
achievements can be more readily apprehended and more easily
analyzed.
Machiavelli intimates that the careers of Agathocles and Borgia
may provide important clues for those pursuing answers to the following
crucial questions: What horrendous crimes, in addition to the few already
recorded, did Romulus and Moses actually commit in order to achieve
immortal fame? Conversely, what mistakes might have Agathocles and
Borgia avoided if they were to succeed ultimately in gaining the success
and renown attained by Romulus and Moses? Machiavelli famously
places himself in the company of the most illustrious princes; he boasts
that he, in formulating a startlingly unprecedented political doctrine,
embarked upon the dangerous road of founding “new modes and
orders.”
Yet few scholars note how closely Machiavelli affiliates himself
personally with what might be called the common criminal element in the
history of princes and would-be founders.
Indeed, this rather low-born Florentine of questionable parental
lineage uses exactly the same phrases to describe himself--a victim of
“fortune’s malignity,” who suffered countless “hardships and dangers” on
behalf of his fatherland--as he does to evaluate, respectively, the Papal
bastard, Borgia, and the abjectly poor “potter’s son,” Agathocles.
A careful assessment of Machiavelli’s accounts of these figures’
careers yields the conclusion that in many respects he considers a
Borgia, despite his limited success, and an Agathocles, despite his
infinite crimes, politically superior to, respectively, recent hereditary kings
of France and the exalted hero of humanist literati, Scipio Africanus.

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 What then are the princely qualities most conducive to political
success as so assertively and realistically reconceived by Machiavelli?
Flouting the ethical pretensions of classical, Christian and humanist
political philosophy, Machiavelli unequivocally instructs readers of The
Prince that “virtue” most certainly does not correspond with the interior
moral character of an individual political actor. Instead, Machiavelli
affiliates virtue with the latter’s proficiency at wielding force and fraud to
overcome fortune’s sway over the external world.
Machiavelli metaphorically presents fortune’s nearly inexorable
power as a raging river overflowing its banks or a manipulative goddess
determined to derail the grand designs of mortal men.
More literally, Machiavelli identifies fortune with the unexpected
events that emerge from the ever-changing conditions of human affairs,
or, more pointedly, with the limits imposed on a prospective prince’s
autonomy by his servile dependence on superiorly situated political
actors.
The virtuous would-be prince, Machiavelli argues, creates laws and
institutions, political dams and dykes, that, at least temporarily, impose
order on the unruly political universe; and he effectively slaps around
Lady Fortune by ruthlessly eliminating any individuals who stand in the
way of his attaining increased power and unfettered autonomy.
Further indicative of Machiavelli’s unorthodoxly realist approach to
politics, the Florentine blatantly rejects the ideal of philosopher kings
whose perfect judgment might be at least remotely approximated by the
educated, wealthy and prominent noblemen of worldly cities.
Machiavelli insists that there exist no few best men whose wisdom,
prudence, or love of the common good can be counted upon to settle,
with impartial justice, political controversies and crises. Defying the
aristocratic preferences of “all” previous philosophers and historians, as
he states in the Discourses, Machiavelli recommends in The Prince that
individual princes militarily arm the common people, in whom the noble

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quality of onestà (honesty, decency or justice) actually resides, and
crush at every opportunity self-styled nobles, “the great,” whose
ambitious and avaricious motivations and machinations offer little more
than oppression for the people and insecurity for a prince.
The Florentine Republic [1494-1512], which Machiavelli served as
an administrative secretary, diplomatic emissary and militia organizer for
over a decade, was overthrown by an aristocratic coup, foreign
intervention and Papal intrigue that returned the Medici family to power.
Machiavelli responded by writing to the restored princes, delicately
advising them to betray their allies among the nobility and align
themselves instead with the presently disempowered Florentine people
(Machiavelli, “Ai Palleschi”).
For his troubles, Machiavelli was implicated in an anti-Medici
conspiracy, tortured, imprisoned and subsequently confined to internal
exile. Several years later, Machiavelli repeated his advice that the Medici
ultimately reempower the Florentine people at the expense of the
family’s aristocratic “friends” in an understudied but important
memorandum on constitutional reforms (Machiavelli, “Discursus
Florentinarum rerum”).
Machiavelli’s Discourses [c. 1513-19] and Florentine Histories
[1532] clearly exhibit the author’s admiration for republics, even if, ever
intriguingly, these works generally affirm rather than repudiate the moral
and practical lessons of The Prince.
The near perfect, ancient Roman Republic is Machiavelli’s primary
subject in the Discourses, while the hopelessly disordered, medieval
Florentine republic takes center stage in the Histories. In Rome, a wise
founder, Romulus, armed the poor and collected the wealthy in a senate,
insuring that future conflicts between plebeians and patricians would
produce two salutary institutions: an office, the plebeian tribunate,
dedicated to the welfare of the common people, and large citizen

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assemblies in which the people themselves freely discussed and directly
decided legislation and political trials.
Intense but productive class conflict at home, and unprecedented
territorial expansion abroad, herald, for Machiavelli, Rome’s singular
greatness and its ultimate value as a model for all subsequent republics
to emulate.
By contrast, in Florence, Machiavelli demonstrates how one
individual after another emerged with the prospect of assuming the role
of founder (e.g., Giano della Bella, Michele di Lando, the Duke of
Athens); yet they each ultimately demurred from fully arming the people
civically and militarily such that social conflicts (not only between classes
but especially among families and factions) persisted in episodically
destructive rather than constructive ways.
Machiavelli exhaustively chronicles how the republic’s defective
ordering and chronically tepid leadership result in its gradual
enfeeblement, measured by both geo-political decline and civic
corruption.
Particularly emblematic in this respect is Machiavelli’s vivid account
of Florence’s Ciompi Revolt in book III of the Histories. Since the city’s
oppressed woolworkers had no recourse to tribunes who might air their
grievances and were unable to confront directly Florence’s wealthiest
and most prominent citizens assembled in an actual senate, the
Ciompians were compelled to pursue the city’s nobles house to house in
a series of bloody, destructive riots.
These disturbances produce no longstanding progressive gains for
Florence’s poorer citizens but rather facilitate conservative consolidation
of power among the city’s richest families. From such entrenched
oligarchic arrangements, Cosimo de’Medici and his family successors
rise to the ranks of commercial princes.
Rather than arm citizens, the Medici rendered the latter mere
economic clients, definitively corrupting the city’s civic life and ensuring

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its military dependence on foreign mercenaries. Why were Rome’s
founders and civic princes so virtuous and Florence’s so hesitant and
inept?
Machiavelli sometimes directly and sometimes more subtly blames
Christianity for the weakness of modern republics and their leaders:
unlike the teachings of previous, more robustly political belief systems,
Christian tenets encourage passivity, subservience, and deferral of
punishment to the next world and, perhaps worst of all, promote an
inflexibly undifferentiated view of “the good.”
These precepts seem to inhibit modern peoples and princes from
behaving in the “bad” ways that actually prove salutary for political life.
Ancient armed populaces often took matters into their own hands to
discipline those who commit “sins” against the public; and ancient
princes like Moses and Brutus never hesitated to eliminate rival threats
to their new modes and orders that guaranteed the liberty and longevity
of their regimes.
Indeed, Machiavelli laments, Christian populaces suffer rather than
punish ill-treatment by abusive elites; or, as the Ciompi Revolt makes
plain, when finally provoked to the point of spirited response, they strike
out against them in undisciplined and ineffective ways.
Florentine princes like the Medici, Friar Girolamo Savonarola and
Machiavelli’s own patron, Piero Soderini— who all maintained concrete
ties of one kind or another with the Roman Catholic Church--seem
hamstrung internally by Christian morality or externally by the Church’s
secular power from acting decisively to found and maintain a healthy
civic republic.
In particular, Machiavelli avers, Christian princes seem especially
incapable of arming the people with little more than platitudes attesting to
their goodness, and of eliminating the metaphorical “sons of Brutus,” who
forever threaten “a free and civil way of life”: oppressive minded
aristocrats who invariably detest the people’s liberty, bitterly resent their

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participation in politics, and always intransigently oppose any reformer
who attempts to limit their own power and privilege.
Scholars often grossly overstate Machiavelli’s concrete impact on
practical politics and constitutional forms in the modern world. The
“republicans” of the broad Enlightenment era drew upon the Florentine’s
prescriptions in a highly selective fashion: they only partially adopted his
call for neo-Roman full militarization of the people, and almost
completely rejected the democratic institutions and practices that
Machiavelli hoped would be demanded by such newly armed citizenries.
They explicitly rejected his call for modern plebeian tribunates, and
for assemblies in which common citizens themselves discuss and enact
public policy. Instead, the framers of modern constitutions opted
exclusively for generally elected offices in which the people might choose
the most wise and prudent (read: richest and most prominent)
individuals, and for elected assemblies of notables that purportedly
would faithfully and effectively “represent” the interests of common
people.
Machiavelli achieved perhaps his greatest practical influence, and
hence earned his greatest infamy, in literatures associated with “reason
of state,” a phrase he never used. Architects of the European absolute
monarchies appropriated Machiavelli’s apparently cynical, amoral
doctrines, but decisively severed these from the Florentine’s own crypto-
normative political concerns.
They successfully elevated individuals to the status of national
monarchs— Tudors and Stuarts; Valois, Hapsburgs and
Hohenzoellerns--and certainly helped subordinate traditional
aristocracies to the latter’s authority. But by relying on professional
militaries and by endorsing “representation” of the public’s interest,
modern statebuilders failed to empower the people to the full extent that
Machiavelli recommended.

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 The economic dependence of these modern princes--and, notably,
the bureaucratic states that succeeded them--on newly emerging
capitalist aristocracies, would leave the citizens of modern republics
without recourse to the military or civic arms that the Florentine thought
eternally necessary for the defense of their liberty from rapacious elites.
The radically democratic spirit of Machiavelli’s political philosophy
was perhaps best recognized by twentieth century Marxist and post-
Marxist theorists on the continent, especially, Antonio Gramsci, Louis
Althusser, Claude Lefort and Michel Foucault.
They often ingeniously translated his ideas concerning the struggle
between the “humors” of the great and the people in terms of capitalist
class conflict; or recognized the affinity between Machiavelli’s prince and
the party vanguard who would lead the people to socio-economic
liberation; or appropriated for contemporary circumstances Machiavelli’s
notion of politics as a game of strategy in which various actors negotiate
a field of myriad opposing forces.
However, perhaps precisely due to the powerful legacy of “reason
of state” on the continent, “the state,” a concept that Machiavelli never
really deployed, became for this literature an unproductive idée fixe.
Moreover, perhaps bewitched by orthodox illusions of eliminating
elites or overcoming “rule” altogether, most authors in this tradition failed
to revive or elaborate anew the institutional means through which
Machiavelli intended the common people to realize civic liberty; that is, to
rule themselves and control socio-economic and political elites.