tyranny

This is the first comprehensive exploration of ancient and modern tyranny as

a central theme in the history of political thought. Waller R. Newell argues
that modern tyranny and statecraft differ fundamentally from the classical
understanding. Newell demonstrates a historical shift in emphasis from the
classical thinkers’ stress on the virtuous character of rulers and the need for civic
education to the modern emphasis on impersonal institutions and cold-blooded
political method. The turning point is Machiavelli’s call for the conquest of
nature. Newell traces the lines of influence from Machiavelli’s new science of
politics to the rise of Atlanticist republicanism in England and America, as
well as the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and their effects on
the present. By diagnosing the varieties of tyranny from erotic voluptuaries
like Nero, the steely determination of reforming conquerors like Alexander
the Great and Julius Caesar, and modernizing despots such as Napoleon and
Ataturk to the collectivist revolutions of the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Nazis, and
Khmer Rouge, Newell shows how tyranny is every bit as dangerous to free
democratic societies today as it was in the past.

Waller R. Newell is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Carleton

University. He is the author of The Soul of a Leader: Character, Conviction, and
Ten Lessons in Political Greatness (2009); The Code of Man: Love, Courage,
Pride, Family, Country (2003); What Is a Man? 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the
Art of Manly Virtue (2000); and Ruling Passion: The Erotics of Statecraft in
Platonic Political Philosophy (2000).
 TYRANNY
A New Interpretation

WALLER R. NEWELL
Carleton University
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Tyranny : a new interpretation / Waller R. Newell, Carleton University.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-01032-1 (hardback)
1. Despotism. I. Title.
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 contents

Acknowledgments page ix

Introduction: The Conquest of Eros 1

The Debate about Ancient and Modern Tyranny 12
Remarks on Method 20
1. Is There an Ontology of Tyranny? 26
The Primordial and the Transcendental as Fundamental
Perspectives on Political Existence 32
Education and Imitation: Images of the Soul in Plato’s
Dialogues 35
The Modern Point of Departure for the New Science of
Politics 63
The Hobbesian Narrowing of Machiavelli’s New
Science of Politics 75
2. The Tyrant and the Statesman in Plato’s Political
Philosophy and Machiavelli’s Rejoinder 81
The Lover of the City 83
The Hidden Tyrant 94
The Hidden Founding 108
Paradoxes of the Tyrannical Founding 119
Machiavelli and the Sophists 131
3. Superlative Virtue, Monarchy, and Political Community
in Aristotle’s Politics 141
Monarchy and the Political Community 143

v
 contents

The Claim of Superlative Virtue in the Debate about

Justice 156
A Godlike Man in the City? 162
Monarchy, Reason, and Nature 169
Arendt on the Household and the Community 180
The Global Household 183
4. Tyranny and the Science of Ruling in Xenophon’s
Political Thought 186
Roads to the Education of Cyrus: The Distinctiveness of
Xenophon’s Political Thought 187
Cyrus’s Imperialistic Revolution 199
The Peloponnesian War and the Thucydidean Context 210
5. Machiavelli, Xenophon, and Xenophon’s Cyrus 228
Virtue Defined as the Mastery of Fortuna 232
Cyrus the Great in Machiavelli’s Discourses 236
Subverting the Traditional Catalogue of the Virtues 246
Machiavelli’s Rhetorical Employment of Xenophon in
the Appeal to Antiquity 257
6. Glory and Reputation: The New Prince 271
How Original Is Machiavelli? The Relationship of
Virtue and Fortuna 274
Sundering Diotima’s Ladder: The City of Man, the City
of God, and Machiavelli’s New Synthesis 296
The Three Stages of Mastering Fortuna 325
7. The Republic in Motion: Machiavelli’s Vision of the New
Rome 345
The Classical Understanding of Imperialism as a Mode
of Tyranny 347
Virtue, Necessity, and Choice in the Founding of Cities 351
The Cycle of Regimes 363
The Republic Perfected by Chance 383
The Rise and Fall of the New Rome 406
Interlude: Machiavelli and Religion 419
Conclusion: Tyranny Ancient and Modern 433
The Many Faces of Machiavelli 433

vi
 contents

The Two Corridors to Modernity (Dark and Light) 445

The Torture of Nature? 456
The Phenomenology of Tyranny 478
The Transition to Totalitarianism and the Will of the
People: The Limits of This Study 498

Epilogue: The Hermeneutical Problem of Tyranny 513

Bibliography 519
Index 537

vii
 acknowledgments

As I was nearing the completion of this book, the world was being
inspired by the struggle for freedom unfolding across the Arab lands.
During that same period and for some time preceding it, according
to Freedom House, the world’s democracies had been in retreat while
tyrannical forces were on the rise. We seem to be living through an era
in which expectations for freedom and the proliferation of tyranny are
intensifying simultaneously. More than ever, then, it is incumbent on us
to study tyranny, attempt to identify its varieties, and try to anticipate its
emergence and hostility to the forces of freedom. Tyranny is generally
an unpleasant subject, but one does not think about tyranny because
one wants to think about unpleasant things. Rather, if one wants to
think, it must be about both pleasant and unpleasant things.
This book grew out of many years of reflection, and some of the
chapters (1, 3, 4, 5, and a portion of 6) contain greatly transformed
and lengthened versions of earlier articles. The Introduction, Chapters
2 and 7, and the Conclusion are entirely new. None of the chapters,
however, simply duplicates the content of the earlier articles, because I
only arrived at the central thesis of this book through writing them. They
have now been reshaped in light of that thesis, which I set forth in the
Introduction. This book can be read entirely on its own, independent
of my other writings. At the same time, it does draw on, and is the
scholarly culmination of, my earlier books on Plato, the manly virtues,
and political leadership.
Earlier versions of some of the chapters were presented at Peterhouse
College Cambridge, Yale University, and the University of Toronto. I
gratefully acknowledge the stimulation and the hospitality I received

ix
 acknowledgments

on those occasions. I also have the pleasure and the honor of acknowl-
edging the critical insight and support that I have received from many
colleagues over the years. Although they share no responsibility for
the book’s shortcomings, they have contributed to whatever of value
readers may find in it. They include, in no special order, the follow-
ing: Charles H. Fairbanks, Thomas L. Pangle, Lorraine Pangle, Clifford
Orwin, Ryan Balot, Nalin Ranasinghe, Stanley Rosen, Catherine Zuck-
ert, Barry Strauss, Paul Rahe, Robert Sibley, Steven Smith, Travis Smith,
Graham Howell, Jarrett Carty, Geoffrey Kellow, Peter Ahrensdorf,
Harvey C. Mansfield, Lynette Mitchell, Jeff Sikkenga, Norman Doidge,
Kenneth Green, Michael Zuckert, Gregory MacIsaac, Peter Emberley,
Tom Darby, Samuel Abraham, H. D. Forbes, Edward Andrew, and
Gary McDowell. I also have the especially gratifying obligation to
acknowledge the insights I derived from discussing the political philoso-
phies examined in this book with students past and present, some of
whom are now embarked on their own careers. Finally, I owe special
thanks to my editor at Cambridge University Press, Robert Dreesen, and
to the anonymous reviewers for the original proposal, who prompted
me to address many important issues in advance that I had neglected.
This book is dedicated to my best friend and collaborator, my wife
Jacqueline Etherington Newell.

x
 introduction
The Conquest of Eros

Tyranny is elusive. Although everyone wants to be known as just, espe-

cially when they are not, no one wants to be known as a tyrant, espe-
cially when they are. Yet this most elusive of political phenomena is
one of the most widespread and shockingly real. From the innermost
sanctum of the household to the politics of nations and empires, there
are victims and there are oppressors. Civil war, revolution, terrorism,
superpower conflict – in all these spheres of human violence, the pur-
suit of power over others is accompanied by the furious or heartrending
demand for justice, whose first act must be to expose the aggressor for
what he or it truly is. The dilemma is only complicated by the fact
that, as students of politics from Aristotle to Abraham Lincoln have
observed, the would-be tyrant may appear in the guise of a liberator.
More extraordinary still, in the modern age, our potential oppressors
are sometimes not necessarily human at all – technology is a faceless,
impersonal power that nevertheless could destroy the entire planet or,
some have argued, terrify us into peace and moderation. Hence one of
the oldest themes in political philosophy and one of the most lastingly
relevant: Who and what is the tyrant?
The word tyrannos in ancient Greek meant a ruler without ances-
tral descent from a lawful king, a basileus. A basileus was sometimes
a semisacerdotal figure, sometimes, as in the Spartan dual monarchy,
exercising military command. Often a king was seen as a kind of father
of his people, a link to the ancestors and the womb of the country, and
to the gods themselves, who were the fathers of the fathers.1 By contrast,

1 Consider Aristotle Politics 1252b15–27, 1285b3–1285b20. In the first lines of Oedipus

the Tyrant, Oedipus tries to assert his status by addressing the Thebans as “children.”

1
 tyranny

a tyrant was often a “new man,” someone who seized or usurped exclu-
sive power, whether over a formerly free people or by taking the place
of a lawful king. Sometimes their rule was violent or began in violence,
but tyrants could also be recognized as benevolent, better at the art of
ruling than a legitimate king, and so successful that their position might
become hereditary for a time. However, they never entirely escaped the
taint of illegitimacy. Hence Max Weber derived his famous category
of “charisma” from Sophocles’ Oedipus the Tyrant. Because he came
to power by ridding Thebes of the sphinx and labors under mutterings
about how the legitimate king Laius had been murdered, a crime that he
must also solve to remove a famine, Oedipus must compensate for his
lack of hereditary royal authority and sanctity by proving his intellec-
tual prowess and boldness, which of course leads to his undoing as he is
exposed as his father’s murderer and in an incestuous relationship with
his mother. Throughout the play, one senses the uneasiness of Oedipus’
hold on the throne, how even in the opening lines, the priests seem
unwilling to recognize his claim to authority (30–35), and his vexation
with his behind-the-scenes power-sharing deal with Kreon, the repre-
sentative of the nobility from which a legitimate king would normally
be drawn (575–584). In another variation of the problem posed by
absolute rule, for the Romans, a king (rex) was himself tantamount to
a tyrant, hence the Latin translation of Sophocles’ title as Oedipus Rex.
The Romans’ hatred of their original Etruscan kings was so intense that
even men who later wielded what amounted to royal power such as
Julius Caesar and, above all, his serpentine successor Augustus dared
not claim this title openly but had to sheath it in the constitutional garb
of “first citizen” or “commander” (imperator), even though Augustus
was openly hailed in the Greek provinces as a monarch.2
There are so many ways we can use this term “tyranny” that it is
difficult to isolate a common definition. At a minimum, we could define
it as the use of coercive or violent force to treat others unjustly through
the exercise of political supremacy. But is this not a matter of perspec-
tive? As Hobbes sourly observed, if someone does us good, we praise
him; if someone harms our interests, we call him a tyrant.3 There is

2 For the classic account of how the usurper Octavian sheathed himself in the outward
garb of the restorer of the Republic, see Syme (2002).
3 Hobbes (1971) p. 722.

2
 introduction

some truth to this observation. The tyrant’s injustice is inevitably to an

extent a perception held by some but not by others, although the percep-
tion of tyranny itself, valid or otherwise, is a palpably and universally
observable political phenomenon. Hitler and Stalin were venerated by
many of their own countrymen, despite their millions of victims. Dis-
turbingly, they combined their projects for genocide with ordinary and
needed agendas for economic and technological modernization. Indeed,
the deeply paradoxical prospect of the tyrant as a political reformer –
entertained circumspectly by the ancients and openly extolled by mod-
erns like Machiavelli – will be a central theme of this study. However,
we use the condemnatory term “tyranny” in many other ways as well –
the tyranny of petty bureaucrats, vindictive high school principals, par-
ents over their children, spouses over their partners. If the power to
destroy millions, or even the entire human race, is a characteristic of
tyranny, then we could even assign it to purely impersonal forces such
as nuclear weapons or the devastation of the environment. Another cen-
tral theme of this study is the contention that the transition from ancient
tyranny to modern tyranny involves just such a shift from personal to
impersonal oppression.
Sometimes tyrants are purely secular. There have been modernizing
state-builders like Kemal Ataturk who used dictatorial methods to try
to establish a democratic culture in a country that had never before had
one. Abraham Lincoln was decried as a tyrant for provoking the civil
war by endangering states’ rights and for suspending habeas corpus.
Franklin Roosevelt arguably acted tyrannically by interring innocent
Japanese Americans because of their race. Religious zealots can also
rule tyrannically, as in Iran or wherever the Taliban gain local control
in Afghanistan. Finally, there are what I term “garden variety” tyran-
nies, the oldest and most enduring variety. These are regimes ruled by
one man or clan and an extended network of cronies who exploit an
entire country as if it were their private property, a network of venal-
ity sometimes laced with religious or modernizing ideology, sometimes
not. Here one can think of Spain’s General Franco, whose government
was conflated with his personal household and whose followers were
enriched with contracts and privileges, under a veneer of protecting
traditional morality and the Church. More recently, we witnessed the
collapse of the shambling oligarchy that was Mubarak’s Egypt, with its
baksheesh-run economy, purloined billions of American foreign aid for

3
 tyranny

more lavish villas for the elite, headed by a canny old mafioso survivor.
Even religiously fanatical regimes such as the rule of the Ayatollahs in
Iran can combine their zealotry with old-fashioned greed and graft of
this kind: the mullahs are said to have stolen millions in public funds
for their personal fortunes. Dictatorships like the former Soviet Union
claiming to be bent on modernization also created a nomenklatura sys-
tem of special privilege and purloined wealth for the party elite. When
the regime fell, they simply stole the state’s property and thereby became
“entrepreneurs,” a feat imitated more successfully and without a full-
blown regime change by China, a mercantilist oligarchy still claiming
to be Marxist. The list goes on and on.
The psychology of tyranny is also a rich vein for speculation. We all
sense that there are different psychological types among tyrants – the
voluptuary, the sadist, the puritan, the coldly efficient manager. Hitler
was a vegetarian and teetotaler as he ordered the deaths of millions.
Stalin issued similar orders while indulging in a gluttonous appetite for
food and booze. Indeed, as we see at length in this study, Aristotle’s
identification in the Politics of despotism with a form of “household”
authority, in which the ruler treats the country as an extension of his
own property, has endured throughout history. In addition to the exam-
ple of Franco, both Hitler and Stalin conducted their most important
state business from their private households and dinner tables, with a
blurry line at best between state official and personal retainer. Although
Hitler himself was not a gourmand, the household pattern of authority
was extended from his getaway home in the Alps to daily lunches in
Berlin where the top paladins of the regime – Speer, Goebbels, Goering,
and others – would discuss policy and monitor each other’s status while
sharing a common meal. According to Albert Speer, these daily lunches
were the heart of the Nazi government.4
Two psychological types have assumed special prominence in the
tradition coming from the classics – the erotic voluptuary and what
we might term the rational or benevolent despot. The first of these
is clearly a tyrant in a blatant way recognizable by all. Think of the
mad and depraved Caligula and Nero with their endless rounds of
cruelty and debauchery. The status of the second type, however – the
rational despot – is much more ambiguous. Everyone has this contrast

4 See the accounts in Speer (1997) and Montefiore (2005).

4
 introduction

encoded as a part of our cultural heritage, including popular enter-

tainment culture. Think of Joaquin Phoenix’s marvelous turn as the
emperor Commodus in Gladiator. Besotted with pleasure, he is also
gloomy, suspicious, and thin-skinned in a way that makes him lethally
dangerous to those around him. Wandering his palaces sleeplessly at
night, searching for a new pleasure, a new hatred, to fill his coruscating
inner emptiness with a spasm of feeling, he finally provokes his own
murder by outraged subjects who would rather risk death a single time
than live in unremitting terror. Commodus in this film is much like the
figure of the Master in Hegel’s famous master-slave encounter in the
Phenomenology of Spirit. The Master has achieved independence by
dominating his slaves, but he has no sense of personal achievement or
self-worth and can only despise the honors he receives from those who
fear and curry to him. Hegel’s Master in turn recalls Socrates’ portrait
of the tyrant in Book 9 of the Republic, probably the single most famous
denunciation of tyranny in the canon, Hegel’s version being laced with
a further strain of Lutheran contempt for such witless immersion in the
tinsel of worldly pleasure and renown.
In contrast to this gloomy and paranoid monster typified by Com-
modus, think, on the other hand, of Julius Caesar as portrayed by
Ciaran Hinds in the television series Rome. It will be difficult to visual-
ize Caesar in the future without recalling this Irish actor’s thoroughly
convincing portrayal. In all the historical accounts of him, Caesar is
erotic, a famous womanizer whose own soldiers sung ribald lyrics about
his unquenchable thirst for both sexes. However, he was also a well-
educated and cultivated man with refined tastes in literature and a
great prose stylist himself. He took a huge interest in public business,
including the construction of great public works, making taxation more
fair, securing land distribution for his troops, and trying in general to
improve Roman life as against the purblind, stubbornly reactionary
resistance of his own fellow aristocrats. Above all, he was urbane. He
preferred being your friend to being your enemy. He forgave almost
anyone who crossed him once but then repented. All in all, he was a
magnificent figure, reviled by those who regarded him as a demagogue
and traitor to his class, revered by his beneficiaries and his comrades
in arms. Even Cicero could not resist his charm, although he regarded
him as the very death of republican liberty. As Cicero wrote to a friend
after Caesar had arrived uninvited for dinner one day at Cicero’s villa

5
 tyranny

with an entourage of hundreds, he found Caesar a charming and witty

conversationalist at table as always, but not the sort of person with
whom you would end the visit by saying, “Come again soon!”5
These preliminary contours add force to our original question: Who
and what is the tyrant? Many books have been written on this theme.
This book is concerned with a specific dimension of it: How does the
modern conception of tyranny differ from the ancient one as a theme in
the history of political philosophy? The core of its approach is to draw a
contrast between the Platonic understanding of tyranny as a misguided
longing for erotic satisfaction that can be corrected by the education
of eros toward civic virtue and the modern identification of tyranny
with terror deployed in the service of political reconstruction. Although
Hegel is not discussed at length, my approach is very much influenced by
his analysis of the French Revolution in The Phenomenology of Spirit.6
Hegel locates a change in the meaning of tyranny in modern politics
from the tyrant’s pursuit of pleasure to an impersonal, self-abnegating,
and therefore seemingly “idealistic” destruction of all premodern ties
to family, class, and region in the name of a contentless vision of a
unified community or state. Thus, whereas Plato considered tyrants to
be fundamentally venal, what is so frightening about modern terroristic
rulers such as Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot is precisely their
apparent imperviousness to ordinary greed and hedonistic pleasure in
their rigorous dedication to a “historical mission” of destruction and
reconstruction. Their savagery becomes a duty that cannot be “compro-
mised” by their own self-interest or love of a noble reputation, which
arguably puts them outside of the Platonic starting point for the diag-
nosis and treatment of the tyrannical personality. Their eros cannot be
rehabilitated because it is absent in the first place, rooted out by an act
of will.
The studies that follow concentrate on a specific hinge of the shift
from personal to impersonal tyranny suggested by Hegel: the transition
from the classical teachings on statecraft to the modern science of pol-
itics inaugurated by Machiavelli and his successors. Machiavelli’s for-
mulation of the relationship of princely virtu to Fortuna is, it is argued

5 Amusingly retold by Everitt (2003). For a masterful account of Julius Caesar as animated
by a love of Greek heroism, see Meier (1997).
6 Hegel (1979) sections 582–595.

6
 introduction

here, at the origin of an ontological shift in the meaning of tyranny,

transferring to the secular prince a transformative power of creation
ex nihilo formerly reserved for God. For Plato, tyranny is a misun-
derstanding of the true meaning of human satisfaction whose cure is
the sublimation of the passions in the pursuit of moral and intellectual
virtues grounded in the natural order of the cosmos. The Machiavellian
prince, by contrast, stands radically apart from nature construed as a
field of hostile happenstance, so as the more effectively to focus his will
on attacking and subduing it. Mastering Fortuna includes the prince’s
mastering that part of his own nature – eros specifically – vulnerable to
believing in the Platonic cosmology with (what Machiavelli takes to be)
its unwarranted, delusory hopefulness about the success of morality,
nobility, and reason in the world. In this sense, central to the conquest
of Fortune is the conquest of eros. The result is a new kind of power
seeking that is at once passionately selfish and cold-bloodedly methodi-
cal – a mixture arguably not accounted for in the Platonic psychology of
tyranny. With Machiavelli, we encounter a new view of princely vigor
according to which terror can be a catalyst for social and political recon-
struction. As we will see, this places the diagnosis of tyranny on a new
basis, including the grounds on which it is to be condemned. For Plato
and the ancients, the tyrant is a monster of desire who plunders and
ravishes his subjects. Beginning with Machiavelli, the “prince” is envi-
sioned as dispensing terror in a disciplined and dispassionate manner
to purge society of its bloated desires and corrupt “humors,” thereby
laying the foundations for a stable and productive social order.7
Using eros as a prism, my aim is to explore the extent to which
tyranny possesses an ontological basis and how that basis changes
between ancient and modern thought, contributing, it is hoped, to an

7 Readers of Harvey Mansfield will recognize my debt to his exploration of these themes in
Machiavelli’s Virtue (1998), Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders (2001), and Taming
the Prince (1993), although I do place more emphasis on explicitly metaphysical themes
in my readings. Mansfield’s works are discussed in the chapters to follow. For the devel-
opment of my thesis about the contrast between the personal character of ancient rule
and the impersonal character of modern authority, I am also indebted to Mansfield’s
seminal essay on Hobbes and the “science of indirect government” (1971). Other impor-
tant approaches to Machiavelli and his legacy are considered in due course, including
Rahe (1992, 2005, 2008) and Sullivan (1996, 2004). The identification of modern state
authority with the transition to impersonal authority is also a theme of the recent book
by Fukuyama (2011).

7
 tyranny

important debate in the history of political ideas that is discussed a little

later in this introduction. My premise is that, interesting and salutary as
it may appear to do so, one cannot posit a single psychology of tyranny
that explains its ancient and modern types. The theme of tyranny is
intrinsically connected to the relationship between human beings and
nature. As the meaning of tyranny alters, so does the relationship of rea-
son, virtue, will, and technical prowess to nature. The reverse is equally
true: as the content of reason, virtue, will, and technical capacity under-
goes a fundamental change, so does the meaning of tyranny. Tyranny
thus emerges as a crucial avenue for thinking through the shift from
classical political theory to that of modernity altogether, crystallized as
the conquest of eros.
Now one might argue that classical and modern political theory
differ most importantly in their practical, moral, and psychological
implications for statesmanship. Given the richness of that debate, do
we need to think about it in more purely theoretical or ontological
terms? Are not the human things enough? I hope to show that, rich as
those practical and psychological dimensions of statesmanship are – and
this book treats them at length – they are always intertwined with more
purely theoretical speculations about the ultimate character of reality,
and that these streams cannot be treated in complete separation from
one another.8 That is to say, the psychological and practical dimensions
of statecraft derive from a particular view of nature – because human
nature is a part of nature as a whole – and in turn furnish evidence in the
human realm of day-to-day civic experience for those larger cosmologies
themselves.9

8 In this sense, Weiss’s interesting book would be on a different page from mine because
she argues that Socrates in the Meno is defending the possibility of adequate moral virtue
bereft of metaphysical inquiry (2001). As Stauffer argues, Socrates in his rhetoric stresses
the tension between philosophy and the city while arguing that, at the same time and for
this very reason, philosophy is “the moral conscience of the city” (2006, p. 179).
9 This is why I cannot go all the way with Hadot (1995), interesting as his argument is,
in seeing Socratic or Platonic philosophizing as “spiritual exercises” akin to personal
therapy or mystical techniques or as if Socrates simply embodied a vague “way of life”
alongside other ways of life. The Platonic Socrates does not base his argument solely
on the best askesis for the individual but on what is objectively true and real about the
cosmos, and philosophy is not presented merely as a “way of life” but as the magisterial
guide to the truth about the cosmos, or at least the pursuit of it, and therefore as the most
suitable governor for other “ways of life” including politics and poetry. Admirable as the
postmodernist reading of Plato is in some respects as a way of freeing it from the dead

8
 introduction

The studies that follow are much concerned with the problem posed
by excessive ambition spurred by an eros for glory and for possession of
the city, a problem exemplified in different ways by Sophocles’ Oedipus,
Homer’s Achilles, and Socrates’ companion Alcibiades. Plato begins a
tradition of suggesting that those aberrant erotic longings for victory
and possession might be rechanneled toward serving the common good
guided by philosophy. Unlike modern thinkers such as Hobbes, the
classics take it as given that these aberrant erotic passions cannot be
wholly suppressed or extirpated but must be reshaped and redirected
through civic paideia. As the examples of Oedipus, Achilles, and Alcibi-
ades variously illustrate, the energy and vigor of the ambitious, although
potentially dangerous, are sometimes needed by the political commu-
nity in situations of extreme peril, war, or national emergency. For the
classics, the challenge is to shape such men’s characters in a way that
will make them prefer the honor of vigorous citizenship in coopera-
tion with their fellow citizens to the excesses of tyranny. However, this
rehabilitation of eros on a psychological level to become the ally of
sound statesmanship is indivisibly connected to a view of the cosmos as
balanced and moderate so as to ground and justify on the transhuman
level the desired human and civic therapy. If the cosmos is characterized
by violent impulse and disorder, the human soul will mirror those dan-
gerous qualities. If, however, the cosmos is harmonious and balanced,
civic education can aspire to inculcate those same virtuous qualities in
the citizenry. This link between soul and cosmos, this balance between
mind and passions, is crystalized in such famous Platonic images as the
Chariot of the Soul and Diotima’s Ladder, just as later classical state-
ments of this need for balance such as Cicero’s depiction of the Dream
of Scipio the Younger tie the correct balance of active and contempla-
tive virtues in the soul to a vision of the celestial order. That is why for
Plato, as we consider in this book, the reform of political psychology
and statesmanship is indivisible from a critical encounter with the pre-
Socratics’ and Sophists’ radically opposed understanding of nature as
motion and its concomitant endorsement of tyrannical aggression (as
in Book 10 of the Laws).10

hand of utilitarian and analytical rationality, it often leads to an even more misleading
reduction of ancient philosophy to mere personal “care of the self.”
10 Plato, the Laws 888–890. On the ontological arguments of the pre-Socratics and
Sophists, consider Newell (2000) ch. 2.

9
 tyranny

As the modern understanding of princely authority is launched with

Machiavelli, there emerges a parallel set of arguments linking the moral
and practical dimensions of political life to the transhuman and cos-
mological. On the most massive level, whereas the ancients stigma-
tize tyranny in favor of virtuous citizenship or envision how a poten-
tial young tyrant might be guided by philosophy to become a good
statesman (as in the fourth book of the Laws),11 the moderns argue
that princes should abandon the distinction between tyranny and civic
virtue and do whatever it takes to achieve “effectual” power, stability,
and prosperity for themselves and their subjects.12 As Hobbes bluntly
argues, the worst imaginable tyranny, if it creates stability and order, is
preferable to the absence of any rule at all with its inevitably resulting
war of all against all.13 Accompanying this practical advice is a psycho-
logical argument claiming that by nature men are driven by the pursuit
of power to preserve their lives, with no intrinsic openness to virtue.
The ambition for mastery driven by a love of personal glory or a profes-
sion of nobility, once exposed as nothing grander than an impulse for
survival, can be extirpated by indoctrination or terror. However, these
practical and psychological tenets, just like the classical precedents they
aim to reverse, all go to the meaning of nature. In the modern view,
nature is matter in motion, and its human equivalent is every individ-
ual’s pursuit of continued motion through self-preservation. Moreover,
as matter in motion devoid of objective teleological purpose, nature can
be mastered and reconstructed to save us from our own violent passions
and make nature serve our material needs.
Accordingly, in the studies that follow, I explore my main theme
along two parallel and equally necessary tracks, the psychological and
the cosmological. One level discusses character and soul-craft – how
the ancients stressed education as the deterrent to potentially tyrannical
souls (as in the education of the Auxiliaries in Plato’s Republic), whereas
the moderns focus more on disciplined methods of rule (as in Machi-
avelli’s recipe for alternating between “the lion and the fox”). Another
level discusses the different ways in which ancients and moderns con-
ceive of, and relate to, nature – not only human nature but the wider

11 Plato, the Laws 709–712.

12 Machiavelli, The Prince ch. 15.
13 Hobbes Ibid.

10
 introduction

natural world with which human nature is connected and from which
it seeks its bearings. For the ancients, both the danger of the tyrannical
soul arising and the possibility of a therapy for it emerge within the order
of nature, so that the correct treatment for aberrant erotic passions is
to redirect them toward their proper natural fulfillments – civic virtue
and the contemplative life. For the moderns, by contrast, starting with
Machiavelli, the possibility is explored that through an effort of will,
we can master Fortuna, striving to step outside of nature’s limitations
altogether. As we will see, this involves a complex dyadic movement in
which the prince achieves control over Fortuna by, paradoxically, chan-
neling “her” impulsiveness to empower his own daring. The Platonic
orientation by which eros leads the soul on a hierarchical ascent from
the outward beauties of visible reality to the imperishable beauty of the
Good is replaced in Machiavelli’s new psychology by the prince’s inte-
rior and invisible modulation of the rhythms of Fortune’s subrational
impulses within the inward reaches of his own solitude. This contrast
is explored through studies of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Machiavelli,
and Hobbes treating different aspects of this overarching theme. I con-
clude with a general discussion suggesting the wider implications of
the new conception of princely rule launched by Machiavelli includ-
ing, for example, a discussion of Shakespeare’s history plays. I also try
to show how the sometimes bewilderingly various interpretations of
Machiavelli, as well as his multidimensional influence on the various
streams of modern political thought, all derive from his fundamental
project for the mastery of fortune.
Let us dwell for a moment more specifically on why eros can be con-
sidered the prism for clarifying some important aspects of the general
shift away from the classical emphasis on our reconciliation with nature
to the modern project for subduing it. For Plato, eros, if left unguided,
can be the source of spontaneous tyrannical ambition. However, as
he presents it, eros also contains the potential for its own redirection
toward a love of the beautiful and the good, entailing the rehabilitation
and sublimation of those aggressive passions in the service of philoso-
phy and a devotion to the common good. That is to say, erotic longing
can be rehabilitated by being directed toward a love of the balance and
harmony that are superordinate over chance and impulse in the cosmos
as a whole. Eros, in other words, is the key to an orientation toward
the beneficence of the natural order. That is why, for Machiavelli, eros

11
 tyranny

must be extirpated from the heart of the prince. The kind of erotic
longing for the beautiful and the good set forth in Plato’s Symposium
is, as we will see, the most dangerous psychological example of what
Machiavelli means by “relying on Fortuna,” that is to say, entertaining
a deluded hopefulness about nature’s friendliness toward our needs,
aspirations, and desire for an honorable life. Therefore, Machiavelli is
not merely endorsing tyranny of the kind that Plato opposed. On the
contrary: he is arguing that the entire Platonic starting point, which
sees eros both as the source of aberrant tyrannical passions and as the
source of their rehabilitation, must be abandoned. Instead, the prince
must aspire to step outside of nature altogether, face the harsh truth that
Fortuna is entirely indifferent to if not outright hostile to human hopes,
and, emboldened by that sense of alienation, turn back on nature and
master it. The key to this revaluation of values is that, before the prince
can master Fortuna outwardly, he must first conquer within himself the
allure of eros and its vision of a beautiful cosmos. The first victory of the
prince must be over his own latently Platonic soul. In this book’s inter-
pretation, then, modern tyranny is launched on the premise that eros
can be extirpated and that nature, thereby reduced to sheer hostile and
purposeless happenstance, can be mastered by an act of cold-minded
will.

the debate about ancient and modern tyranny

Let me dwell momentarily on how this book might contribute to some
wider debates about ancient and modern political philosophy. The
debate about whether and to what extent the modern concept of tyranny
differs from the classical concept has a long pedigree continuing down
to the present. Some – most notably Sir Karl Popper – have argued that
modern totalitarianism was a direct repercussion of Plato’s Republic
and its utopian model for the complete subordination of the individual
to the community.14 Thus, whereas Plato would have us believe that
the rule of reason (the philosopher-king) is the only sure antidote to
tyranny and other vices, Popper believes that the rule of reason itself
is a different and more dangerous, all-controlling form of despotism.
Others have maintained, however, that there is a distinct break between

14 Popper (1971).

12
 introduction

the ancient condemnation of tyranny and the modern tolerance for it

as an engine of political power and prosperity and that this ethical
break was paralleled by a new view of nature. Max Horkheimer, for
example, explored the underlying connections between the emergence
of modern natural science and Machiavelli’s new science of politics, see-
ing in the Discourses a new “physics” of clashing political “bodies.”15
Closer to the beginning of the modern age, Bacon and Spinoza acknowl-
edged their indebtedness to Machiavelli’s new political science with its
emphasis on power seeking, stability, and prosperity.16
In more recent years, Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojeve famously
debated the difference between ancient and modern tyranny in their dis-
cussion of Xenophon’s Hiero.17 For Kojeve, to some degree following
Hegel, modern tyranny or totalitarianism is a project for the univer-
sal actualization of reason originating in the classics. Today’s emergent
“universal homogeneous state” is but the working out of a blueprint for
rational politics offered by Simonides in the Hiero or by Plato’s Repub-
lic. Strauss argues, by contrast, that the creation of a rational world
order may be the aim of modernity, or a certain dimension of moder-
nity, and of a certain kind of modernizing tyranny, but not of ancient
political philosophy, because the philosophic life can never be entirely
assimilated to any project for a rational politics. However, Strauss’s
position could thereby be taken to imply that modern tyranny cannot
be fully comprehended or anticipated within the classical premises; that
it has radically altered its character inasmuch as modern political science
obliterates the distinction between the active life and the contemplative
life and enlists reason in the service of the former. This poses a conun-
drum: If the classics cannot fully explain or anticipate modern tyranny,
then how can Strauss argue that the classical view of politics is prefer-
able to the modern view, specifically preferable to the modern project
embraced by Kojeve for the actualization of reason, and preferable

15 Horkheimer (1995) (2007).

16 As Bacon writes in The Advancement of Learning in a gloss on chapter 15 of The
Prince: “We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do,
and not what they ought to do. . . . As for the philosophers, they make imaginary laws
for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little
light, because they are so high.” Quoted in Kennington (2005). For Spinoza’s view of
Machiavelli, see Spinoza (1997) 5.7, 10.1.
17 Strauss (1968).

13
 tyranny

in general for distinguishing sound from unsound statecraft? I hope

to shed light on this unresolved issue by suggesting that the meaning
of reason itself, and its relationship to authority, changes between the
classical and modern paradigm shifts in the understanding of nature.
Strauss’s rejoinder is that, whereas modern tyranny is distinctive,
the classics provide the best starting point for thinking that distinc-
tiveness through. He grants that “‘the conquest of nature’ . . . made
possible by natural science” at least arguably differentiates the mod-
ern conception of tyranny from the classical. Hence his willingness
to entertain (without ultimately embracing) Eric Voegelin’s view that
the distinctively modern tyrant, exemplified by Machiavelli’s Prince, is
an apocalyptic or “postconstitutional” ruler whose millenarian aspi-
rations to step outside of the boundaries of nature comprise a key
ingredient of modernity.18 By using eros, and especially the Platonic
understanding of eros, as a touchstone for drawing out important con-
trasts between the classical and modern understandings of tyranny, I
share with Strauss the view that the classics provide the best starting
point for thinking those differences through. At the same time, as will
already be evident, I am also partial to Voegelin’s emphasis on the
distinctively millenarian and apocalyptic quality of modern tyranny at
its most radical. Thus, although my approach has been considerably
influenced by Strauss, my particular interpretation of Machiavelli as
a post-Christian and in some ways “apocalyptic” thinker owes some-
thing to Voegelin, although I am less inclined than him to see a generally
seamless continuity between Platonic and Christian transcendentalism
as together grounding the “metaxy” or middle ground of sound prac-
tice. Instead, I am more inclined to view the Augustinian revaluation of
political honor as “dominion” in The City of God as constituting an
irreparable break with the Platonic understanding of the erotic ascent
set forth in the Symposium. Indeed, this book tries to show (especially
in Chapters 6 and 7) that there are grounds for reading Machiavelli’s
new science of politics as the secularization of certain key Augustinian
tenets, part of an original path that rejects both classical and Chris-
tian transcendence on post-Christian grounds. I would also argue that
the broadness of Voegelin’s contrast between the traditional tyrant and

18 Voegelin’s review of On Tyranny first appeared in The Review of Politics (1949), and
Strauss’s response appeared in later editions of On Tyranny.

14
 introduction

the postconstitutional prince, although stimulating, can undermine the

precise psychological and ethical content of the shift from personal
to impersonal tyranny, including specific changes in the meaning of
regime types and institutions. By concentrating specifically on eros – by
taking my bearings from the Platonic understanding of eros as the fun-
damental phenomenological link between the human soul, the political
community, and the world at large – I hope to invest the broadness
of Voegelin’s approach with the psychological finesse encouraged by
Strauss’s exegeses.19
In exploring modernity in one of its fundamental dimensions as a
project for the conquest of eros, and therefore (at least at its most rad-
ical) an incipiently totalitarian assertion of man’s absolute power to
master and reconstruct nature, this book radiates out toward a num-
ber of other major debates in contemporary political thought. Martin
Heidegger famously argued that modern global technology originates
in Platonic metaphysics itself. Whereas for Plato, reason is the cure
for tyranny, according to Heidegger, Plato’s metaphysics – the “all-
dominating” agenda to bring all that exists under the “yoke of the
Idea” – is working itself out as “technology,” the complete rational
mastery of nature (one of Kojeve’s sources of insight).20 Here, too,
however, I would argue that the meaning of reason itself has under-
gone a profound alteration between ancients and moderns and that the
conquest of eros presupposes a shift from the Platonic cosmology of
the world as endowed with purpose, moderation, and goodness to the
Machiavellian and Hobbesian view of nature as purposeless flux. If that
is so, then global technology is a hallmark of modernity alone, not of the
classical view of the world. Platonic cosmology invites us to reconcile
ourselves to the supervening beneficence of nature and the cosmos, the
highest fulfillment of our own erotic longing for completion. The new
physics of matter in motion, by contrast, invites us to master nature
and reshape it to serve our material needs.
Hannah Arendt, developing while modifying some of Heidegger’s
themes, sees totalitarianism as a deformation (beginning with Hobbes)

19 A further consideration of the differing positions of Strauss and Voegelin unfolds in

Chapters 1, 6, 7, and the Conclusion.
20 Martin Heidegger, “The Letter on Humanism” and “The Question Concerning Tech-
nology” (1993). See also “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” (1998) and “Uberwindung der
Metaphysik” (1954).

15
 tyranny

of the classical teachings, in which the technical and materialistic imper-

atives of the household are released from, and soon overwhelm, the
ethical guidance of the political community.21 I agree with this as a
general thesis, but we also need to stress that the meaning of these
terms – household and city – undergoes a profound change owing to
the modern project for the conquest of nature. For the conquest of
nature requires that the household itself be drained of Aristotelian tele-
ology every bit as much as the city, depriving it of its own contribution
to the community (the ethical rearing of future citizens). Once the tele-
ological connection traced by Aristotle between reason and the cosmos
is hollowed out by the new physics, what remains is a project in which
political reason becomes a purely anthropocentric project for project-
ing rational control over nature as matter in motion. Aristotle’s “art of
household management,” with its potential for both ethical and uneth-
ical usages in the maintenance of private and family life, now drained
of its own teleological purpose, is employed as a mere methodological
means for the Machiavellian mastery of nature.
This profound shift in the meaning of terms sheds further light on
Heidegger’s argument that modernity has been entirely assimilated to
the project for global technology, the “working out” of metaphysics
reaching all the way back to Plato. In my view, Plato’s evocation of eros
as the longing for the beautiful and the good, first experienced through
human longing but orienting us toward the transcendental harmony,
moderation, and unity of the cosmos, stands in the way of Heidegger’s
attempt to assimilate classical metaphysics to the continuous unfolding
of modernity into technology.22 On the other hand, if, as Heidegger
remarks, the precise historical juncture at which modern technology
comes into its own is “unknown” but is connected to the rise of modern
physics as a “calculable coherence of forces,” I suggest that in Hobbes’s
thought we might see the beginning of this project for technical mastery
based on the new physics, an early synthesis of the political and scientific
dimensions of modernity behind the rise of what Heidegger means by
technology.23

21 Arendt (1996) pp. 28–38.

22 Consider Newell (2000) ch. 5.
23 Heidegger (1998) p. 303.

16
 introduction

Mark Lilla, in his interesting book, has tried to locate in eros a way
of exploring a continuity between the ancient and modern understand-
ing and experience of tyranny.24 In this view, Heidegger’s notorious
commitment to National Socialism would be a variation on Plato’s flir-
tation with educating the tyrant Dionysius, both stemming from an
immoderation born of excessive eros. Attractive as this thesis may be to
establish a link between ancients and moderns that might validate the
classical starting point and typologies, I argue in this book that eros is
not a constant psychological or ontological category throughout these
ancient and modern examples of philosophic immoderation on behalf
of tyranny. Although one might concede that, broadly speaking, Hei-
degger and Plato were both under the sway of passion, as were their
respective tyrants of choice, it is not the same passion of eros in the
original classical meaning. To put it briefly but not misleadingly, Plato
believed that tyranny might be cured by moving the soul away from
spontaneous impulse toward what is metaphysically highest – and mis-
took Dionysius for an eligible candidate – whereas Heidegger chose as
his “hero” the leader whose “resolve” he believed would shatter the
grip of metaphysics over the sheer spontaneity of existence. The Leader
was, indeed, the candidate of Being.25
As this book argues, the depiction and evaluation of eros changes
between the classical and modern approaches to statesmanship, as does
the role of nature. For the ancients, eros lies within the order of nature,
and the therapy for its spontaneous natural proneness to immoderation
lies in its redirection through education toward its naturally highest ful-
fillments, civic virtue and the contemplative life – an ascent that entails
moderation. In sharp contrast, for the moderns beginning with Machi-
avelli, the erotic link between human nature and the cosmos is shattered
by our fundamental experience of alienation from the “malignity of For-
tuna.” We must step outside of nature to master it, which entails purging
ourselves of our own erotic hopes for cosmically grounded repose. To
reiterate an earlier point: For Machiavelli, it is not simply a matter
of endorsing the kind of tyranny that the classics condemned, but of

24 Lilla (2001).
25 On the intrinsic connections between Heidegger’s philosophy of the 1920s and 1930s
and his commitment to National Socialism, consider Newell (1984, 1988a, 1988b,
1988c).

17
 tyranny

evading their whole starting point for comprehending the excesses of

princely rule, in which both diagnosis and therapy are rooted in eros.
Just as the prince must subdue unstable Fortuna, the scientist, according
to Bacon, must torture her to make her yield her secrets so as to maxi-
mize our power over nature “for the relief of man’s estate.”26 Modern
tyranny, including the commitment to the people’s destiny evoked by
the Nazis that Heidegger found so attractive, is hence more fundamen-
tally characterized by an act of will than it is by an eros for magnificence
and honor, more akin to a “secular saint” than to Alexander the Great
or Julius Caesar.27 To the extent that one can employ Platonic psychol-
ogy to approximate the modern phenomenon of tyranny, it is arguably
much closer to the passion of thumos than to eros, although even that
parallel is not precise. In my view, eros is the fundamental passion in
Plato’s account of the soul, from which thumos itself is derived. Unlike
some authors, who have suggested a continuity between Plato’s evo-
cation of thumos and will-based modern moralities like Kantianism,
I believe that this continuity is highly questionable. Indeed, I argue
that for Plato, strictly speaking, there is no equivalent for the modern,
Kantian conception of the will.28
Moreover, to be as precise as possible, when I argue that modern
tyranny, including totalitarian systems like National Socialism, are more
fundamentally to be viewed as a deformity of will than of eros, I am
making this judgment within the parameters of the massive contrast

26 Bacon (1937) p. 214.

27 Still worth pondering in this regard is Walzer (1982).
28 My emphasis on the centrality of eros to understanding the classical approach is cognate
with recent books by Ahrensdorf (2009) and especially Ludwig (2006), although I
examine a different set of authors and focus on the character of the shift from ancients
to moderns. I share with Stauffer (2006) an interest in reading Plato to explore the
possibility of a philosophically reformed rhetoric for shaping citizens but lay more
emphasis on the cosmological hypothesis to which this “noble rhetoric” is connected.
I share with Ranasinghe (2000) a broad assumption that Plato’s erotic psychology is
the key to his cosmological and metaphysical speculations and the limitations imposed
on them by our human finitude, a premise of my own previous book on Plato. I share
with Craig (1994) and Zuckert (1988) an interest in thumos as one of the keys to
Platonic political psychology and the prospect for reconciling the pursuit of honor with
service to the common good. I try to show, however, that eros is the fundamental
passion in Plato’s account of the soul, from which thumos itself is derived. Unlike some
authors – for example, Shell (1996) – who have suggested a continuity between Plato’s
evocation of thumos and will-based modern moralities like Kantianism, I believe that
this continuity is highly questionable.

18
 introduction

between ancients and moderns that this book is devoted to uncover-

ing – the conquest of nature. As I argue in the Conclusion, however,
although some dimensions of modern tyranny and totalitarianism can
indeed by illuminated by the rubric of the conquest of nature, the fuller
understanding of collectivist or Volkish tyrannies such as National
Socialism must carry us beyond those parameters altogether, thereby
amplifying my view that one cannot, as Lilla does, treat the relation-
ship between philosophy and tyranny as a set of constants. This book,
by focusing strictly on the project for the conquest of nature charac-
teristic of an intellectual phase of early modernity, will bring us to the
cusp of that new collectivist politics of the General Will whose origina-
tor is Rousseau and without which we cannot fully account for total-
itarianism.
To return to our overarching question: Is modern tyranny a contin-
uation of the ancient concept? Is modernization, especially its totali-
tarian version, the attempt to actualize classical utopias such as Plato’s
Republic? Or is it something fundamentally different? This book argues
for the latter alternative. My approach is to show how the moral and
psychological issues surrounding the tyrannical character that sharply
distinguish the ancient and modern views are inextricably bound up
with, and illuminated by, the ontological shift in man’s relationship
to nature. In other words, to understand how the psychology of state-
craft changes between ancients and moderns, we must consider how the
entire relationship of reason to nature and to rule, and all of its cog-
nate terms, changes between ancients and moderns. It is not enough to
offer a judgment that either the classical or the modern understanding
of political life is more or less natural or reasonable, because nature,
reason, and the art of ruling all alter their meanings between Plato and
Machiavelli, with eros at the core of the debate. These issues are held in
play through a close comparison of some highly relevant classical and
modern texts. In this way, I believe that my exploration of the conquest
of eros can be a touchstone for these larger issues in the history of
political ideas.
It should be made clear from the outset that I am far from arguing in
this book that the entire meaning of modern political philosophy, even
of early modern political philosophy, is exhausted by the Machiavellian
project for the conquest of nature. I readily concede that Machiavelli’s
Discourses, for example, contain a defense of republicanism whose

19
 tyranny

roots are in the tradition of the zoon politikon going back to Aristo-
tle, although I also maintain that Machiavelli almost entirely subverts
and transvaluates their meaning. What we might term the Promethean
vision of the prince as the potential master of Fortune is more sharply
etched in The Prince, whereas the approach of the Discourses is both
more communal and more explicitly reflective about the existential lim-
its placed by external reality and human psychology on our exercise of
will.29 Nevertheless, as we will see, the Promethean vigor of the ideal
prince is, according to Machiavelli, also an important element in the
founding and institutional makeup of republics. Altogether, then, in
focusing on that strain of modernity pursuing the conquest of nature,
I am abstracting what Max Horkheimer termed the “dark” dimension
of the modern project (typified in his view by Machiavelli and Hobbes)
from modernity as a whole, an undertow that weaves in and out of its
more benign enterprise typified by such thinkers as Spinoza and Locke
for the establishment of communities of rights bearing, tolerant, free,
and fulfilled individuals. How and to what extent this darker current
vitiates the more benign dimensions of liberalism is a question to which I
hope my focus on extracting this more strictly Promethean strain might
contribute. In other words, is Heidegger right to claim that, in our age,
the benign face of the Enlightenment has been unmasked to reveal
nothing but this underlying darker project for global technological
mastery?

remarks on method
Because the word “ontology” can be used in different ways, my particu-
lar use of it in the studies that follow should be clarified. An ontology is
a characterization of the fundamental status of all reality, beyond which
or behind which there is no further basis or ground. Accordingly, all the

29 The Prince and the Discourses deserve pride of place among Machiavelli’s writings
because they are the only books in which he claims to have presented everything he
knows (Mansfield [2001] p. 9. I hope I will be forgiven, as a political theorist, for
not engaging the crowded field of Machiavelli biographers. Among many fine entries, I
lean to Sebastian de Grazia (1994). The burden of his biography, to me convincing, is
that Machiavelli, in inventing Realpolitik, was recommending the use of conventionally
immoral means to bring about arguably sound political ends – greater stability and
prosperity for the state and its inhabitants.

20
 introduction

more proximal experiences of human life – the everyday phenomena of

human psychology, morality, politics, and even philosophizing itself –
are derived from this ontological ground, and it to some degree shapes
in advance the specific content that those more proximal experiences
contain for us. When Aristotle, for example, proclaims that we should
approach what is “first by nature” only by way of what is “first for
us,” questions of ethics and political authority, he is to some extent
presupposing a view of the cosmos as an ordered teleological hierar-
chy within which what is “first for us” already receives its rank and
substance (Nicomachean Ethics 1095a17–b6).
In this book, beginning in the first chapter, a contrast is drawn
between what I term primordialist and transcendentalist ontologies as
a basis for speculating about tyranny. In the case of transcendental-
ist ontologies, the supreme expression of which is Plato’s speculative
metaphysics, life is preeminently characterized by a cosmic structure
of orderliness, moderation, harmony, friendliness, and benevolence, all
radiating from the Idea of the Good. By contrast, primordialist ontolo-
gies such as those of the pre-Socratics and Sophists stress that life is
fundamentally characterized by strife, chance, and motion, the con-
comitant human behavior for which would elevate selfish impulse and
the quest for domination over others as the most “natural” behavior. As
we will see, the Platonic therapy for tyranny is squarely directed at repu-
diating this primordialist ontology that gives despotic and aggressive
impulses the sanction of nature itself. Machiavelli’s political thought
is in some measure a return to the view of the Sophists, but only to a
limited degree. As I argue, Machiavelli’s adaptation to secular human
rule of the Abrahamic concept of a God who can stand entirely out-
side of nature and reshape it places his new science of politics beyond
the parameters of even the most open endorsement of tyranny by the
Sophists and pre-Socratics, none of whom believe man possesses this
degree of power to reshape his existence.
Why insist on introducing these rather freighted terms? After all, it
is possible to read the history of political philosophy entirely on the
level of moral experience. Seen in that light, we can find writers as
diverse as Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche all endorsing self-control, virtue,
honesty, and justice, often in similar if not identical-sounding terms.
Who, indeed, among the great thinkers is not in favor of being just to
oneself and others, of living honestly, of being true to oneself, of not

21
 tyranny

compromising with baseness? The problem with this approach is that

it risks reducing the history of thought to an undifferentiated mass in
which everyone is the same as everyone else and in which there are no
sharp and possibly irreconcilable differences among their philosophies
and worldviews.
Only when one connects the moral evaluations of different politi-
cal philosophies to their respective ontological foregrounds does one
understand how the content and derivation of words such as “justice”
or “moderation” are fundamentally different from one philosophy to
another. The lesson of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus – that one should
aspire, allegorically speaking, to the blindness of Teresias and not tempt
the gods with one’s hubristic belief in one’s own intellectual prowess –
presupposes the tragic and Heracleitean view of life as motion and flux,
what Seth Benardette termed “the Homeric-Heracleitean doctrine” of
the pre-Socratics.30 It is thus derived from a different basis than that of
Platonic ethics, in which sight is the primary metaphor for the soul’s
openness to knowledge and in which the capacity for virtue is derived
from and supported by a view of the cosmos in which rest and unity are
always superordinate over chance and necessity, and hence the oppo-
site of the tragic worldview. To take another such case, when Gorgias
argues in one of the fragments attributed to him that “prudence” is one
of the city’s two most important virtues along with courage, he means
something very different from Socrates’ use of it in the dialogue devoted
to Gorgias. Because Gorgias shares the Heracleitean and Empedoclean
view of physis as motion, “prudence” is the hale and manly prowess
by which rulers assert their power and achieve fame and prosperity.31
For Plato’s Socrates, by contrast, prudence leads (in the Gorgias) to
the complete subordination of bodily passion and the manly contest
for distinction through pre-eminence to a cosmos of pure orderliness,
harmony, and rest. Similarly, to take a final example, to derive moral
virtue as Kant does from the will to overcome our natural inclinations
as the drag on us of a natural world driven by material necessity is dia-
metrically opposed to Aristotle’s view of virtue as the fullest flowering
of our natural inclinations guided by teleological purpose. On a certain
level, Kant may sound like Aristotle or the Stoics in his exhortations

30 Benardette in Plato (1984) p. 117.

31 Gorgias 8. In Freeman (1948). Consider also Newell (2000) pp. 17–20.

22
 introduction

to overcome base and witless pleasures, but at bottom the content

and derivation of these accounts of moral virtue are at odds with one
another.
For reasons beyond the scope of this study, we political theorists have
sometimes lost sight of the fact that the history of political ideas is one
of fundamental alternatives, not a happy chorus in which all the great
ones agree with each other. The sidelining of the metaphysical and onto-
logical dimensions of political philosophy now in vogue enables one to
evade the likelihood that it may not be possible to agree with all the
great ones at the same time. We should avoid committing the fallacy of
concluding from the fact that we understandably and justifiably admire
both Nietzsche and Plato that Nietzsche is Plato. Once we grasp that
Plato’s cosmology and Nietzsche’s teaching on the will to power, or
Plato’s approach to Being and that of Heidegger, are opposed and anti-
thetical concepts, we will be liberated from this fallacy, and understand
far better, moreover, why Nietzsche and Heidegger themselves regarded
Plato as their antipodal opposite and chief antagonist.32
I will tax the reader further with one brief methodological considera-
tion. To the extent that I have worked out a hermeneutic for interpreting
political theory, I try to avoid a stage-theory of history in which one
philosophy “causes” another one in a direct linear development. To my
mind, the meaning of a political philosophy is not most fully grasped
as its next measurable impact on another thinker chronologically in
time. Hence, the meaning of Machiavelli is not reducible to his influ-
ence on Hobbes, who some would argue is his most immediate and
compatible successor. As I argue in the Conclusion, the meaning of
Machiavelli is comparable to many spokes radiating outward from a
single wheel, the full significance of which is an ongoing exploration
for the interpreter down to the present. I do not view the history of
political thought as primarily linear at all, but rather as a mutating and
dynamic whole within which many views contend and out of which
one can abstract for purposes of examination one of those complexes
in contrast with others. Much less do I accept the still-prevalent notion
that political theory concerns the realm of the “ought” or the normative
in contrast with the realm of the “is” or the empirical. Why would any
sensible adult spend his life studying an “ought” that is divorced from

32 This argument is explicated at further length in Newell (2010).

23
 tyranny

what is real? To my mind, political theory is a way of studying poli-

tics. Arguably, political theory may not be the primary cause of great
historical events. Although I am inclined to believe that it is, and find
compelling, for example, Richard Kennington’s characterization of the
seventeenth century’s religious wars over the Reformation as in effect
wars launched by Machiavelli, Bacon, and Hobbes against the Catholic,
Aristotelian, and feudal conglomerate of the old politics, I cannot prove
it. At a minimum, however, by separating out from the warp and woof
of historical causality in its limitless overlapping layers the motif of a
distinct set of political ideas, we are unquestionably lighting up one way
of explaining what causes great historical events.33
For reasons such as these, I am sympathetic to Hegel’s view that
education is not the rote learning of given data from a chronologi-
cal sequence, but the “recollection” of moral, spiritual, and theoretical
energies that may have taken place in the distant past but none of which
have been simply outmoded by the march of time and all of which are
dwelling with us right now as modern men and women as latent ener-
gies that can be “raised to consciousness” through an interaction in
which both the interpreter and the text are transformed.34 Hence, for
example, by considering how Sophocles’ Oedipus could not possibly be
“guilty” from a modern Kantian perspective that assumes we can take
autonomous responsibility for our actions in full awareness of them, we
learn more about both the ancient and the modern view of life through
what each of them lacks and may need from the other – how Sophocles
downplays the importance of autonomy as the key to ethics and how
Kant downplays the extent to which unmerited, unintended, and hidden
fate can undermine our pursuit of virtue. Gadamer’s hermeneutic of the
“fusion of horizons” is in my view the direct successor to Hegel’s peda-
gogy of recollection, in which precisely the irreconcilable contradictions
between, say, Aristotle’s Physics and Bacon’s Novum Organum disclose
the meaning of both in a sharper and richer way than if we had access
only to one or the other.35 This is not progress but dialogue.

33 Kennington (2005). Consider Manent’s subtle yet trenchant defense of the need to
recognize in the ideas of modern political philosophy the animating spirit of modern
liberal civilization as a whole (1995).
34 Consider Newell (2009a, 2006).
35 Gadamer (1975) p. 273.

24
 introduction

Accordingly, the essays in this book are not written as a chronologi-

cal sequence in which I try to show, step by step, how Plato influenced
Aristotle and how Machiavelli influenced Hobbes. I am indeed cluster-
ing these studies around a break between ancients and moderns that I
argue is fundamental, the modern project for the conquest of nature.
Each study, however, as the reader will discover, is a more-or-less self-
contained reflection in which classical texts are paired with modern texts
in the hope of opening up a deeper vein of insight into how moderns
differ from ancients.

25
 I

is there an ontology
of tyranny?

In this chapter, I set forth the main premise of this book – that the
classical understanding of tyranny viewed it as a deformed and excessive
version of eros, the cure for which lay in the proper redirection of
eros toward civic virtue and philosophy. In contrast, I argue, modern
political thought, beginning with Machiavelli, understands statecraft as
originating in an act of will that attempts to master nature, and above
all to master the passions expressed through eros. Thus, whereas for
the ancients, both the problem of and the therapy for tyranny take
place within the natural order and man’s place in it, for the moderns,
tyranny is assimilated to a project for the rational conquest and control
of nature, including and especially human nature, starting with the
prince’s own.
Because I am proceeding at a certain level of abstraction, let me
furnish some preliminary content by beginning with a specific set of
contrasts between Machiavelli and his closest point of contact among
the ancients, Xenophon, a linkage to which we return a number of
times throughout the studies that follow. The most important differ-
ence between them is the extent to which Xenophon’s writings on
princely rule (culminating in the Education of Cyrus) explore a kind
of high political hedonism. Cyrus’s motivation as Xenophon depicts
him in the Education of Cyrus is not only the pursuit of honor but also
the pursuit of pleasure from the successful arrangement of his life and
tastes. More importantly, he is consumed by an eros to gratify “all men”
(1.1.5) without their being in a position to gratify him in return. In this
respect, Xenophon’s presentation of his rise to empire is a riposte to
the Aristotelian contention that liberality could be confined within the
boundaries of the polis and republican self-government. The perfection

26
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

of this virtue of character, Xenophon maintains, requires an imperial

politics. Xenophon’s exploration of political honor seeking as hedonis-
tically motivated is further revealed by the fact that Cyrus’s empire is
the attempt to actualize the teaching about the Good explored by the
Xenophontic Socrates, a teaching that (in contrast to Plato’s Republic)
is not only not necessarily connected to a polis but in fact cannot be
reconciled with republican government. Ruling on behalf of the Socratic
Good, Cyrus builds a cosmopolitan multinational empire based on the
architectonic division of labor (to this extent alone like the Republic)
and the ability of individuals to actualize their respective capacities and
enjoy the rewards of their merit.
Cyrus’s own fulfillment as an individual at the peak of this vast multi-
national household crowns the ranked satisfactions available to the
meritocracy that serves him. His rule is the working out of Aristotle’s
definition of monarchy strictly speaking in Book 3 of the Politics as the
rule of a prudent man according to the proper art of household manage-
ment and capable of extension over many cities and nations (1285b20–
33). In keeping with this teaching about political hedonism, which
implies a rank ordering of respective human satisfactions, Xenophon –
in contrast to Machiavelli – evinces serious reservations about man’s
capacity to interfere with or reshape the order of nature and of the
soul’s satisfactions. For example, Cyrus’s father Cambyses (a Socrates
stand-in) warns the ambitious young conqueror that the variability of
fortune (tuche) and the inscrutability of the gods’ favor set limits on
what we can impose on nature through art (techne). To this we should
add Xenophon’s comparative assessment of Cyrus as a “good” man
who practices the art of ruling vis-à-vis the gentleman or “beautiful”
character pointed to by Ischomachus and the example of the Spartan
Lysander in the Oeconomicus. These distinctions are also given in the
order of the soul’s natural satisfactions, and the possibility that even
Cyrus’s meritocratic empire cannot encompass all of them (particularly
the kalos kagathos) reflects a natural limitation on the capacity of even
the best regime to foster every form of human excellence (Cyropae-
dia 1.6; 2.3.4; Oeconomicus 11.8; 4.4–16; 4.17–25; Memorabilia
3.9.10–13).
From this perspective, as we will see at length in the studies that
follow, Machiavelli’s differences stand out starkly. The capacity to
transform nature that Machiavelli attributes to the virtuous prince goes

27
 tyranny

much further than anything entertained by Xenophon. Machiavelli has

no teaching about political hedonism in the high sense of showing how
the virtues of the statesman par excellence are also the key to the soul’s
happiness. That Machiavelli (in chapter 9 of The Prince) promotes the
gratification of pedestrian desires in “the people” as a bond between
them and the prince does not contradict this assertion, because those
desires are limited to physical survival and material well-being – in
other words, limited, from the classical perspective, to the realm of
mere epithumia as opposed to eros. Machiavelli cannot have a teach-
ing about high political hedonism incentivized by an eros for honor
and a love of the noble because he does not share Xenophon’s or the
other classical thinkers’ view that there is an order of nature and of the
soul’s natural satisfactions. This lack of a high political hedonism in
Machiavelli’s thought is connected to his view of the world as Fortuna,
as clashing and hostile motions or “bodies.” The radical elevation of
motion over rest characteristic of Machiavelli’s new science of politics,
reversing the priority of classical philosophy and political philosophy,
is the source of a series of paradoxical assertions that stand the classical
teachings (including Xenophon’s) on their head – to wit, that “disunity”
and “chance” were the source of Rome’s greatness (Discourses 1: 2,4).
By contrast, it is as true for Xenophon as it is for Plato or Aristotle
that only unity or rest could be the source of the best regime and the
art of ruling. For, again, Cyrus’s cosmopolitan empire is the proper
art of household management writ large, a reflection of the natural
order.
In this connection we should note at the outset the continual privi-
leging throughout The Prince of touch and sensation over sight. As he
advises the prince in chapter 18 about how to manipulate his externally
perceived reputation for virtue, “everyone sees you, few touch what you
are.” The distrust of the visible phenomena of everyday politics – the
preference for the hidden, the subterranean, the unproclaimed – goes
together with the rejection of classical metaphysics, the most famous
Socratic metaphor for which is the eye of the soul, implying an initial
trust in how the visible “looks” of political life present themselves to the
eye and are clarified through logos. This reversal of the classical priority
of sight over touch is summed up in Machiavelli’s maxim that it is better
for the prince to be feared than loved (The Prince, chapter 17). Love
orients us to the world of the visible. The loving prince (Machiavelli’s

28
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

example is Scipio Africanus the Elder, disciple of Xenophon’s Educa-

tion of Cyrus and immortalized in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio as the
ancestor who comes in a dream to Scipio the Younger) believes he can
trust his subjects’ love for him as he stands revealed in his splendor
for having successfully ascended the ladder of the soul from lower to
higher virtues, from battlefield courage to the civic virtues to the life
of the mind in its access to the eternity of the divinely ordered cos-
mos. He is in turn for his followers a visible object of their own erotic
longing for the noble and good, the embodiment of the longing for
immortality through lasting fame. Fear, by contrast, cuts underneath
the world of the visible and touches us in our innermost passions of
base survival, and for Machiavelli it is therefore more reliable, because
opinions about the noble can change, while our fear of death is con-
stant. For Xenophon, however, although Cyrus’s status as a noble ruler
and an object for his subjects’ admiration is certainly open to suspicion
and undercut by many of his own hidden actions, it is by no means
a pure illusion or manipulation of appearances. In Machiavelli’s new
science of politics, the first step in the conquest of human nature is to
strip it of its noble pretensions and bring it face to face with its fear of
extinction.
As we consider at length in Chapter 3, Aristotle argues in Book 1 of
the Politics that there is certainly room for the art of political construc-
tion and fabrication – what Machiavelli comprehends as the mastery of
Fortuna – in statesmanship. In Aristotle’s view, however, the construc-
tivist dimension of statecraft based on habituation through coercion
and fear must be severely circumscribed, or politics (whether republi-
can or monarchical) would collapse into mastery, and the political realm
would disappear. Hence, Aristotle continues, we must believe that, just
as nature provides us with a sufficient wherewithal for economic sur-
vival such that nature need not be radically transformed by techne, so
it is also true that nature provides statesmanship with people whose
natures possess a sufficient degree of virtue that they do not have to
be “made” into citizens from scratch (Politics 1258a20–30). For all the
greater latitude that Xenophon gives to imperial politics, and notwith-
standing his comparative diminution of the claims of republican gov-
ernment, he is in agreement with this argument of Aristotle’s, and the
limitations his political theory places on the constructivist dimension
of statecraft are, at bottom, the fundamental philosophical difference

29
 tyranny

between him and Machiavelli. A telling sign of this is that in the Hiero,
the work of Xenophon’s that is most candid about transforming a tyrant
into a benevolent “leader,” it is not a philosopher who dispenses the
advice but a poet (literally a “maker”). Evidently Xenophon wishes to
separate the philosopher from the teaching that suggests nature (in this
case, a human nature) can be transformed or refabricated. Machiavelli,
by contrast, simply merges himself as thinker with the poet, assum-
ing the same transformative role with respect to the addressee of The
Prince that Xenophon has Simonides assume with respect to Hiero. We
explore these nuances at length in Chapters 4 and 5.
Now, to be sure, as Chapters 6 and 7 show in detail, Machiavelli also
believes there are limits on our capacity to master Fortuna, providing a
philosophical point of contact with the classics. Still, Machiavelli’s opti-
mism about the extent of our capacity to master Fortuna far exceeds,
I argue, anything to be found even in Xenophon, the classical thinker
most open to a politics of imperialism, individualism, and acquisition.
One need only mention the contention in chapter 6 of The Prince that
the most outstanding exemplars of virtue were able to “introduce into
matter whatever form they pleased.” This is a familiar scholastic for-
mula for describing God’s power to transform nature ex nihilo.1 That
Machiavelli appears to transfer this capacity for open-ended transfor-
mation to a human ruler speaks for itself – its radicalism can hardly be
exaggerated. It goes together with the assertion that Fortuna provides
such men with nothing more than the “opportunity” to test themselves,
in the form of dismally unpromising, obscure, dangerous, and hostile
origins and circumstances. By contrast, as we see in Chapters 4 and 5,
Xenophon’s Cyrus was highly favored by nature and circumstance –
his innate character and talents, the civic education he receives under
the Persian Republic, and his grandfather’s preference for Cyrus as his
heir to the throne of Media. For Machiavelli, by contrast, the only
favor nature does us is to goad us to strike back and make a stand.
Understanding Fortuna leads to radical alienation and dissociation from
nature, an experience that equips us with the strength of will to turn
back against nature so as to subdue and transform it.

1 Consider Thomas, Summa Theologica, Questions 44 and 93 The Principles of Natural

Science, Book II, Lecture 14, No. 268. See also Cornoldi (1893) ch. 7. A fuller discussion
of this issue is undertaken in Chapter 6.

30
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

In this connection, let me turn in a general and preliminary way

to Xenophon’s Hiero and Machiavelli’s rejoinder to it, a relationship
taken up at length in Chapters 4 and 5. Similar to some of Socrates’
criticisms of the tyrant’s life in Book 9 of the Republic, Simonides as
Xenophon depicts him in the Hiero tries in part to convince Hiero that
he will not only be more secure in his rule but he will also be a hap-
pier man, to the extent that the passion of unbridled eros for honor
and pleasure gives way to the more moderate sentiment of friendship
(philia) in his soul. Because neither his personal nor his public relations
will be exploitive, Simonides assures him, he will be able to trust the
friendship others profess for him. For his own part, Hiero is undoubt-
edly dissimulating about the degree to which he really wants friendship
as opposed to the power to possess both the city and other people as a
lover. Nevertheless, he is not simply lying, I think, when he says that he
would prefer voluntary and trusting friends to minions who are afraid
of him and secretly hate him. In other words, although Hiero may not
be a promising candidate for reform from a tyrant into a benevolent
“leader” (hegemon), it is plausible that the moderating of eros urged by
Simonides into philia both personally and politically is meant seriously
as a possible way of reforming a tyrant into a statesman (similar, as we
will see in due course, to the Platonic Socrates’ argument to Callicles in
the Gorgias).
For Machiavelli, by contrast, the problem is with the whole assump-
tion that eros exists in the first place and can therefore at least be
plausibly discussed as the basis for understanding tyranny and perhaps
moderating it. Machiavelli is not simply saying the ancients were naive
to think that a tyrant will give up his erotic pleasures for the calmer
pleasures of friendship. What he objects to is the whole characterization
of the tyrant as erotic, the whole psychological category of eros, pre-
cisely because it does contain the possibility for reforming the tyrant,
however great the difficulties may be. It is the very belief in the exis-
tence of eros, of the longing for beauty and nobility, that corrupts.
This is the problem with Scipio, who spoiled the soldiers with his love
and undermined the austere virtue of the Roman Republic (The Prince,
chapter 17), as we consider at length in Chapter 5. This is why, again,
properly understanding Fortuna jolts you into realizing that there are
no objects in the world in which your erotic longing can fulfill itself,
only alienation, dissociation, and the need to fight back. Plato and the

31
 tyranny

ancients ask: which way of life is erotically more satisfying, philosophy

or tyranny? For Machiavelli, it is the very posing of the question in this
way that obscures clear thinking. The methodical alternation within
oneself of caution and impetuosity – of the fox and the lion – takes the
place of the soul’s openness to transcendence through the longing for
the beautiful.

the primordial and the transcendental as

fundamental perspectives on political existence
Having made these preliminary comparisons between Machiavelli and
the classical thinker most congenial to his project as an initial way of
disclosing what precisely is modern about Machiavelli’s teaching on
tyranny, and by way of sketching the architecture of this book, I now
want to broaden the argument into a more general contrast between
the classical and modern approaches to statecraft. To this end, I suggest
looking at politics as a tension between the primordial and the tran-
scendental, a tension revealed by the psychology of thumos and eros,
the two fundamental passions in the Platonic account of the soul. By
primordial, I mean not only the idea that politics serves the passions
but also the ontology that establishes the primacy of the passions: the
sense that man is burdened with a consciousness of his finitude, mor-
tality, individuality, and alienation (an emphasis on anxiety stretching
from Hobbes to Heidegger). In this view, the origins are fundamental.
By transcendental, on the other hand, I mean the view of politics as
directed toward a common end that lifts man above his passions and
orients him toward permanence and eternity. Whereas primordial pol-
itics has as its extreme the abstract homogeneity of the passions (what
Hobbes termed the “similitude of the passions”),2 the extreme of tran-
scendental politics is the abstract homogeneity of pure self-identity and
the One (exemplified by Socrates’ argument in the Republic that the
citizens of the kallipolis should be united like the limbs of a single body
[420b–421c]). The reform of tyranny emerges as the attempt to actu-
alize these extremes of transcendental or primordial homogeneity as a
political project, corresponding respectively to the ancient and modern
paradigms. The two ways of reforming tyranny differ crucially. For the

2 Hobbes (1971) pp. 82–83.

32
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

classics, tyranny, once reformed into a rational despotism like that of

the herdsman of “featherless bipeds” in the Statesman (266–267) or
Aristotle’s model of the best monarch, attempts to bring political life
into closer conformity with the unchanging One, and the pattern of
cosmological reason within which human nature finds its place. For
the moderns, by contrast, reason itself is assimilated to the will, while
the substantive content of reason articulated through the cosmologies
of the ancients becomes the purely anthropocentric capacity for the
methodical imposition of formalistic order on nature through an act of
will. The classical way of reason in politics becomes the modern way of
political rationality.
Let us begin with the psychological dimension of the classical and
modern approaches to see how the passions of the soul might connect
with the wider world. In Plato, aggressiveness derives primarily from the
psychology of spiritedness (thumos) – not psychology in the behavioral
sense but as an intimation of the link between the soul and the world.
The spirited man is the revealer of the gods, whom he calls into being to
lend his own suffering or frustration the significance of a cosmic oppo-
nent (as when Achilles challenges the river god; Republic 391a–b). This
man also invokes the gods as allies in punishing others, avenging himself
for the deprivation he suffers. The spirited man can be subversive of the
city when, like Leontius, he is drawn to dwell obsessively on the crimes
and violence on which even lawful societies are founded (439e–440b).
Like Polus, he may feel he has to become a tyrant out of fear that he
will otherwise be tyrannized over (Gorgias 469–470). What is common
to these manifestations of thumos is that the disjunction between man’s
longings for happiness, dignity, and repose and the achievement of their
goal hurls him back on himself, with increased feelings of fear and vul-
nerability or anger and belligerence. Thumos is revealed in this tension
(one of its etymologies relates it to rushing like the wind), calling on the
gods from the depths of the soul not to forsake us. As the embodiment
of thumos for Plato, Achilles is either a mad hero or in a paralyzing
funk.
The complement of thumos is eros, the longing for completion
through union with the beautiful or noble. Spiritedness comes to the
fore when eros is thwarted. Callicles, who loves the boy Demos and
the Athenian people (demos), loses his temper when Socrates likens his
position (both personally and politically) to a catamite (Gorgias 494e).

33
 tyranny

As Socrates prods him into seeing the chasm between his longing for
nobility and the putatively pandering character of his relationships in
both private and public life, his eros collapses into his thumos. Before
that, his mood is one of sublime confidence in his own capacities and
of admiration for the even greater “natural master” who tramples over
all convention (Gorgias 482–486). After Socrates deflates his eros, his
generosity and good humor give way to sullen resentment. As we will
consider in Chapter 2, the most potent figure in political life, capable
of either the noblest or the basest actions, is the man whose thumos is
absorbed into his eros, who sails above anxiety in his urge to consum-
mate his union with the city, his “beloved.” This is the type of nature
Socrates most hopes to save for philosophy, and his closest embodiment
in the dialogues is Alcibiades. For Plato, the root psychological motiva-
tion behind tyranny is an erotic longing to possess the city in the same
way that ordinary men would long to possess another human being. In
such a deformed soul, the zeal and aggressiveness of thumos become
the allies of an eros for tyrannical possession of the city. The aim of
Platonic civic pedagogy is to reorient eros toward the love of the Good
glimpsed through philosophizing, so that thumos can act instead as the
ally of wisdom and the civic virtues.3
Thus, in my view, and as I argue throughout this book, of these
two fundamental passions that can lead us either toward tyranny or
toward an openness to the eternal Good, eros entails and has primacy
over thumos. In its spontaneous emergence, prior to philosophic and
pedagogical shaping, eros strikes out for whatever it desires, summoning
forth the aggressive energy of thumos as its ally. Left on its own, thumos
by itself, without the leadership of eros, wallows in gloomy ruminations,
fear or anger – only erotic longing gives it a purpose. The same holds
after these passions are sublimated in the service of philosophy and the
common good: eros unifies the soul in the pursuit of the Good, assigning
thumos its subordinate role as ally.4 To see how Platonic civic pedagogy
tries to effect this sublimation, let us consider some of Plato’s famous
images of the soul.

3 Newell (2000) pp. 1–5.

4 On interpreting thumos as an existential stance toward the world, consider Ricoeur
(1965) pp. 161–163m, 184–185. On the interrelatedness of thumos and eros, see Pangle
(1976) pp. 1059–1077.

34
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

education and imitation: images of the soul

in plato’s dialogues
If one accepts (as I do) the grouping of the Platonic dialogues accord-
ing to their intrinsic content as early, middle and late, then one of
the hallmarks of Platonic political philosophy is the transition from
the early protreptic dialogues, which are mainly based on the Socratic
elenchus of the short question and answer, to the middle dialogues, in
which there is a sudden flowering not only of more rounded human
portraits but of Socrates’ interest in the passions of the soul, espe-
cially eros and thumos.5 To this period belong as well the dialogues
most famous for their myths and images – the Republic, Phaedrus, and
Symposium notable among them. Whereas the early dialogues show
Socrates attempting in the main to convince his interlocutors strictly
according to reasonable argument, in the middle period, Socrates is
shown as being aware that the intellect must also be reached through the
passions and emotions. In other words, people will not necessarily act
reasonably even if persuaded of the truth by reasoned argument. Their
characters must be put into a proper condition to receive this truth, and

5 To a degree, then, I differ from the emphasis of Zuckert (2009), whose study of the
dialogues has rightly been termed “magisterial.” Zuckert’s approach, similar to another
recent book by Lampert (2010), argues that we should arrive at the order of the dialogues
by examining the internal biography of Socrates that they present. Although I agree that
this is a fruitful approach, in my own view, the internal biography of Socrates presented by
Plato is only one among a number of useful perspectives one might take on the dialogues.
Another is to group them thematically as dealing with a) the short question-and-answer
“protreptic” approach of the Socratic elenchus characteristic of, say, the Euthyphro;
b) Socrates’ extensive use of myths, images, and rhetoric as ways of appealing to the
intellect through the affects typified by the Symposium and Republic; c) a concern with
more purely metaphysical issues characteristic of the Theaetetus and Sophist. To be sure,
one could assent to this thematic division into three groups without necessarily buying
into any theory about the order in which the dialogues were composed – for example, the
fact that the Euthyphro is more of a protreptic dialogue does not in itself entitle one to
conclude that it was composed at an earlier date than, say, the Symposium. Still, against
the exclusive reliance on the internal biography, I maintain that Plato viewed his teacher
from these three different although not unrelated perspectives as his own meditation on
the life of Socrates unfolded over time. In his edition of the Gorgias, Dodds claims that
Plato deliberately blurs the internal chronology of the dialogues, juxtaposing events and
personalities that could not have been together at the same time, to prevent us from
viewing the dialogues, even internally, as unfolding in unilinear time according to the
stages of Socrates’ life. There is a sense, Dodds remarks, in which they take place “any
time” because Platonic philosophy itself is concerned with truths that are not time bound.
Dodds in Plato (1979) pp. 17–18.

35
 tyranny

they must also be convinced of the emotional and aesthetic satisfaction

that is entailed by the pursuit of philosophical insight. Accordingly,
these middle-period dialogues also introduce a new stress on education,
rhetoric, and the reform of poetry as mediums through which the wis-
dom sought by philosophy, and the value of the philosophic life, can be
shaped for reception by a variety of psychological types and audiences.6
The passions of eros and thumos are the gateways to transcendence;
pathways, through their own progressive self-understanding and redi-
rection, up toward the sunlight of what truly is. Of course, we must
not push this periodization of early, middle, and late too far: Ostensi-
bly early dialogues such as the Alcibiades 1 do supplement argument
with long speeches (the royal myth extolling the Persian and Spartan
constitutions), while middle dialogues such as the Gorgias contain long
exchanges of refutational reasoning (such as the exchange with Polus)
that are relatively barren of imagery. Even so, the trove of great myths
and images including the Chariot of the Soul, the three images of phi-
losophy in the Republic (the Sun, the Line, and the Cave), the myths
of judgment in the afterlife that conclude the Gorgias and the Repub-
lic, and Socrates’ long speech about eros in the Symposium – these do
appear to set off the middle-period dialogues in their distinctive concern
with appealing to reason through the affects.
Although the Platonic Socrates’ intellectual adversaries, that group
we now call the Sophists, are sometimes understood as appealing to
passion in contrast with Socrates’ appeal to reason, a more nuanced
consideration would show that, although the Sophists’ understanding
of passion remains fairly sketchy and minimal, often reducing to a mere
desire for “getting the better” of others, the Platonic Socrates has a
vastly more subtle and probing diagnosis of the affects. To take but

6 Blondell (2002) has persuasively argued for the need to reconcile the dramatic or psy-
chological reading of the Platonic dialogues with the analytical, to see how seemingly
impersonal metaphysical speculations emerge from psychological portraits of literary
genius, in such a way that the dramatic reading should only further illuminate the analyt-
ical. Annas (1981) also argues that, for Plato, making the right intellectual choice about
just action is inseparable from the character development required for embracing that
choice. I make a similar argument, against a Kantian approach to Plato, that Plato cannot
be understood exclusively in terms of either moral duty or perfectionism (Newell 2000,
ch. 3). Arguing specifically with respect to shame and Socrates’ employment of certain
varieties of it to bolster civic virtue, Tarnopolsky (2010) also argues that there can be no
strict dichotomy between emotion and reason in Platonic political psychology.

36
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

one example, where in any of the surviving pre-Socratic or Sophists’

writings would we encounter a figure as darkly brilliant, ambivalent,
saturnine, and glimmering as Alcibiades in the Symposium? As a lit-
erary portrait, it ranks with anything to be found in Shakespeare or
Flaubert. Yet it is also a vehicle for considering the meaning of the
philosophic life and its satisfactions by ranging Socrates’ independence
from the Athenian demos alongside the frustration experienced by its
greatest living statesman. He appears in the Symposium on the eve of the
disastrous military expedition to Sicily, which he more than any other
leader provoked the Athenians to undertake and which will bring him
down, the final political consequence of his tortured careening between
wooing the many and wooing Socrates – the man who starts out, as
Alcibiades bitterly complains, as your lover but who always transforms
himself into the beloved (222b–d). Moreover, whereas for the Sophists,
passions and desires could never be more than local coloration for
whatever set of conventions happened to prevail in a given city and are
therefore, as we would now say, culturally conditioned, the Platonic
Socrates takes seriously the universality of the passions as a constant
in human nature everywhere, a path to tyranny and violence but also
potentially the path to a transcendence that would also be universally
valid and not merely a feature of some local code, custom, or prejudice.
The Socrates parodied in Aristophanes’ Clouds naively believed that,
as a Sophist, he could protect himself from the passions of the many by
using his intellect to erect a buffer of rhetorical self-coloration between
himself and them. While studying natural science, he could insulate
himself from the ignorant many by teaching the art of tricky rhetoric
for pay. As Aristophanes’ depiction suggests, the Sophists at their most
venal saw rhetoric as mere camouflage, a bag of tricks for manipulating
local prejudices that had no connection with the universality of real
knowledge such as the study of nonhuman nature through mathemat-
ics or astronomy. But the angry revenge taken against Socrates in the
Clouds by Strepsiades, the country bumpkin who has married up, for
corrupting his wastrel son shows how impossible it is to protect reason
from its influence on the nonphilosophic – and that passions of family
honor, familial attachments, and outraged indignation at the alienation
of sons from their fathers by corrupt mentors are constitutive of human
life everywhere.

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 tyranny

In contrast with Aristophanes’ lampoon of him, the Socrates we

encounter in the Platonic dialogues, especially the middle dialogues,
has fully absorbed the need to fashion rhetorically and psychologically
subtle appeals to the emotions that will lead them toward philosophy
or at least a respect and friendship for it. In this sense, he leans far
away from the reductive utilitarian rationalism of the Sophists and is
more interested in learning from, while rehabilitating, the depth of the
emotional landscape uncovered by the poets and tragedians.7 While
Socrates certainly does call for the censoring of poetry, this does not
imply its complete suppression, but rather its redirection.8 As he argues
in the Republic, one must expose oneself to the charm of the vices
lionized and made dulcet by the poets in order to be able to distinguish
virtue from vice and praise it in verse (409b–d). His final word on the
poets is that the “sweetness” of their verses might well be an ally in
charming the impressionable young to prefer virtue over vice, as long
as heroes like Achilles are shown for the spoiled and insubordinate
whiners that they frequently are (like bawling children who go around
holding the part that hurts until they get some attention [604c–d]).
Most of Socrates’ own tales and images – the Chariot of the Soul,
the story of Leontius, the myths of Er and Rhadamanthys, the Ship of
State, Diotima’s Ladder – contain recognizable elements from widely
known poetry, tragedy, comedy and folk-lore that would make them
automatic “hooks” for his listeners, even as he massages their content
away from the teaching attributed by Socrates to his predecessors that
nature is strife and motion – and that, therefore, a life of impulse and
domination is more truly reflective of nature at large – toward the
Platonic cosmological hypotheses that “soul came first”; that stability

7 For the background of Socrates’ relationship to tragedy, consider Eliade (1978) pp. 259–
264 and Dodds (1984) pp. 29–50.
8 Socrates on the dangers of poetry: “For my dear Adeimantus, if our young should seriously
hear such things and not laugh scornfully at them as unworthy speeches, it’s not very
likely that any one of them would believe these things to be unworthy of himself, and
would reproach himself if it should enter into his head to say or do any such thing.
Rather, with neither shame nor endurance, he would chant many dirges and laments at
the slightest sufferings . . . We’ll beg Homer and the other poets not to be harsh if we
strike out these and all similar things. It’s not that they are not poetic and sweet for the
many to hear, but the more poetic they are, the less should they be heard by boys and
men who must be free and accustomed to fearing slavery more than death” (Republic
388d, 387b).

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and moderation are super-ordinate over motion and strife both in the
world and in a properly attuned soul (Laws 892).
Viewed in this light, Socratic philosophizing can be seen as an alterna-
tion between refutation and integration – between elenchus and image.
On one level, the Republic as a whole can be seen as Socrates’ explo-
ration of a new, reasoned poetry that would replace the manipulators of
the “images” carried along the ramp at the rear of the Cave, the unseen
source of the shadow play that the prisoners chained below mistake for
reality. Socrates’ new images will still be only a reflection of the truth,
but they will contain a kernel of philosophic transcendence that might
induce their viewers to turn around and look for the light of true being,
the Idea of the Good, in which those partial truths participate – not
mere seeming, but “correct” seeming or opinion. The elenchus is the
rough handling that Socrates says the prisoner in the cave first needs to
force him to turn around and look up toward the light (515d–516a). Its
negative refutation serves to dissect and expose as inadequate the opin-
ions of Socrates’ interlocutors about the virtues they profess to know
about and seek, while Socrates’ images gather the fragments of this
negative dialectic and re-integrate them into a more satisfying account
on the basis of what has been learned. For instance, the image of the
Ship of State (488) beautifully integrates the proposition that there is an
art of ruling properly informed by the philosopher’s desire for know-
ledge of the Good, and that the nonphilosophic will benefit, like the
passengers of a well-steered ship, if political life is guided by this true
pilot. Yet the actual content of this art, and of the philosophic life itself,
as well as its precise benefits for the city, are merely sketched rather than
filled out in the image. For up to this point in the Republic, Socrates
has merely asserted that there is an art of ruling analogous to the other
crafts, and that it is synonymous with philosophy, but the content of
which has not yet been filled in, merely assigned a place to hold in
the tri-partite hierarchy of the city and the soul.9 It is no more than a
supposition at this point that there is an art of ruling comparable to

9 Socrates’ introduction of the philosophic Guardians rests on the most flimsy of analogies
conceivable, that between the loyal guard-dog Auxillaries’ knowledge of how to distin-
guish between citizen and non-citizen and the philosopher’s search for the distinction
between knowledge and lack of knowledge in general: “Does the man who will be a fit
guardian need, in addition to spiritedness, also to be a philosopher in his nature? . . . since
(this soul) defines what’s its own and what’s alien by knowledge and ignorance . . . So

39
 tyranny

the other crafts in the precision of its knowledge and its criterion for
the distribution of a solid benefit to a specific clientele. We know what
those other arts are – we do not yet know what justice is.10 The assim-
ilation of statesmanship to philosophy is lent a solidity by the Ship of
State image that is not actually manifest in the discussion itself at that
point in the Republic, but whose very ambivalence and incompleteness
invites further reflection while outwardly preserving the vision of a poli-
tics guided by selfless moderation grounded in a knowledge of the starry
cosmos.
Socrates depicts his intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo as turn-
ing away from the attempt to give the direct speech about being – the
pre-Socratics’ tendency to identify nature with one force such as motion,
strife, or a simple dyadic alternation between love and strife as principles
regnant throughout the cosmos – and toward conversing about different
opinions regarding the virtues (95a–107d). As Aristotle was later to put
it, the only approach to what is “first by nature” – that is, metaphysical
truth – is by way of what is “first for us” – political life and moral-
ity (Nicomachean Ethics 1095a17–b6). For Socrates, the debate about
what justice, moderation, piety, and so on might mean pointed to the
fact that there must be an “idea” or “form” of each virtue that solicited
the debate and disagreement. Since the form was entirely consistent with
itself, stable and permanent, then by considering how an opinion held
about a virtue failed to be free of contradiction or instability, we would
know in the case of each such opinion what virtue was not, and thereby
make progress, through excluding mere seeming, toward what virtue
truly is. If opinions about a virtue could be sifted through, retained,
or cast aside to the extent that they were consistent or inconsistent
with the “form” of virtue “in itself,” then progress toward the truth
could be made, not through the direct characterization of being, but
intermediately through the clarification of these heterogeneous human
qualities. Thus, when Socrates asks Euthyprho to define the holy, and
Euthyprho proceeds to give a series of examples of pious behavior,
Socrates tells him that he does not want a mere list of arguably pious

shall we be bold and assert that . . . the man who’s going to be a fine and good guardian
of the city will in his nature be philosophic, spirited, swift and strong” (375d–376c).
10 As Zeigler notes, we need a skilled craftsman to pursue the good because it is not a
matter of subjective preference, but instead is grounded in the objective ordering of the
whole (1979) pp. 124–125.

40
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

actions, but to know what the form of the pious is unchangingly “in
itself” (6e).
The focus on the Ideas as the beginning of the Socratic “turn” com-
ports with Socrates’ famous claim in the Apology, another attempt at an
intellectual autobiography, that he knows that he knows nothing (21d;
Republic 354c).11 While Socrates’ claim is ostensibly humbly advanced,
the ability to know in the case of every important human endeavor what
the limits of our knowledge are amounts to a powerful theoretical claim.
For the clarification of the virtues guided by the search for, in each case,
a permanent, unvarying and universally valid Idea, amounts to parsing
opinion to show in each case how justice is not this, is not that, is not
this either, until one has demolished most conventional and authorita-
tive opinions and is left with mere fragments.12 For instance, in the very
first pages of the Republic, by considering the customary opinion that
justice is paying what is owed, and comparing that with the question
of whether it would be good to return a borrowed weapon to someone
of unsound mind, Socrates’ companions learn that justice is not nec-
essarily synonymous with property rights, a powerful negative insight
that almost requires in itself, then and there, that a just regime will be
communistic, though the implications are not spelled out for several
more books.13 Knowing that we know nothing amounts to knowing
how any given opinion or phenomenon falls short of the consistency
and non-contradictory permanence of the Idea in which it participates.
Socrates’ myths and images, accordingly, are ways of restoring a sense
of the wholeness that our opinions about the virtues seemingly possess
before they are deflated by the elenchus, re-integrating what refutation
has shattered by fashioning an emotionally appealing symbol of the
progress in knowledge that has been made. Hence, the growing aware-
ness in the middle dialogues of Socrates’ need to enlist allies in making

11 For a discussion of the Delphic Quest in the Apology as another version of the Socratic
“turn,” consider Strauss (1983).
12 In his elegantly argued discussion of Socrates and his successors, Villa (2001) stresses
the skeptical, questioning side of the Socratic dialectic, more intent on exposing the
inadequate conceptions of his fellow citizens than in bolstering their moral attachments.
In this sense, Villa argues, he was a “bad” citizen. As Annas observes of the Republic,
it is “meant to startle and shock” (1981) p. 2.
13 As Blitz observes about this passage, “legal force” in the defense of property right is
valid only to the degree to which it is guided by a knowledge of what is truly good for
the individual and for the common good (2010) p. 167.

41
 tyranny

philosophy more palatable and accessible to the emotions – the need

to reform rhetoric, perhaps to enlist rhetoricians like Gorgias or Pro-
tagoras in a new, philosophically grounded art of oratory; the need to
provide poets with new models of the soul and cosmos, which Socrates
tries to do with Phaedrus in the dialogue with him and with Agathon
in the Symposium, where Diotima’s alleged speech about eros reported
by Socrates is, I will argue, meant to provide Agathon with a model for
the new poetry of love he aspires to create in place of Homer’s poetry
of tragic necessity and strife.
Socrates’ encounter with Callicles in the Gorgias brings a number of
these elements together. In his great set piece extolling injustice, Calli-
cles draws upon a number of familiar views attributed to the Sophists
and pre-Socratics, doubtless a reflection of his esteem for Gorgias him-
self, the eminent visiting rhetorician, grammarian, and ambassador for
hire. In particular, Callicles distinguishes between what is just and noble
merely by convention – the morality of equality – and what is just and
noble by nature – the sway of the “natural master” who tramples over
all such pusillanimous democratic moralizing (483e–484a).14 In this,
he hopes to rescue Gorgias and Polus from their earlier encounters
with Socrates, where, Callicles maintains, they were tricked by Socrates
into confusing natural justice and nobility with the merely conventional
kind, forcing them to admit that what was just by nature was shame-
ful by convention, with Socrates unscrupulously flitting back and forth
between one criterion and the other without saying so. In respond-
ing, however, rather than tackle Callicles’ position head on through
refutation, as he did with Gorgias and Polus, Socrates instead begins
by engaging his position through the emotions, especially through

14 Callicles uses language akin to a religious revelation when he proclaims that “nature
herself” manifests the “shining” truth that it is “just” and a “law of nature” for the
better and more powerful to rule over the worse and weaker and to “get the better” of
them, building up to a crescendo of anti-egalitarianism: “I think these men are acting in
accordance with natural justice when they do such things, and, by God, in accordance
with the law, too, the law of nature – though not, indeed, the laws we frame. For we
mold the natures of the best and strongest among us, raising them from infancy by the
incantation of a charmed voice, as men do lion cubs. We enslave them by saying that
they must be equal and that only this is noble and justice. Yet I think that if a real man
appears, of capacity sufficient to shake off and break through our mass of written rules,
spells and charms – all against nature – our erstwhile slave will stand forth revealed as
the master, and thus natural justice will shine forth!” On the character of the Greek,
see Dodds in Plato (1979) p. 267.

42
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

eros.15 The ensuing refutation is grounded in a psychological diag-

nosis by Socrates that claims Callicles is a “double man” because of
his erotic confusion (482). Callicles believes that he can become, or at
least approximate in his impending political career, the natural master
he extols in his speech by becoming the conventionally powerful leader
of Athens. In this, Socrates predicts, he will find that his role of master
quickly reverses itself into the role of slave and pander. Just as he is at
the beck and call of the fickle boy Demos, whom he wants to possess, so
he will be at the beck and call of the fickle Athenian democracy (481).
His erotic longing for complete satisfaction and independence is natu-
ral, but it cannot be satisfied, Socrates tell him, through tyranny or any
kind of merely political pre-eminence. He needs to replace his passion
for erotic victory over the Athenian Demos and the boy Demos with a
more moderate desire for friendship (philia) with them. Just as he should
be Demos’ friend in order to lead him to virtue rather than his ravisher,
he should, in his upcoming political career, seek to turn the Athenian
demos away from empire and the erotic excesses it feeds and instead
turn Athenian politics inward into purely internal self-government with
limited material needs and external entanglements. In this way, the city
led by Callicles might, along with his love life, mirror the orderliness,
balance, friendliness, and geometrical proportionality characteristic of
the cosmos as a whole (504–508).
It is arguable that Socrates is also addressing Gorgias himself through
his fiery young follower, appealing to the older teacher to re-calibrate his
own teaching of rhetoric to serve these more moderate ends. As Socrates
warns Callicles – and therefore perhaps also Gorgias, who is listening
to the exchange along with the other participants – Callicles’ belief that
mastering others is the natural life while the democratic morality of
equality is merely a convention is as likely to get him into trouble with
the Athenian democracy as is Socrates’ philosophizing, especially if he
is one of their leaders when the empire falls (519). A moderate rhetoric
might both prevent anti-democratic hot-heads like Polus from being
associated with Gorgias (who is adamant in disavowing responsibility
for how certain of his students turn out [457]) and shield Gorgias

15 On how Socrates enlists Callicles’ passions in order to play on his longing for wholeness
to turn him away from tyranny, and not by an appeal to reason alone, consider Klosko
(1983).

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himself from the imputation of endorsing tyranny. The appeal of this

prescription for Callicles, however, is left in doubt by his silence at the
end of the dialogue, and by his refusal to engage in open discussion
with Socrates after Socrates compares him to a catamite (494). In so
rigorously suppressing eros and subordinating all the passions to a
rather contentless, proto-Stoic creed of austere self-overcoming both
in politics and private life, Socrates ends up forbidding Callicles the
erotic inducement both to philosophizing and to political honor with
which he began his own psychiatric diagnosis of Callicles and his hope
that Callicles might change his ways. Given a choice between witless
eros and passionless reason as Socrates poses the stark alternatives
here, grounded in an exaggeratedly absolute distinction between body
and soul, Callicles truculently embraces the former. He is a stunning
example of how a man can be persuaded by Socrates’ arguments on
the level of reason, but deliberately resist them in order to preserve his
dignity and pursue the life he desires.
In other dialogues, however, such as the Symposium, Republic and
Phaedrus, Socrates is able to achieve a more convincing and appeal-
ing balance and symbiosis between intellect and passion through his
great images of the soul. While the Gorgias ends up positing a division
between the body and the soul so dichotomous that it anticipates Sto-
icism and even Christianity, in the Symposium, in a compensating move
toward the middle realm, eros is depicted as the vehicle for a continu-
ous, seamless ascent from bodily passion through the nobility of civic
virtue to the highest level of contemplating the eternally beautiful in
itself – an ascent that is simultaneously rational, aesthetic, character-
forming, and erotically therapeutic.16 As Socrates depicts it, Diotima
had upbraided him at some unspecified earlier period for not being
“willing” to examine the “human beings’ eros for honour.” Were he
to do so, she told him, “you would be amazed at their irrationality,
unless you bear in mind what I have said and reflect on how uncannily

16 Eros is a “demon” between the divine and the human, an intermediary that “binds
together the whole” (202e–203a). As for the Beautiful itself, Diotima says: “(It) is
always being and neither comes into being nor passes away . . . It is by itself and with
itself, always being of a single form . . . For this is what it is to proceed correctly in
erotics, or to be led by another – beginning with the beautiful things around us, always
to proceed on up for the sake of beauty itself, ending at that study which is the study of
nothing other than the beautiful itself” (211a–c).

44
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

they are affected by their love of renown . . . for the sake of immortal-
ity, virtue and an illustrious reputation” (208c–d). His initiation by her
into the rites of eros constitutes another version of the Socratic “turn”
from cosmology and natural science to the human things variously
depicted in the Apology (through the Delphic Quest) and the Phaedo
(the turn from the direct speech about being to the clarification of polit-
ical and moral opinions through the Ideas). While initially unwilling
to examine the eros of humans for honor because it was “irrational,”
Socrates’ “wonder” at this eros at length incentivized him to “reflect” on
the honor-seekers’ psychology, just as Diotima adjured him to do. The
Gorgias, Symposium, and Republic, taken together, explore the reaches
of this eros for honor, including the attraction to tyranny, and try to
re-direct this energy away from such excess to a robust service of the
common good, hopefully accompanied by at least a respect for philos-
ophy if not an outright pursuit of it. All of the most famous images
are therefore aimed at enlisting while moderating a love of honor that
is potentially tyrannical, using visual symbolism to extol a life guided
by reason in which the erotic and spirited passions would achieve their
greatest emotional satisfaction precisely through being sublimated by
an orientation toward the eternal truth.

Let us look more closely at how these images are fashioned to sublimate
and re-direct the eros for political honor away from tyranny toward
civic virtue and philosophy. I want to begin with the general observation
that even most contemporary exponents of artificial intelligence would
concede that there is something about the soul or the self that cannot be
expressed in propositional terms; that even if all human knowledge and
experience could be digitalized or expressed algorithmically, it would
not constitute a self-conscious personality. In other words, the super-
computer Big Blue may be able to defeat a Grand Master at chess,
but Big Blue is not playing chess – it is merely solving a problem, and
could as well be operating a desalination plant or the space shuttle.
A computer can simulate Bach by sampling all information about his
music to a degree that might fool all but a seasoned musicologist –
but would it occur to a computer to compose music of its own? The
motivation to create is strictly human.
What cannot be expressed logically about the soul and its relationship
to the world might be expressed symbolically as a myth, such as Freud’s

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Oedipus complex. As Sophocles’ original depiction of Oedipus would

have it, destiny and fate always play a role, perhaps more powerful
than the intellect and freedom of choice, in determining our conduct.
Oedipus begins by imagining he is the favorite of Apollo, the god of the
sunlight, patron of beauty, mind and the art of ruling. But he goes down
to his doom in a Dionysian unraveling as his destiny destroys his claims
to be a beneficent ruler: From a tyrant aspiring to legitimize himself into
a king, he is exposed as a parricide in an incestuous relationship with
his mother. By gouging out his own eyes, he not only punishes himself,
but exacts vengeance on himself for his trust in the shining image of his
own superiority, literally duplicating the blindness of Teresias, whose
advice is to lay low, not probe too deeply into life’s secrets, and not
tempt the gods with one’s hubris (315–320; 375–380; 1330–1335).17
In the tragic view of life, something about the world and especially
about ourselves will always elude complete clarity: We are in the grip
of forces larger than ourselves. Poetic imagery is a way of showing
how man might relate to and cope with these forces; how they might
operate on us through our desires, hopes, fears, and passions. Religious
ethnographers like Eliade (1978) have argued that mythic archetypes
are embedded in our subconscious way of grasping the world at a tacit,
prereflexive level. We continually act out these cycles of heroic despair
and triumph, the knight’s longing to serve a chivalrous cause and rescue
a damsel in distress, a heroism often requiring a long night of the soul
and inner purification, like Tamino in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Plato’s use
of myth and images most definitely probes these archetypes. Think of
Glaucon’s Ring of Gyges tale in the Republic (359c–360b). It blends
the philosopher’s prying into things under the earth (as Socrates claims
people charge him with doing in the Apology) with archaic heroism

17 As Euben notes, at the beginning of the play, Oedipus thinks he is the child of tuche or
fortune, independent of nomos or convention (1990) p. 98, n.8. On the greater affinity
of the Republic with comedy than with tragedy, consider Euben (1990) p. 241 and
Saxonhouse (1978). See also the illuminating study of Sophocles by Ahrensdorf (2009).
As against Nietzsche’s critique of Socrates for destroying the tragic age with his hyper-
trophic rationalism, Ahrensdorf argues that Sophocles does promote a role, although
not an excessive one, for reason in good government, as opposed to the hubristic reliance
on reason of Sophocles’ Oedipus. He also argues, against Nietzsche, that the political
philosophy of Plato evinces a profound awareness of the tragic dimension in life and
political life, a view with which I very much concur in my interpretation of Plato’s myths
and images, and especially in the disjunction between the erotic longing to possess the
beautiful forever and our human incapacity to do so.

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promising a secret source of strength. Gyges descends into a womblike

cave in which he finds the naked body of some larger than life hero
within a windowed bronze horse. He takes the hero’s ring of invisibility
(it is unclear whether it conferred that power on the archaic hero, or only
on Gyges for uncovering the secret of his existence) and uses it to steal
of Queen of Lydia and usurp the throne. As a shepherd, Gyges stands
outside of society like other famous rustic usurpers including Romulus
and the Cyrus of Herodotus’ account (unlike that of Xenophon), who
rise from rural obscurity to great power. Through such myths, Plato
concedes that an existential experience of “wonder” (thaumazein) at
life’s buried mysteries might be needed to explain what incentivizes us
to seek knowledge.18 (Just as Diotima told Socrates that men’s eros for
honor and its apparent irrationality would strike him as “wondrous”
were he willing to examine their love of honor more closely.) Indeed,
Socrates explains his own study of the Ideas as rooted in an erotic
longing for completion, a longing for union with the beautiful and the
good – or, as Diotima puts it, a longing to possess the Good as one’s
own forever – and he can probe the souls of his interlocutors to unlock
this same longing for completion. That all said, however, we must
never cross all the way over into identifying Platonic myth and imagery
with a purely intuitive, existential, or pre-rational experience. What
might begin as an erotic intuition of neediness leads, when properly
clarified, toward the study of the Good, the objective reality that informs
both a reasonably structured cosmos and a well-ordered soul. Diotima’s
account of eros as the lean and hungry off-spring of Resource and
Poverty (203b–d) may begin with a level of prereflexive experience
analogous to that explored by Freud and Jung. But her Ladder of Love
reaches its highest rung in the same pursuit of permanent knowledge
about the whole as that sought by Newton or Einstein.
If the Apology is the most public of Plato’s depictions of Socrates,
the Symposium is the most personal, ensconced Rashoman-like within
five layers of surrounding narrative, boxes within boxes. Not coinci-
dentally, it is also the most complete portrait of Alcibiades, who, after
his first encounter with Socrates in the Alcibiades 1, reappears like

18 Euben makes an intriguing argument for returning to a Nietzschean view of the Greek
polis as providing a context for the rise of classical philosophy, liberating us from
intervening attempts at historical teleology (2003) ch. 2.

47
 tyranny

one of Balzac’s recurring characters in cameo roles until the Sympo-

sium, where we finally see how central he and Socrates have been to
each other’s lives. Alcibiades’ appearance may well be on the eve of
his departure on the Sicilian Expedition, the zenith of Athenian impe-
rial overextension whose chief instigator, according to Thucydides, was
Alcibiades himself.19 Chosen by the Athenians as the man likeliest to
be victorious, they shortly recalled him because they feared he would
tyrannize over them on the speed of that success, guaranteeing the expe-
dition’s doom by placing it under Nicias, the leader most opposed to
the venture, extremely reluctant to expand the war while Athens had
not yet beaten Sparta. All in all, Alcibiades is the paradigm of the young
man described in the Republic as having both the greatest potential for
philosophy and the greatest potential for being de-railed into excessive
ambition and tyranny (491d–492a), and Socrates’ intimate relationship
with Alcibiades – in his detractors’ eyes, a licentious and war-mongering
demagogue – is a touchstone for his efforts to re-direct those energies
toward philosophy and the common good.
But to what degree is Socrates responsible for the way his protégé
turns out? That is not easy to determine. In Aristophanes’ parody of
their relationship in the Clouds, Pheidippides, the Alcibiades stand-in,
begins, prior to any exposure to the “sophist” Socrates, as an unthink-
ing libertine and spoiled rich kid. Once exposed to Socrates, when he
reemerges from the “thinkery” (phrontisterion) of Socrates’ pale-faced
crew, he begins to justify his vices with the theoretical language of
the distinction between nature and convention, thereby suggesting the
possibility that the Aristophanean Socrates may have deepened Phei-
dippides’ corruption by giving it a philosophical basis. The Platonic
Socrates’ first encounter with Alcibiades contains a kindred ambiguity.
Socrates prods Alcibiades into confessing that he has a passion to rule
not merely in Athens but over the whole world (104–105). But it is
not clear how precisely or self-consciously the youth had formed this
ambition for himself beforehand.20 Socrates wants to expand the hori-
zons of this promising young aristocrat beyond Athens, using the two
paradigmatic and superior regimes of Sparta and Persia to convince
Alcibiades that he needs to make a study of the art of ruling, inasmuch

19 See the fuller discussion in Chapter 4 and in Newell (2009) Part III.
20 On Socrates’ seduction of Alcibiades, consider Zuckert (2009) p. 230.

48
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

as they embody the best republic and the best monarchy, respectively
(121–124). But by stimulating Alcibiades’ ambition to soar above the
local level to the universal so as to engage him in pursuing knowledge
about the whole, including or through the medium of politike, it is
not inconceivable that Alcibiades retained the global ambition to which
Socrates inspired him without fully cultivating the longing for univer-
sally valid knowledge which Socrates hoped would be its final aim, just
as in Diotima’s Ladder, the longing for immortality through political
honor is the way station to the philosophic life.
By enflaming Alcibiades’ eros for honor, Socrates may have been
making one of his first efforts at turning away from the direct specu-
lation about cosmology (as limned in the Phaedo) to probing the souls
of his interlocutors, responding to what he depicts in the Symposium
as Diotima’s criticism of him at some point much further back in time
when he was still the Socrates who studied nature rather than human
affairs, for failing to pay attention to the “amazing” eros of men for
honor. But if the Alcibiades 1 can be seen as a first step down this
highway from the Socrates depicted in the Clouds to the Socrates of the
Platonic dialogues, with Socrates testing his new insight into the eros for
honor on one of the city’s most promising young aspiring politicians,
the dialogue leaves it in some doubt whether the erotic diagnostician
was successful in this early attempt to use philosophy as a therapy for
the ambitious soul, or whether philosophy did not merely deepen what-
ever tendency to tyranny was present in Alcibiades in the first place, just
as in the presentation of Socrates’ effect on Pheidippides in the Clouds
behind the closed doors of the thinkery. Alcibiades’ lament decades later
in the Symposium that he wants Socrates when he courts the Demos and
wants the Demos when he is with Socrates may be in part self-serving,
presenting as an agonizing and tragically moving failure what in fact
is his own strong preference for politics over philosophy. But it may
also suggest that the universality of Athenian imperialism, whose main
exponent he was – according to Thucydides, after Sicily he planned to
conquer Carthage, telling the people that there was no natural limit on
their empire (6.18.5–16) – substituted for the universality of philoso-
phy’s search for wisdom that was only partially successfully implanted
by Socrates in his soul. If so, Socrates may have soured both alternatives
for Alcibiades, dooming him to act on his stronger impulses for political
action while cursed with knowing that life to be second rate. Was he a

49
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magnificent abortion in Socrates’ art of midwifery, compelling Socrates

to search ceaselessly for new and improved products like Glaucon and
Theaetetus?21
In turning specifically to Diotima’s teaching about the Ladder of
Love, an image fashioned by Socrates through his long speech in the
Symposium, let us recall the setting of the dialogue. The purpose of the
dinner party is to praise eros on the grounds that it has not received
sufficient praise to date. Puzzling on the face of it, given the poets’
accounts of Aphrodite as the goddess of eros (she appears, for instance,
in Book 3 of the Iliad to facilitate an amorous encounter between Paris
and Helen), this claim suggests that the participants in the dialogue are
searching into eros for a natural grounding for both personal happiness
and public excellence to replace the fading traditions of the poets. This
is especially likely given that the winner of the contest in whose honor
the dinner is being held, Agathon, wants to replace the old Homeric and
Hesiodic poetry of titanic strife and necessity with a new, more opti-
mistic and forward-looking celebration of the Age of Love. (In one of his
surviving fragments, Gorgias, who is a preceptor for Agathon, claims
that the new elite of wise rhetoricians headed by himself will replace the
authority of the older poets through their capacity to make any image
they wish seem to come into being [13–14].) Because the ground rule
is that each guest will give a long speech praising eros, there is far less
dialectical refutation than in other dialogues. The speakers build on
each other’s accounts cumulatively, and Socrates’ speech attributed to
the teachings of Diotima draws on (while modifying) all the preceding
ones.
Like Pausanias, Socrates’ Diotima distinguishes between base, merely
bodily eros, and the noble kind whereby the lover cultivates the
beloved’s capacity for excellence. Like Eryximachos, she identifies eros
as being constitutive of the entire cosmos, the link (she maintains)

21 Alcibiades says that Socrates’ “philosophical speeches” are like the bites of a “painful
viper.” Further: “He conquers all human beings by speeches . . . He compels me to agree
that, although I myself am still in need of much, I neglect myself while instead I deal with
the affairs of the Athenians. I feel only shame before him. For I know within myself that
I do not have the capacity to contradict him when he says what I must do; yet, whenever
I leave him, I succumb to the honor of the many” (213e, 216a–c). While Alcibiades does
not conquer all human beings through politics, Socrates does conquer all human beings
through speeches. Alcibiades recognizes the superiority of Socrates’ empire to his own
semi-successful attempt.

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 is there an ontology of tyranny?

between the human and the divine, and between seeming and being –
unlike Aristophanes, who depicted eros solely as a human trait on a
purely anthropological level. Further, while Aristophanes had some-
what democratically recognized the existence of eros in all kinds of
people, not merely the agonistic and pederastic kaloi kagathoi, even
ordinary husbands and wives, along with homosexuals and lesbians,
Diotima preserves from Agathon’s speech the depiction of eros as hier-
archical, reserved for the best natures, the soft and cultured few, in
ascending rank. She does, however, preserve from Aristophanes the cru-
cial distinction between eros and the good for which it longs, identifying
this good, not with the forever lost bodily unity of now split genders (as
in Aristophanes’ myth), but with the over-arching and eternally present
Idea of the Beautiful. Eros is drawn upwards by this pre-eminent cosmic
orderliness and wholeness, and is not, as Agathon depicted it, a sheer
force or impulse of graciousness. Eros is not the good itself, but, in
Diotima’s phrase, “wants the Good to be one’s own forever” (206a).
As earlier observed, Diotima’s speech is another account of the
Socratic “turn,” analogous to the Delphic Quest or the Phaedo. Com-
mon to all the accounts is the implication that philosophy of the kind
Socrates practices in the Platonic dialogues emerges from a dawning
awareness of the divine in human life, the boundedness of the human
by the divine, and the search for a demonic link between the human
and the godlike.22 All the dialogues may be said to abstract from the
Idea of the Good, the superordinate reality that is unvarying throughout
Socrates’ metaphysical speculations. The dialogues are different paths
to that same end, depending on the psychological leanings and situa-
tions in life of the chief interlocutors. Socrates’ therapy for Callicles’
erotic doubleness ends up with a cosmology that abstracts from eros
altogether. The Symposium, by contrast, attempts to derive all virtue
from it, showing how thumotic aggression might be assimilated and
guided by eros itself. In further contrast, the Republic strikes a balance:
The civic virtue of the Auxillaries is purged of eros in its primordial
manifestations (the love of one’s own including wealth and the family)

22 Voegelin’s key concept of “metaxy” is closely connected to Diotima’s presentation

of eros as a spirit in between the human and the divine (1999) vol. 3. In Zuck-
ert’s formulation, eros mediates between the sensible and the intelligible (2009)
pp. 193–198.

51
 tyranny

and is grounded primarily in thumos as the psychological basis for cos-

mologically guided honor-seeking through the reform of theology and
poetry. Eros is re-introduced in Book 5, but only as the incentive to
philosophize. This may be Socrates’ considered judgment, given in his
own voice, on the attempt he attributed to Diotima to derive all virtue
from eros. The denouement of Diotima’s teaching, the drunken and
belligerent entry of Alcibiades, and his semicomical, semiserious vying
with Socrates for the love of Agathon, calls into serious question the
seamless ascent of Diotima’s Ladder of Love, according to which the
eros for political honor is continuously subordinated to, and guided
by, the philosophic eros for the Beautiful itself. It is far from clear that
Alcibiades ever has been or ever will be governed by his wise counsellor.
On the other hand, the Republic, by grounding civic virtue in a code
of austere collective honor whose psychological mainspring is thumos,
while reserving erotic longing for the philosopher alone, strikes a bal-
ance between these two fundamental passions, albeit at the price of
introducing a fatal psychological contradiction between the Guardians
and the Auxillariues and their respective purchases on the world. For
while the former are guided by a direct study of the Idea of the Good,
the latter are guided by a mere set of opinions about it whose theoretical
basis they are by definition incapable of grasping. Little wonder that
Socrates is concerned lest these thumotic men become “angry” if their
beliefs are ever exposed as mere beliefs and not the unshakeable truth
(480a). Just as Strepsiades burns down the thinkery, these moralistic
warriors may one day overthrow the rule of Guardians who turn out
to lack conviction.23
All in all, Diotima’s Ladder of Love is arguably the single most daz-
zling attempt by Plato to show eros as the unitary passion of the soul
harmonizing ordinary family life, civic virtue, and philosophy in a con-
tinuous ascent. The soul progresses simultaneously toward intellectual
enlightenment and emotional and aesthetic satisfaction.24 That is why

23 On the incompatibility between the erotic incompleteness of Socratic philosophizing

and the fact that the Guardian class of the Republic would have to have achieved at
least a degree of settled wisdom about the art of ruling, see Hyland (1990). On the good
and bad potentialities of civic honor and its connection to the theme of education in the
Republic, see Gadamer (1980) pp. 54–59.
24 As Nussbaum notes, “a central feature of the ascent is that the lover escapes, gradually,
from his bondage to luck . . . (The philosopher’s) contemplative love for all beauty carries
no risk of loss, rejection, even frustration” (2001) p. 181.

52
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

it is such a compelling crystallization of the Platonic Socrates’ search

for an appeal to the intellect through the affects. The temptation to
tyrannize is the limit test case of the capacity of the philosophic life to
establish order in the city and the soul. Only if these ambitious men
can be soothed and satisfied and rendered friendly to learning can this
project for establishing the optimal politeia, at least in discourse if not in
real life, have any prospect of success. Throughout these middle period
dialogues, we see Socrates embarked on the search for possible interme-
diaries – new rhetoricians, educators, and poets – who might assist in
this enterprise, while Socrates himself of course has a prodigious talent
for fashioning such images (Republic 487e–488b). In the Symposium,
where Socrates’ brief attempt to use the elenchus in getting Agathon to
grasp the distinction between eros and the object of its longing ends in
the poet’s befuddlement, the ensuing long speech attributed to Diotima’s
inspiration might be seen as Socrates’ way of appealing to the poet in
a more explicitly poetic (as opposed to dialectical) vein, providing him
with a guide for the new poetry he aspires to create (199c–201d). Dio-
tima is a seer from an unspecified time in the past, shrouded in mystery,
enigmatic and even terrifying. She is Socrates’ guide in somewhat the
same way as Athena is that of Odysseus or Telemachus. The previous
speakers in the dinner conversation tended to view eros as an agonis-
tic relationship in which an older man possessed a younger beloved,
endowing him with advice about how to succeed in life in exchange for
enjoying his beauty – a one-sided possessiveness mirroring the view of
politics itself as the manly pursuit of distinction in the agora. In sharp
contrast to this agonistic ethos, Socrates, by attributing his knowledge
about eros to a woman, stresses a more androgynous conception of the
soul and a more mutual, fertile kind of friendship, in which both lover
and beloved are united in their common service of the Good, rather than
the victory of one over the other (lover over the beloved, ruler over the
ruled). A part of the implied therapy for the tyrannically inclined man
is that his harsh and aggressive “manliness” (andreia) will, in his soul’s
ascent upward, be tempered and softened by the philosopher’s “love of
the human” (philanthropia).
With the preceding considerations in mind, we should now turn to
the three images of philosophy provided by Socrates in the Republic to
see how they bear on our theme of the sublimation of tyrannical and
aggressive impulses. The three images provide different although linked

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perspectives on the philosopher’s quest for wisdom. The image of the

Sun is an erotic image about nature’s wholeness in which the sun’s
warming power, analogous to the Idea of the Good, solicits all natures
toward their respective fulfillments and enables them to be known. The
image of the Divided Line is another rendition of this ascent toward
the Good, now mapped as a theory of cognition, in which we ascend
from unclarified experience through the concrete entities of the everyday
world, themselves clarified by the mathematical properties we abstract
from them, guided at the highest level by the permanent Ideas under
which families of phenomena are grouped.25 The third and most famous
image, that of the Cave, integrates the erotic and the epistemological
ascent of the previous two into the fuller context of moral psychology
and the exigencies of political life. Now we learn that the ascent toward
the sunlight of the Good is not an effortless rise, like the opening of a
flower in the sunlight implied in the first image, or a dash up the Divided
Line, because we are bound in place by our prejudices and attachment
to convention. Bound in place and facing away from the sunlight, we
mistake for reality what is actually a series of images shaped by the
poets and Sophists casting shadows on the rear wall of the cave from
atop a ramp partway up the ascent.
Socrates’ own trove of images and myths, his speeches about eros,
his reforms of theology and poetry, are meant to replace these image-
bearers (plausibly identified with the old poets and their successors,
the Sophists, but also with the tragedians of Socrates’ era) with a new,
philosophically grounded poetry and ethics.26 For example, the story
of Leontius in Book 4 of the Republic and his attempt to make war on
his illicit thumotic absorption in violent death on behalf of the gover-
nor within him of reason is one that Socrates says he “trusts” (439e).
In other words, this tale corresponds to the level of “trust” (pistis) on
the Divided Line, the level of the solid reality of the world around

25 As Rosen comments, “the first image is primarily ontological while the second is epis-
temological. What is missing from these two images is human life. Nor does this seem
unusual, since we are discussing the most difficult abstractions of philosophy” (2006)
p. 269.
26 Both the Sophists themselves and the Platonic Socrates regarded the old poets including
Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar as the Sophists’ forbears. See, e.g., Plato Protagoras 316D–E;
Jaeger (1965) pp. 289–296; and the discussion of Machiavelli’s relationship to the
Sophists in Chapter 2.

54
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

us, because it reveals some elementary components of morality and its

relationship to reason purged of the Dionysian obfuscation, tragic self-
pity and reveling in the passions characteristic of the old poetry. By
distinguishing among the three states of the soul (reason, thumos, and
desire) and the arrangement whereby reason rules desire with thumos
as its ally, the story crystallizes in a vivid, semi-comical anecdote (Leon-
tius, initially covering his eyes, runs toward the pit of corpses while
screaming at his eyes for their evil wish to gaze at them; 440a) the
analytical rigor by which, in comparing virtue to an art, Socrates was
able to compartmentalize the soul and the city as characterized by three
distinct “jobs.” Establishing the permanent self-sameness of each such
nature served as an introduction to the “forms” and the reform of the
gods as similarly stable, unchanging, and purged of Dionysian whim-
sicality or passion. Above all, the conversion of young Glaucon to the
dazzling vision of the splendors of philosophy presented in the Cave
image is aimed at equipping him with a respect for the philosophic life
while also equipping him with a moral compass – the best regime as
a “pattern in the sky” (592b) – that will enable him to live responsi-
bly in the imperfect city of reality in the here and now, his leanings
toward tyranny assimilated by the more pure and lasting pleasures of
philosophy.27 Nevertheless, as Socrates warns, grave danger may await
the man who returns to the shadow-play at the bottom of the Cave.
Blinded by his time gazing straight into the sunlight and unable to make
out the shadows regarded by the chained prisoners as the truth, he may
incur their resentment for his seeming neglect of conventional decency
and piety – the fate of Socrates himself. And as we recall, this backlash
could even take place among the Auxillaries of the best regime itself if
they find their piety and morality exposed as shadows: Even the best
regime, while an improved cave where morality is to an extent illumined
by the Idea of the Good, is still a cave with most people living according
to the prejudices instilled in them by (in this case philosophically shaped)
convention.
Finally, let us note the image of the Chariot of the Soul in the Phae-
drus, put forward, like Socrates’ revelation of Diotima, as a model for

27 Consider Roochnick’s interesting proposition that Books 8 to 10 of the Republic rep-

resent a dialectical advancement over the previous books’ argument because they are
equipped with the insights about justice derived from the image of the Cave (2003).

55
 tyranny

how eros, properly understood, might guide poetry (247–254). While

the images in the Republic cumulatively stress the difficulties of the
soul’s transcendence from the transient toward the eternal, the image
of the Chariot suggests a more harmonious, holistic approach that is
the direct antecedent of later prescriptions for the balanced soul like
Cicero’s Dream of Scipio.28 In Plato’s image, the soul is likened to a
chariot, the charioteer representing the mind (nous), while the two pow-
erful horses he steers represent the passions of spirit and desire, both
vying for power over the soul. As long as the charioteer is able to steer
the horses, the soul’s chariot enacts a celestial journey of calm and mod-
eration. If the charioteer loses control of the horses, either one or both
of them can plunge the chariot from the heavens down into the realm
of chaos, corresponding to the sheer impulsiveness of the passions. Yet,
lest we too quickly see in this analogy a Kantian prescription for the
repression of the inclinations by an act of will, we should remember
that the Platonic notion of happiness analogized by the image is one
of balance, harmony, and symbiotic combination – not the repression
of nature, but its fulfillment. For, while the chariot must be guided by
the charioteer, just as the mind must guide the passions, the chariot
is not going anywhere without the power of those steeds, just as the
intellect cannot on its own achieve virtue without the energy of the
passions. The passions must be sublimated and redirected away from
the frenzy of spontaneous impulse so that they might energize the intel-
lect and, through their shaping by philosophically guided education,
rhetoric, poetry and theology, integrate mind and body in a satisfying

28 Cicero’s On the Commonwealth is the consummation of the Platonic-Aristotelian

approach to the proper balance of mind and passion, and of a duty to serve the common
good under the guidance of philosophy. That Cicero somewhat elevates the claims of
civic virtue to being on a par with philosophy, or even as enriching it, may be evi-
dence of how the gentlemen Plato and Aristotle were trying to enlist in a friendship for
philosophy might have tweaked the balance of elements to favor politics a little more,
something which Aristotle, if not Plato, would have found satisfactory: “Let us count
those who treat the philosophy of life as great men . . . But at the same time let us admit
the existence of an art . . . which comprises the theory of politics and the government of
peoples . . . What indeed can be more glorious than the union of practical experience in
great affairs with an intelligent enthusiasm for the liberal arts? . . . Hence I hold that a
man who has been able and willing to combine these two interests and has disciplined
himself both in the ways of his ancestors and in liberal culture, has attained everything
that entitles a man to praise.” Quoted in Newell (2001) p. 304.

56
 is there an ontology of tyranny?

emotional and aesthetic middle ground. Virtue cannot be divorced from

happiness.29
It should be stressed that these images do not only serve to appeal to
reason through the affects, but that, by reasoning through the images,
we actualize philosophizing itself. For their surface sheen quickly yields
many ambiguities that prompt the refutational analysis whose frag-
menting of opinion they were meant to heal in the first place: The dyad
between refutation and holism is at the nerve of the images themselves,
calisthenics for the soul. In every image, there are subtle variations
which are not exactly contradictions, but rather show how the soul can
be viewed from different perspectives depending on the conversational
context and different psychological types requiring different kinds of
educational therapy. To sum up: Plato’s images of the soul point to a
fundamental contrast between the ancient and modern understandings
of tyranny and statecraft that will recur throughout this book. For the
classics, freedom (eleutheria) flows from a harmonious balance between
the passions and the mind. It is the experience of a well-tempered whole-
ness and dignity that flowers naturally when our desires and our intellect
are integrated by the vision of a beautiful and beneficent cosmos. Free-
dom in this perspective is not a will that we impose on nature. It is not
so much a matter of self-assertion and autonomy but of reconciliation,
both within ourselves and with other people, especially our fellow citi-
zens. Whereas the modern conception of freedom is based on self-hood,
what Plato means by eros – the longing for union with the eternally
beautiful and good – leads to self-forgetting and self-transcendence,
a falling away of bellicosity. With Machiavelli, we encounter a fun-
damental shift in the meaning of freedom to our capacity to oppose

29 On the incompatibility of virtue and happiness, see Kant (1956) pp. 42ff. Many con-
temporary approaches to Plato are grounded in Kantian distinctions between freedom
and nature, autonomy and heteronomy, altruism and egoism, and treating others well
for their own sake as opposed to for the sake of perfecting oneself. See, for example,
the discussion in Kraut (1973) pp. 330–334 and Vlastos (1981). I share the reservations
expressed by other scholars about this Kantian approach. See, for example, Griswold
(1986), Kossman (1976), and Nussbaum (1983) pp. 4–6, 285–287. Zeigler (1979)
argues against interpreting the Platonic Socrates as a psychological egoist, pp. 123–133.
Kraut (1973) argues for attributing a much broader conception of self-interest to Plato
than is implied by the notion of egoism.

57
 tyranny

ourselves to nature and bend nature to our own purposes, extracting

the power we need from it to create political security and well-being.
In place of Socrates’ majestic prophetess Diotima, his guide into the
rites of Love, Machiavelli will present Fortuna, who in her boundless
caprice and malignity, must be forcibly subdued by the hot-blooded
young.

Having given some consideration to the psychological dimensions of

tyranny in the classical tradition and the use of Platonic imagery as a
therapy for it, let us return to the more foursquare political dimensions
of tyrannical ambition. Much of Platonic and Aristotelian political psy-
chology is concerned with elaborating the tyrannical longing to possess
the city with a view to disarming it and converting the energies of tyran-
nical eros and thumos to the service of republican citizenship and, in
the best instance, philosophy. But uncovering the treatment requires a
certain hermeneutical attentiveness because as much is stated by silence
as by asseveration. The union of eros and thumos in the tyrannical
longing to possess the city like a lover is treated with a good deal of cir-
cumspection, lest painting it too vividly might make it more appealing
than its corrective therapy. This is most notable through the virtual dis-
appearance (aside from a few mentions and a cameo appearance in the
Protagoras) of Alcibiades, who fully embodies the alliance of thumos
with eros in tyrannical longing, after the Alcibiades I, reemerging in
whole only in the magnificently ambivalent portrait of him many years
later buried deep within five layers of recollection in the Symposium. In
the Laws, it is suggested that a young man possessed of “an eros for the
city” might be the one who could found a regime in accordance with the
mores elaborated by the Athenian Stranger (709–712). Yet, while as we
will see in Chapter 2, this hint of a Promethean human founder is by far
the frankest discussion in the dialogues of the prospect for harnessing
tyrannical eros to the establishment of a just regime, it is no more than a
brief sketch, rapidly submerged by a theological discussion of “the god”
who is to be seen as the source of the city’s belief in these laws after the
founding (however that may take place). Similarly in Aristotle’s Politics,
a founder is mentioned briefly in connection with the admission that
human nature does not “grow” seamlessly into a city but requires a
degree of “making” (poiesis 1253a29) – the beginning, as we will see in
Chapter 3, of a constant alternation in the Politics between Aristotle’s

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massive foreground preference for the self-governing republic and the

more muted claim of the “best man” to absolute authority that is con-
tinually breaking through to the surface.
Symptomatic of this circumspection, as I will try to show, political
eros is never fully or adequately elaborated in Plato’s Republic. In the
civic psychology of the Auxillary class (the bulk of the citizenry) in
Book 4, thumos is presented mainly as the master or slave of physical
or (in the case of Leontius) morbid desires, and as distinct from calcu-
lation (logismos). Later on, in Books 6 and 7, when the education in
philosophy strictly speaking is discussed – as distinct from the civic edu-
cation of the Auxillaries – eros comes to the fore, but in a context largely
abstracted from politics. The fullness of longing for and development
toward the Good is evoked by the analogy to the nourishing, warming
qualities of the Sun, or schematized as an epistemological ascent up
the Divided Line. Politics, by contrast, is depicted as a cave where the
sunlight (therefore, allegorically speaking, philosophical enlightenment)
does not penetrate or only in a dim form. Life there is an imprisonment.
The wall along which the masters of simulation walk recalls the wall of
the city that Leontius followed to the execution pit (439e). The moral
psychology of the thumotic Auxillaries, which the story of Leontius is
meant to verify, exists in the realm of “trust” and “correct opinion.”
But it is also barred by a wall from the complete truth – that the philo-
sophic life, not the moral life of the citizen, is the only sure source of all
prudence (476d–478c; 480a; 517c).
The tri-partite psychology of the Republic has the effect of depicting
politics as a realm where eros cannot be satisfied, and where thumos
is present only in its compulsive and anxious manifestations unless it
is educated to become the ally of justice. Only philosophy can channel
eros toward its satisfaction. Hence, when the three parts of the soul
are reinterpreted in Book 9 as forms of desire, Glaucon has long since
been ready to reject tyranny as a life of aimless, degrading pleasures.
But he rejects it in favor of the philosophic life – not, strictly speak-
ing, in favor of the just life considered as distinct from the philosophic
life. Only in the ostensibly more personal, less political milieu of the
Symposium does Plato find it safe to present an eros for the city’s honor
as being on the route to the satisfaction which philosophy more nearly
approaches. But even in Diotima’s sketch of a continuous ascent from
lower to higher forms of eros entailing political virtue along the way,

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the potential for clashing ambitions among the lovers of the city is
largely occluded. Diotima does not stress or perhaps does not realize
that too many brilliant competitors in the service of the common good
will almost unavoidably turn on each other. There cannot be a republic
full of Julius Caesars. Alcibiades’ belligerent entrance after Diotima’s
revelation provides, through the dramatic action of the dialogue, a tacit
emendation of her assimilation of eros to civic virtue in an untroubled
ascent to philosophy. The dilemma is summed up by Diotima’s own
remark, earlier mentioned, that eros is the longing to possess the beau-
tiful or noble “as one’s own forever.” The deepest problem surrounding
Platonic civic paideia is this explosive contradiction between the love
of one’s own and the eternal good.30 Diotima’s formulation expresses
the dubious paradox that a virtuous citizen could somehow “possess”
forever a truth that transcends all local political virtues, attachments,
patriotism, family ties, and the love of one’s own. The truth is own-
erless. But justice requires a commitment that says: “This is mine –
my city, my family, my god – and I will defend it.” One of the major
complexities in thinking through the connection in Platonic philosophy
between the philosopher’s direct pursuit of what is immortally last-
ing through the longing for the beautiful and the good and the citizen’s
indirect pursuit of it through virtuous citizenship is considering whether
the prospective ascent outlined by Diotima from civic virtue to philo-
sophic virtue is indeed continuous and relatively untroubled, or prob-
lematic to a degree requiring considerable rhetorical embellishment and
artistry. That complexity will loom large throughout the chapters that
follow.
In Plato, the ambiguity of the attempt to reconcile eros, whether
tyrannical or philosophic, to the city is evident to the attentive reader,

30 Like Ranasinghe (2000), with whose approach I am in broad concurrence, I am not sug-
gesting that eros is a kind of pre-established, disembodied cosmic force that antecedently
informs every thought and action in the Platonic dialogues. On the contrary, eros opens
up the inscrutable and agonizing disjunction between the longing for immortality and
our own inescapable immurement in a world of finitude and impermanence. Eros lights
up that longing, and so discloses a new envisioning of the soul in relation to the cosmos,
linked by philosophic longing. By the same token, of course, the prospect for success
in achieving union with the beautiful and the good is always present, however elusive,
fleeting, or unlikely. The longing does not, as it does for modern existentialism, condemn
us to permanent absurdity, man as “the great stupidity” to use Nietzsche’s language.
See also Nelson (1986) pp. 203–204.

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 is there an ontology of tyranny?

which invites an ongoing dialectical rejoinder to the starting points.

Socrates’ attempt in the Gorgias to convert Callicles to moderate citi-
zenship does not meet with evident success, while the cause of the best
regime’s downfall in the Republic is the rebellion of the Auxillaries,
the thumotic warrior class, suggesting that thumos is an element of the
soul which makes the reordering of political life “according to reason”
highly problematic.31 Most muted of all, though, is a full elaboration
of the man whose eros for the city could convert his thumotic energies
to the creation of the conditions for transcendental politics. That is to
say, a tyranny on behalf of the Idea of the Good. For to unleash this
possibility would be to court the danger of a tyranny much worse than
the sot of pleasure presented in Book 9 of the Republic, not a Nero or
Commodus but (to analogize somewhat broadly) a Napoleon or Stalin
who conquers on the basis of a universalistic conception of the state.
This possibility is not muted only out of considerations of prudence and
the philosopher’s need to be “politic,” but because to court it would
be to embrace a fundamentally different view of man’s place in the
whole, that is to say, the primordialist ontology of the pre-Socratics
and the Sophists or “motion-men” according to which the originating
power of nature as genesis fuels the tyrant’s mighty impulses (Laws
888e890a; Theaetetus 152e, 179e, 180d). That primordialist ontology,
as we have already suggested and as the rest of this book will explore at
length, takes on the potential for truly earth-shaking transformations
when it is hitched to the modern conception of the will to master nature
altogether that emerges with Machiavelli. For Plato, as the culmination
of the defense of justice in Book 9 of the Republic demonstrates, the
tyrannical urge is to be assimilated directly by an eros for philosophy,
because the superior satisfactions of the philosopher on an erotic level
are so manifest in their contrast with the inferior erotic satisfactions of
tyranny. More muted, however, is the direct evaluation of philosophic
eros in comparison, not with tyrannical excess, degradation and dema-
goguery, but with the honor that might accrue to a tyranny guided by
reasonable political aims. As we will consider at length in Chapters 4

31 See the article by Skemp on how the psychology of thumos epitomized by Leontius in
Book 4, and especially his failure to master his desires, prefigures the rebellion of the
Auxillaries in Book 8. As Skemp puts it, “we forget Leontius” after Book 4 until the
rebellion of the thumotic class. Skemp (1982) p. 91.

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and 5, Xenophon, by contrast, presents in full form the possibility

that Plato occludes. His idealized Cyrus is driven by an eros for the
love of all human beings, and by placing his thumotic aggressiveness
at the service of this erotic but non-philosophic motive, Cyrus creates
a cosmopolis whose universality and meritocracy mirror philosophic
truth in as direct a manner as is possible for any regime, by dispens-
ing altogether with the polis. To reiterate our introductory comparison
between Xenophon and Machiavelli, the Xenophontic Cyrus’s world
household is Machiavellian statecraft minus the secularization of the
will of the Abrahamic God to conquer nature. Its ruler’s motivation is
a hedonism higher and nobler than the witless excesses of the wastrel
tyrant of Book 9 of the Republic, the fulfillment of nature rather than its
conquest.
In Aristotle, as Chapter 3 treats in detail, the Platonic psychology of
eros and thumos virtually disappears as politics is categorically sepa-
rated from philosophy with a clarity never found in Plato, and therefore
separated from the fullest human satisfaction. In Plato’s dialogues, the
life of philosophy is always directly present in the character of Socrates
to surpass in excellence all political longings. At the same time, at least
the possibility is sketched that, through the rule of philosopher-kings,
or of citizens educated toward philosophically guided correct opin-
ion, politics could bask more or less directly in the light of the Good.
Aristotle, however, rigorously divides the two realms of life, endowing
politics with greater stability and self-sufficiency by blanking out the
superior competing alternative of philosophy. If, for Plato, the light of
the sun makes its way down into the cave in only a dim form, or as
a mixture of sunlight and the light of a man-made fire, one might say
that Aristotle virtually bricks up the opening at the top, leaving nothing
but a chink. As Aristotle argues (1251a1–24), there cannot be a single
apodictic “science” (episteme) that would enable a monarch to grasp
faultlessly all political problems, as Plato had depicted in the States-
man (258e, ff.). Instead, flesh and blood rulers and citizens must try
to develop prudence in assessing how far particular events and vari-
able circumstances can measure up to natural right. Although there is
some question whether the great-souled man of the Nicomachean Ethics
would really be satisfied with the austere aristocratic republic outlined
in the last two books of the Politics (as opposed to becoming Cyrus),
the contradiction is much less glaring than that between, for example,

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Callicles and the Auxiliaries of the Republic. While for Aristotle the
highest moral virtue is fenced off from true happiness (the contempla-
tive life), for that very reason it can flourish on its own, unafflicted by
the unflattering contrast always manifest in Plato between the splendor
of philosophy and the rather robotic civic virtue of the best regime.
In Aristotelian political psychology, thumos becomes a mere subdivi-
sion of courage (albeit the “most natural” form of it [Nicomachean
Ethics 1116a20–1117a10]), rather than (as for Plato) the part of the
soul which is the source of this political virtue as well as of religious
revelation and theology (the theology of Books 2 and 3 of the Republic
is specifically fashioned for the thumotic part of the soul and city).
Although, as we will see, there are cryptic references in Aristotle to a
god-like ruler whose claim supersedes all others (Politics 1288a25–30),
the competition implied is not, as it is in Plato, between philosophy and
all merely political virtue, but between monarchical and aristocratic
political virtue. The philosophic life is indeed superior to both, but it
does not and should not rule. The psychology of thumos and eros fades
from view in Aristotle’s political philosophy in the same measure as
the politics of transcendence are conventionalized and fenced off from
philosophy: The code of the kalos kagathos can stand improvement,
but need not be shattered by an exposure to the highest truth. By the
same token, Aristotle’s great-souled man arguably participates more
directly in the repose for which eros longs than do Plato’s Auxillaries,
and would be a more appealing prospect for a Callicles otherwise drawn
to tyranny.

the modern point of departure for

the new science of politics
The overwhelming practical aim of classical political philosophy was, as
it were, to make Coriolanus content with Rome. Plato is more reveal-
ing than Aristotle about the full spectrum of possibilities because he
concedes that the longing for satisfaction from politics may, in rare
instances such as Alicibiades or Callicles, be open to a philosophic eros
for knowledge of the whole. Still, common to both Plato and Aristotle is
the conviction that philosophy is a superior way of life, both in dignity
and pleasure, to any kind of politics, even the best. A useful way of tax-
onomizing subsequent political thought is to see how this assumption

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is challenged by the moderns through a reinterpretation of the psychol-

ogy of political ambition and its primary passions of eros and thumos.
For Plato, the gods revealed by thumos are not a human projection.
They are an “enthusiasm” issuing through us by way of thumos, a rev-
elation further clouded by the needs and passions men bring to their
piety. Hence, the gods are not inventions, but both approximations and
distortions of the divine nous that orders the world and is the source
of wisdom. As Book 10 of the Laws argues, the spirited man’s resent-
ment and despair over the gods’ indifference or malevolence toward
the human situation can be an invaluable propaedeutic, if not to phi-
losophy, at least to a philosophical theology that grounds republican
citizenship (899–904).32 Eros can also be a bridge between the primor-
dial and the transcendental – sexual passion is a low but real intimation
of a beauty that objectively graces nature’s most perfect beings.
I will argue that the modern tradition – if one attempts a direct inter-
pretation of the moderns on the basis of the categories provided by the
ancients – is characterized by the ontological priority of thumos over
eros, the reversal of what I have argued is the Platonic priority of eros
over thumos. In other words, the time-bound, anxious, individualistic
side of human longing is radicalized and separated from an openness to
its objective satisfaction guided by eros – union with the beautiful. In
keeping with this severance of thumos from the beautiful is the transfor-
mation of transcendental politics from the approximation by political
life of the objective nous that orders the cosmos into a self-conscious
human construct fashioned in opposition to a nature devoid of pur-
pose. Looked at in Platonic terms, in other words, modern political
philosophy is dominated by thumos: the thumotic man comes into his
own virtually unchallenged – anxious, self-conscious, alternately fearful
and arrogant, ready to storm the heavens in order to get three meals a
day. What is more remarkable, however, is that precisely as thumos is
liberated from its classical restraints, modern political psychology loses
sight of thumos as a phenomenon about which it can give a reasonable
and rounded account. When everything is thumos, thumos disappears.

32 Plato writes sympathetically about how thoughtful young men are often led by their
pride to gloomy ruminations about life’s meaning. They are aware of how often injustice
goes unpunished, how some men enjoy enormous wealth and glory at the expense of
others and die peacefully in their beds of old age. It makes them doubt whether a rational
and beneficent order governs the world. Laws 899–900. Consider Pangle (1976).

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Not being limited by anything, it cannot be defined and compared. This

occlusion of eros, I argue, is crystallized by Hobbes.
At this juncture, it should be emphasized that when I characterize
the shift to modernity as the ontological priority of thumos over eros,
I am making this characterization still largely from within the classi-
cal horizon itself. In other words, the priority of thumos over eros is
the closest way of expressing modern political psychology in terms of
classical psychology. But we cannot leave it at that. The classics were
already aware of what it would mean for thumos to lead the soul. The
story of Leontius in Book 4 of the Republic is a cautionary tale about
the difficulty of containing the soul’s thumotic capacities for zealotry,
fury, and morbid ruminations even while attempting to sublimate and
re-direct those passionate energies toward a vigorous civic-spiritedness.
Indeed, the denouement of the kallipolis as a whole comes when the
spirited men throw off the rule of the philosophers and institute a regime
based on honor. That is to say, even after the elaborate civic pedagogy
of the first four books of the Republic, the “correct opinion” instilled
in the Auxillaries – which might have been thought sufficient to fore-
stall Leontius’ only very shaky mastery of his passion, since he had not
been the beneficiary of such an education – does not prove a sufficient
insulation against thumotic indignation even among those who have
received, at least within the fiction of the dialogue, this philosophically
guided civic paideia.
Beginning with Machiavelli, however, modern political psychology
alters the whole relationship between reason and passion. While the
thumotic, honor-seeking dimension of the soul certainly is privileged by
Machiavelli over the erotic dimension (a love of the beautiful or noble
being for Machiavelli, as I will argue in Chapters 5 and 6, the most
profound source of a prince’s delusional “reliance on Fortune”), thu-
mos is also diminished and displaced, although not altogether snuffed
out. By being sundered from its connection, through eros, its proper
guide, to a longing for the beautiful and the good, thumos is diminished
from an openness to divine transcendence and reduced to mere human
aggression, the “lion” side of the lion and the fox, Machiavelli’s somatic
metaphor in which the traditional alliance in the soul between the divine
and the animal is replaced by an alliance between two animals, the cun-
ning and the forceful. Having been severed from its connection to the
beautiful and good, thumos is further and more fundamentally displaced

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by the will to master Fortuna, to master nature, whose project thumos

will now serve. It is well to remember that in Platonic psychology,
thumos is not itself the source of volition. Thumos is not the Platonic
equivalent of the will.33 Thumos is a passion, a kind of moral depth
charge in the soul which, properly shaped by the correct civic educa-
tion, can produce a burst of zealous energy to set the levers of volition
in motion so as to serve the leadership of reason, both within the indi-
vidual soul and within the tri-partite best regime. In both the classical
and modern psychologies, in other words, thumos is the ally of volition,

33 As Zeigler observes, the seat of volition in the Platonic account of the soul is boulesis,
from the verb boulomai, meaning deliberative resolve. Boulesis does not mean “will” in
the modern sense. It is more akin to a reasoned wish or a wish arising from deliberation.
It entails a particular end or counsel advantageous to the situation. Zeigler (1979)
pp. 126–127. Evidence of this is that boulesis is cognate with the word boule, a council
of citizens appointed to deliberate upon the daily affairs of the polis. For reasons such as
these, Platonic volition cannot be equated, in my view, with the modern Kantian concept
of “autonomy,” the striving to exert a pure will unmediated by empirical correlates,
which I trace to the Abrahamic conception of a God who stands outside of nature and
exerts his will to transform it. See also Hyland (1981) pp. 7ff. Of course these issues can
admittedly never be resolved through etymologies alone, but etymologies are helpful.
Along with boulomai, there are several other verbs that connote wishing, wanting
or resolving, with varying nuances of impulse, instinct, unconscious and conscious
desire, or deliberative choice, including ethelein and epithumein. I will provide here
for readers’ interest a note on the debate about their precise meanings, but stress in
advance that none of these verbs, however one assesses their bearing on volition, has
the modern connotation of the will to strive to stand outside of nature and master
it. Indeed, the very uncertainty about the precise connotation of these different words
for volition testifies to the lack of a single term possessing the clarity that the term
“will” does for us, at least philosophically. Gottlob Schrenk comments as follows on
the difference in meaning between ethelo and boulomai: “The original difference in
meaning between boulomai and ethelo is disputed in philological investigation. Two
diametrically opposing views confront one another. The one finds in ethelein impulsive
and unconscious desire and in boulomai rational and conscious choice. Ethelein thus
signifies volition by inclination or natural instinct . . . while boulomai denotes a decision
of will based on deliberate resolve . . . On the other hand, ethelein is understood to
mean the resolution of the spirit, and boulesthai as desire or inclination, as the wish
of the soul. The first view is supported by the fact that boulesthai is related to boule,
bouleuein, bouleuesthai. The second view argues amongst other things that it is often
used synonymously with epithumein. It is difficult to decide between them because at
a very early date the two groups overlap. Hence the only course is to study the usage
in different periods. The following results accrue from such historical investigation. In
Homer there are 38 instances of boulomai and 294 of ethelo. Boulomai always has here
the sense of ‘to prefer,’ ‘to choose,’ whereas ethelo is used for all the other nuances of
volition. Thus ethelo is the older and more comprehensive term. It is particularly loved
by the poets, whereas boulomai is preferred by the prose writers and predominates from
the time of Herodotus.” Quoted in Halloran (1973).

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which is seated in reason. What changes so profoundly is the status of

reason.
For the classics, the soul seeks, through the intellect, union with the
eternal truth. The soul governed by the intellect mirrors and instantiates
the harmony and unity of the cosmos itself. Volition is at the service
of, and solicited by, this erotic longing for completion. Beginning with
Machiavelli, by contrast, reason is assimilated into the will to master
nature. Reason is no longer the guide to the whole, but an anthropocen-
tric pattern of rationality – of formal order and control – imposed on
nature by the “virtue” of the new prince. A part of the leonine ferocity
of the traditional meaning of thumos is, to be sure, incorporated into the
steely resolve of Machiavelli’s new prince. However, the representation
of princely calculation as “the fox” endows it with an entirely somatic
and animalistic spirit, just as the metaphor of the lion and the fox as a
whole collapses the classical distinction between the purely animal and
the divine spark of the soul – mediated by the in-between realm of the
passions shaped by the virtues – into a thoroughly reanimalized under-
standing of the human. While a certain dimension of thumos can still
be found in Machiavelli’s new princely psychology, this passion must
be methodically disciplined to pursue the goal of dispassionate mas-
tery, never allowing its hopes for transcendence, its perplexity about
the gods, or its openness to tragic gloominess to distract the new prince
from the ongoing project for the mastery of Fortuna. For shorthand
purposes, one could contrast Achilles, the ancient prince of untutored
thumos, with Shakespeare’s presentation of Henry Bolingbroke, the
modern methodist of power seeking. The untamed passion of Achilles,
leading him to careen between tragic despair and mad daring, is, in
Platonic psychology, to be reshaped and moderated by the education of
the Auxillaries, governed by a philosophic cosmology of eternal stabil-
ity, mediated by the “tales” making up their education. Henry Boling-
broke, by contrast, has mastered his unruly passions through his own
silent resolve to overcome all obstacles placed in his path by Fortuna,
summed up in the flawed Christian monarch and Augustinian poet of
the soul’s deepest despair, Richard the Second. Bolingbroke’s career is
not reasoned, but it is rational. The content of reason – the longing
for union with the beautiful and good – is replaced by method. In this
way, Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke reflects Machiavelli’s maxim, which
I explore in the next chapter, that the classical prescription whereby

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philosophy provides a prince with a guide to prudence must be replaced

in such a way that the prince is the source of his own prudence, with
no need for a philosophical governor (or, therefore, a potential rival).
We revisit the “stage Machiavel” in the Conclusion.
As I will argue throughout this book, and most thematically in Chap-
ter 6, of paramount significance to the modern approach is the change
in the interpretation of political ambition effected by certain strains of
Christianity. In St. Augustine, for example, the happiness that Aristotle
believed could only be achieved within the political community becomes
the preserve of the City of God. Political life, what Augustine terms the
City of Man, is separated and reduced from this happiness to the merely
negative police function of restraining human sinfulness after the Fall
so as to maintain order and the Church as the City of God’s earthly
outpost. Virtue, a term used by Plato and Aristotle to describe various
kinds of human excellence ranging from the statesmanship of Pericles
to the talents of generals, poets and ordinary artisans, and not neces-
sarily or exclusively synonymous with law-abidingness or self-restraint,
is now narrowed to mean the suppression of all worldly desires. Clas-
sical political virtues like pride and magnificence (fueled by an eros for
honor) are now proclaimed not to be virtues at all; indeed, they are
depicted as caricatures of their classical originals.
Since true happiness has been banished to a spiritualized Beyond,
political ambition is drained of its erotic character (the longing for hap-
piness, immortality, the noble and the good) and, thus deontologized, is
depicted as a gray and compulsive drive toward “dominion,” “power,”
and “vainglory.” In Aristotelian terms, politics is reduced from the good
life to mere life, while the good life departs the natural realm. Parallel-
ing this transformation, the word used predominantly for soul or spirit
in the New Testament is not, as it would have been for the ancients,
psyche or thumos, but pneuma, a more disembodied and immaterial
concept with connotations of escaping the evil world of fallen nature.
Whereas soul (psyche) had originally meant undifferentiated life, the
holism of psyche is now dichotomized as bodily animo versus spiritual
anima.34 To be certain, this dichotomy is already present in the more

34 For an illuminating explanation of how ancient accounts of the soul differ from those
of Christianity, see Davis (2011). He sees in the soul of Achilles the archetypal struggle
between immortality and mortal life, a tension I trace to Diotima’s presentation of eros

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 is there an ontology of tyranny?

proto-Stoic of Platonic dialogues such as the Gorgias. But not only

is that dichotomy but one perspective among others in the dialogues,
whose foil is the unification of the soul by eros in a continuous ascent
from the passions of the body to the passions of the mind by way of the
passion for honor; more important, in all versions of Platonic psychol-
ogy the aim is the fulfillment of our natural longings within the sphere
of nature. Augustinian Christianity’s diminution of nature to the cor-
poreal, lustful, irrational, and perishable helps explain the hardening
of the two dimensions limned earlier of primordial and transcendental
politics into a metaphysical cleavage. To be sure, not every version of
Christian theology promotes this cleavage as sharply as does Augustine.
St. Thomas, for example, tries to bridge the chasm between the two
worlds and preserve a place for human nature in its own right, to be
filled with large swaths of Aristotle’s philosophy. But he no less than
Augustine makes God the efficient cause, the creator who imposes final
and formal causes on matter, thus elevating the lowest cause in the
Physics to the highest. Nature can only hold up under the sustaining
impact of God’s will. For Aristotle, by contrast, efficient cause has
been, along with material cause, solicited into movement by the self-
movement of substantive Being most clearly manifest in formal and final
cause. The Unmoved Mover informs the world but does not create it.
Machiavelli is taken by many to be among the chief founders of
modernity. But his transformation of political philosophy could not
have taken place, in my view, without an engagement with Christianity,
especially in its Augustinian variant. Some, like Voegelin, see Machi-
avelli as an apocalyptic thinker. Others see him as reversing the clas-
sical priority of the community over the individual, and therefore as a
harbinger of liberalism and commercialism. Still others see him as reviv-
ing classical republicanism as against the excessive other-worldliness of
Christianity in a way that was used by later figures like Harrington to
resist Hobbesian absolute monarchy. All of these interpretations shed
light on Machiavelli, and I will discuss them at some length in the Con-
clusion. My main point for now is that they are all compatible with,
and flow from, the characterization I am making here of Machiavelli as
a post-Christian thinker. By viewing Machiavelli in light of the tension

as the contradictory and self-vitiating longing “to possess the beautiful as one’s own
forever.” This theme is also central to the fine book by Ranasinghe (2000).

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between the primordial and transcendental, I want to argue, the follow-

ing new synthesis emerges: Machiavelli accepts the Augustinian reduc-
tion of politics to “dominion” while rejecting the City of God. He urges
the return to classical praxis (embodied by the history of the Roman
Republic), but also urges the rejection of classical philosophy, which he
groups with Christianity (the “imagined republics” of Plato and Augus-
tine). This is an original and unprecedented synthesis. In some sense,
Machiavelli liberates from Augustinian reductionism the phenomeno-
logical richness that we find in Plato’s and Aristotle’s political theo-
ries, the full-blooded and nuanced depictions of rule, virtue, honor, and
ambition. Yet he interprets these phenomena in post-Christian terms, as
mediations and epiphenomena of dominion. In urging, for example, that
man forsake the allegiance of his soul (anima) to the City of God so as to
recover the commitment of his spirit (animo) to the earthly fatherland,
Machiavelli, even in repudiating Christian other-worldliness, accepts its
mundane interpretation of political virtue. Nowhere, I maintain, does
Machiavelli account for political eros in its original and full Platonic
sense. His heroes have lusts and rages which occasionally distract them
from the frigid “glory” of mastery, but none of them are “lovers of the
city”: A passion for honor is never the route to an eros for transcen-
dence. In this respect, one may contrast the helpless admiration which
Socrates playfully evinces in the presence of beautiful bodies and souls,
or how much he learned from the priestess of love, Diotima, with the
cold-minded rape of Fortuna urged by Machiavelli.35
Machiavelli accepts the primordialist view of politics as a field of
passions entirely severed from an erotic orientation toward the eter-
nal Good and raises this cleavage to a metaphysical certainty, as had
Christianity. While rejecting the Christian God, Machiavelli accepts the
Christian view of nature as forces that issue out of a void and return
to it. Fortuna, like God, is what/that it is. In this sense, God is assimi-
lated by Being, or, put another way, nature is collapsed into existence
subject to time. Hence, as Strauss writes (1969, p. 214), Machiavelli’s
meditations on Fortune bear a resemblance to meditating on the will of
God, an issue we will treat at length in Chapter 6. While for Christianity,

35 Bruell (1977) observes that Socrates’ attraction to the beauty of Charmides enables him
to contemplate the effects of eros on the others present while not succumbing wholly to
it himself.

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nature so conceived was perishable and corrupt unless held up by God’s

supernatural will, for Machiavelli it is the source of all vitality, spon-
taneity, and energy. Whereas for the classics, Fortuna was a subsidiary
dimension of the whole within its supervening beneficent orderliness,
Machiavelli identifies it with Being tout court. By recognizing the over-
whelming singularity that is Fortuna, we recognize that nature does
not support either classical or Christian hopes for virtue and offers no
prospect for lasting peace, justice, and decency. This awful truth, how-
ever, liberates us to face the world without illusion and bend it to our
will, making it as productive and livable as we can. This requires a pol-
itics in which acquisitiveness is liberated and served by the new art of
government.
The spontaneity and willfulness of Fortuna well up into each of us as
our passions, the “lion” of human psychology. By releasing this chunk
of Fortuna within ourselves, we can adjust ourselves to Fortuna and
anticipate her treacherous reversals. Being at home with our selfishness,
we build dams to prevent the world from upsetting our plans (chapter
25 of The Prince). This requires, of course, that we purge ourselves
ruthlessly of any lingering disposition to reify Fortuna as the objec-
tive support for our human longings for peace, order, and justice –
the “imagined republics” of the great classical-Christian conglomer-
ate. Paradoxically, the full release of the primordial in human nature
requires the dispassionate mastery of the “fox” – the wary manipu-
lator of his own and other people’s passions – so as to construct a
self-consciously human project for an entirely this-worldly transcen-
dence, the imposition of order on nature through political fiat. As I will
argue in Chapters 6 and 7 as well as in the Conclusion, Machiavelli’s
new conception of the self anticipates the Cartesian ego, purged of all
received tradition, purged of what Machiavelli’s admirer Bacon called
“the idols of the tribe,” his term for Machiavelli’s “imagined republics.”
The radical opposition Machiavelli posits between the prince’s virtues
– meaning his strength of will – and the hostility of Fortune also antic-
ipates that aspect of Hegel’s philosophy according to which striving
against the necessity of nature establishes our freedom.
Fortuna is so unreliable that she cannot be relied upon to be unre-
liable: Dealing with her may equally require the impetuosity of “the
young” or the caution of Fabius the Delayer. Neither principalities
nor republics have a privileged place in Machiavelli’s political science,

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but republics are arguably more inclusive since they can accommodate
princely natures in the appropriate camouflage of dictators and leaders
who must periodically re-found the republic and extirpate its malign
“humors.” Fortuna generates “bodies” and republics and principalities
are characteristic modes in which these bodies clash, repel, and coa-
lesce. An expansionist republic whose masses are alternately unleashed
and restrained as foreign and domestic conditions require by an elite
enlightened as to the truth about Fortuna seems to anticipate all the pos-
sible manifestations of Fortuna, immanentizing them in a cosmopolitan
empire composed of “men of many nations” that is progressively per-
fected by “chance” and “the aid of events” (The Prince chapter 17;
Discourses 1.2). Since the cosmos is not ordered by nous, there can
be no Aristotelian “middle way” in the destiny of regimes or in the
moral life of individuals. Liberality, for instance, is not a mean between
parsimony and extravagance. Exposed to the clashes and reversals of
Fortuna, you must either be parsimonious so as to avoid financial ruin
or liberal with other people’s possessions.
In these ways, I want to argue, Machiavelli recaptures the phe-
nomenological range of classical political philosophy but on post-
Christian principles. Viewed from within the classical horizon, thumos
becomes the chief trait of the soul for Machiavelli because the primor-
dialist view of politics entirely displaces the transcendental view oriented
through eros, which is easier to get rid of because it has already been
drained out of politics by Augustinian Christianity. Eros has already
been split into mere appetitive lust within the confines of nature and
the incorporeal love of God. But precisely because the transcendental
object of eros has disappeared – the ascent up Diotima’s Ladder from
civic virtue to the eternally beautiful – the nature of thumos is also
occluded. It is no longer understood in the complexity of its relations
with eros, philosophy, and the gods. It has become neutral “power,”
the engine for the reconstruction of nature. Even tyrannical eros, which
Plato saw as the basis for the critique of the tyrant, is too moral a cate-
gory for Machiavelli because it harbors the possibility of reformation: it
is already a part of Plato’s solution. What Machiavelli means by gloria is
something colder, subjective, self-made, and containing no intimation
of transcendence or immortality. It is reputazione, the ruler’s exter-
nal image based on the awe, fear, and gratitude of his subjects, stem-
ming from his successful mastery of Fortuna. It is at most the nimbus,

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 is there an ontology of tyranny?

the surface sheen of eros, bereft of the immanent potentiality for nature’s
development toward perfection. This diminishing of eros, and there-
fore of thumos, begins the evasion of the classical starting point for
understanding tyranny. If my argument is plausible, it follows that
Machiavelli cannot be comprehended, as Strauss would have it, solely
in terms of how his philosophy contrasts with classical thought without
regard to his engagement with Christianity. At the same time, Voegelin
arguably underestimates Machiavelli’s originality by interpreting him
as an epigone of the Joachite stream of millenarian Christianity.36 As
I will argue throughout this book, Machiavelli is after much bigger
stakes – the imposition of the eidetic quality of classical rationalism on
Fortuna through an act of will, the rational re-shaping of the natural
world, a starting point that makes his project irreducible either to the

36 See the discussion of Voegelin and Strauss in Schram (1987). It is difficult to summa-
rize the complexity of the debate between Strauss and Voegelin over the meaning of
Machiavelli. Broad strokes must suffice. Voegelin saw Machiavelli as a continuation
of the apocalyptic millenarianism of Joachim of Fiore, who preached the dawning of a
new age, a third age, based on the Book of Revelation, in which the Church would no
longer be necessary because all men would be in direct contact with God, the message
of the Gospels and universal love would reign everywhere, and Christians would unite
with Moslems. In other contexts, Voegelin saw Machiavelli as a continuation of Gnos-
ticism, the rejection of the current world in favor of a new epoch where man would be
totally liberated from the constraints of bodily and material necessity. Strauss, by con-
trast, viewed Machiavelli almost wholly within the framework of Machiavelli’s debate
with, and attempted repudiation of, classical political philosophy. Rejecting (or by-
passing) Voegelin’s suggestion of religious or pseudo-religious and millenarian motifs
in Machiavelli’s thought, Strauss believed it was more accurate to see him as being
influenced by Latin Averroism. I have a difficulty with this view because, as I discuss
in detail in Chapters 2, 6, and 7, I see Machiavelli’s focus on man’s freedom of will
to oppose and re-fashion nature to be a secularized version of the Abrahamic God,
which argues for a more intimate connection between Machiavelli and certain strains,
predominantly Augustinian, of Christian theology. At the same time, by suggesting (as
I interpret him) that man might master nature by stepping outside of it, Machiavelli
does not entirely comport with the Averroists who, as followers of Aristotle and clas-
sical thought, believed that human nature, virtue, and the soul fell within the ambit
of nature, to be clarified by philosophy. Averroism wanted to restore classical philoso-
phy and elevate it over the authority of revelation. Machiavelli, by contrast, wants to
assimilate reason to the will-power to master nature, a secularization of God’s will. The
side of Machiavelli that encourages the progressive mastery of nature does not comport
with the Averroists’ wish to restore the natural philosophy of the ancients as perma-
nently valid. For his part, Voegelin believed that Averroism itself, through its attempt
to sunder reason entirely from revelation and establish reason’s supreme authority,
bore a resemblance to Gnosticism, and paved the way for the hypertrophic rationalism
and urge to reconstruct the world in conformity with abstract reason culminating in
twentieth-century totalitarianism, aided by Joachite-Machiavellian millenarianism.

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classical or Christian horizons, or to a mere reversal of them, or to the

horizon of the Sophists.
In rejecting the City of God, Machiavelli immerses himself in the
City of Man in order to offer his own elaboration of the same phe-
nomena which Plato and Aristotle explore. His synthesis of classicism
(the centrality of honor) with Christianity (the centrality of the will)
has the universal scope of both: the phenomenological richness of clas-
sicism freed of Christian otherworldly moral restraints and the creative,
anti-natural willpower of Christian revelation delivered from God, the
chief artificer, into the hands of man. Owing to the broadness of this
synthesis, Machiavelli, I argue in the Conclusion, cannot be reduced to
liberalism, though he offers a recipe for some of its features. In light of
the narrowing of Machiavelli’s teaching effected by Bacon and Hobbes
as they founded the new physics and the political physics of the social
contract deriving from it, one can readily and even eagerly look behind
them to Machiavelli for far more of the scope, substance, and historical
variability of political existence, including an awareness of the limits of
what material self-interest and commerce alone can achieve for a sound
political order. When Burke, for example, counters the narrow appet-
itiveness promoted by certain strains of modernity as the chief aim of
the social contract with a historically more robust and rounded account
of the traditional “powers” of the English constitution, his understand-
ing owes more to Machiavelli’s view of the equilibrium of powers in
the Roman Republic as modalities of the self-originating motions of
Fortuna than to Aristotle’s discussion of the classification of regimes
under the aspect of eternity.
For the classics, human nature is capable of fulfilling its own natu-
ral potential for excellence within a civic community. For Augustine,
by contrast, human perfection is not possible within the limitations of
nature – no human virtue is possible without faith in God. This leads to
a radical diminishing of political life, in which civic virtue is reduced to
mere dominion or power-seeking. It is paralleled by Augustine’s view of
nature as intrinsically fallen, incapable on its own of sustaining happi-
ness or excellence, held up only by the will of God. Machiavelli in effect
agrees that human virtue is reducible to power-seeking while jettison-
ing Augustine’s concern with the divine, and also accepts his view of
nature as random, incoherent happenstance. He speculatively transfers
from God to man to capacity to order nature through a sustained act

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of will, although the full radicalization of this speculative project as the

basis for modern physics and the social contract only comes with Bacon
and Hobbes. By accepting the Augustinian view of nature as random,
purposeless motion – but now stripped of its divine external ordering –
Machiavelli arrives at a view of Fortuna which differs fundamentally
from that of the ancients, whether we are referring to classical philoso-
phy, tragedy, or sophistry. In all three of the ancient versions, fortune or
chance is not unambiguously hostile to man and most definitely cannot
be mastered from without. The prospect for transferring from God to
man a capacity to re-fashion nature broached by Machiavelli is there-
fore not intelligible without the intervening concept of the Abrahamic
God’s capacity to stand outside of nature altogether and re-shape it. I
will bring these contrasts into relief through a detailed comparison in
Chapter 6 between Diotima’s Ladder in the Symposium, where human
nature’s capacity for excellence leads continuously toward trans-human
repose, and Augustine’s dichotomous contrast between the City of Man
and the City of God, where nature and transcendence are almost entirely
sundered.

the hobbesian narrowing of machiavelli’s

new science of politics
With Machiavelli, then, transcendental politics is reduced to an epiphe-
nomenon of primordialist politics, not its fulfillment but its constructed
product. Thumos comes to the fore but loses clarity because it is no
longer limited, bounded by, and contrasted with eros. Future political
philosophy tries instead to clarify the ways in which freedom becomes
conscious of itself through the opposition of nature. The outward man-
ifestation of the pursuit of freedom is the will to re-shape nature trans-
ferred from God to man. Thumos, stripped of its transcendental orien-
tation to the immortal Good by way of eros, reduces to an existential
undertow of anxiety, alienation and rage, psychological fuel for the
will’s negation of nature.
Beginning with Hobbes, liberal political philosophy can be seen as
an attempt to curb the potentially Promethean excess of Machiavelli’s
summons to master nature by achieving an equilibrium between primor-
dialist politics and the transcendental politics that man now artificially
constructs to serve the passions. As I will argue in the Conclusion,

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Hobbes’s theory of the social contract and the Sovereign is the junc-
ture at which the dark and light corridors of modernity intersect before
heading in different directions – the endless reconstruction of nature
through revolutionary will versus the establishment of communities of
rights-bearing individuals living in peace and tolerance.
Just as for Machiavelli, for Hobbes man’s rationality is not given
from an objectively reasonable world, but instead dawns on him as he
struggles not to be destroyed by nature’s purposeless chaos and the grip
of that chaos on him through the passions. Hence, the criterion for
rationality is what the passions require for their own safe and efficient
pursuit. This symmetry between passion and rationality requires that
the passions move even further in the direction of abstract homogeneity
than was the case in Machiavelli. Starting as he did with the full range
of political phenomena, the same broad canvas of war, peace, honor,
and domestic faction surveyed by Aristotle, Machiavelli recognized that
glory could plausibly be more worth pursuing than self-preservation,
and in rare spirits constitutes an independent source of human moti-
vation. He in effect preserves the distinction made by Xenophon’s
Simonides – whose advice to the tyrant Hiero is one of the models,
as we will see in Chapter 4, for Machiavelli’s art of princely rule –
between the “real men” (andres) who aim for mastery and the common
run of “humans” (anthropoi) who are content with self-preservation
(Hiero 2.1; 7.3). Since, for Machiavelli, domestic politics are inevitably
connected to foreign policy – indeed, a republic that does not wish to
atrophy and die must have an expansionist dynamic – the pursuit of
glory through conquest is an irreducible necessity for healthy political
bodies. Because Hobbes, by contrast, confines himself to the internal
ordering of the polity, and begins with an a priori method – the “simili-
tude of the passions” – even these Machiavellian approximations of eros
(as the glory attendant upon successful imperialism) fade away, replaced
by the abstract and contentless summum malum of non-existence, the
fear of violent death. This reduction of the passions to the desire for self-
preservation makes it possible to make the state synonymous with what
Aristotle had called the art of household management. But for Hobbes,
unlike Aristotle, there is no distinction between good and bad, noble
and ignoble usages, for household management and property. Whereas
Aristotle had argued for an economics of sufficiency to enable citizens
to devote themselves to politics and philosophy, and for wives and

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children to cultivate the virtues appropriate to their potentials, in con-

trast with open-ended economic maximization and despotic authority,
Hobbes opted for the latter alone, draining the teleological substance of
Aristotle’s distinctions and turning household management into a pure
method of management and productivity.
Since, as he argues in the Leviathan, the “objects” of the passions –
what we want from, and how we relate to, the political community
and the world – are too diverse and changeable (as are we ourselves)
for us ever to be able to agree on what they are and whether they are
good or bad (and even if we agreed for a time, we would change and
no longer agree with our own selves), we should turn away from the
world and look inward to the “similitude” of the passions themselves
(Hobbes [1971] pp. 82–83). Severed from their objects in the world (and
opinions about them), the passions of every individual are universally
reducible to such simple modes of self-preservation as fear and desire.
Aristotle had argued that humans fulfill their natures by living in a polis
and offering reasoned opinions about the just and the unjust, the noble
and the base, and the advantageous and the disadvantageous. These
reasoned opinions correspond to what Hobbes terms the “objects” of
the passions. By denying that these opinions possess any rank order
or even stability, Hobbes in effect demolishes the Aristotelian under-
standing of the common good. Every man becomes a pedestrian tyrant
motivated by the desire to stay alive and avoid violent death. By orient-
ing ourselves by the similitude of the passions rather than their objects,
we also deny from the outset the existence of intrinsic natural differ-
ences among human beings of virtue, “wit,” and prudence, as well as
the classical assumption that there is an independent capacity in the
souls of some men to seek honor for its own sake, as opposed to mere
self-preservation. Every one who introspects and understands his true
motive will realize that he seeks power to remain alive. In Xenophontic
language, there are no “real men,” only “humans.” And this, I maintain,
is the fatal flaw in Hobbes’s theory.
Why? Let us reiterate that the similitude of the passions stripped
of their objects is a rationality of the origins, not of the end. Like
the Cartesian ego, it is an abstraction of the conditions for pure self-
hood from all mediating traditions and social practices. Machiavelli’s
delicate interplay between Fortuna and man, embodied in the cycles of
history and the rise and decline of republics and principalities, becomes

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in Hobbes a frozen dichotomy between nature as a field of random

happenstance and the anthropocentric power to re-fashion it so as to
maximize survival. The great puzzle that Hobbes cannot explain is:
Why would anyone want to become the Sovereign? Since the toils and
dangers of attempting to rise to supreme power are by definition an
insane goal for every human qua human – since we are compelled by
nature to seek survival and avoid danger – how does the Sovereign
achieve power in the first place? Hobbes seems to assume that these
tyrants emerge like spontaneous natural forces. He envisions them as
supplying the institutionalized terror that, by simulating the terror of
the state of nature where the absence of government exposes us all to
the daily danger of violent death, will remind every subject that no
advantage to be gained from breaking the contract and attempting to
tyrannize could possibly outweigh the dangers involved ([1971] p. 202).
At least one “real man” is needed to keep the “human beings” in line.37
But Hobbes’s theory cannot account for the possibility of such a man.
Clearly this tyrant, re-cast in functional value-neutral language as
“the sovereign,” will be a man of thumos. In a tacit revision of Plato’s
three states of the soul and city, Hobbes argues in chapter 19 of The Cit-
izen that it is not the highest part, the “head” and the seat of “counsel”
that will rule, but the middle part – which Plato identifies as thumos,
and which Hobbes identifies altogether with the “soul” and the seat of
“will” and “command” in contrast with “counsel,” thus joining Machi-
avelli in preferring animo to anima ([1972]). But, on his own principles,
Hobbes cannot elaborate this psychology in any rich detail. It is appar-
ent only through the most cryptic inferences – for example, Hobbes’s
claim that although Sovereignty by institution (consent) can be distin-
guished analytically from Sovereignty by acquisition (conquest), “the
(Sovereign’s) rights are the same in both,” because both are based on
fear ([1971] pp. 252–253). Tyrannical thumos lurks unseen behind this
dry parsing of the modes of order. The lacuna is further illustrated
by the famous conundrum as to whether Hobbes believed that man’s
natural power-seeking is limitless in everyone or only in the “vainglo-
rious” few.38 If it is limitless by nature in everyone, then politics as a

37 Consider Habermas (1973) p. 57: the political absolutism of Hobbes’s Sovereign is

necessary to bring about the utopia of social peace envisioned by Thomas More.
38 Consider Strauss (1952).

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 is there an ontology of tyranny?

universally applicable, deductively rigorous science of the kind Hobbes

professes to have created is impossible, since people cannot be relied
upon (even when terrorized) to prefer safety to vainglory. If, however
(as Hobbes mostly seems to suggest), it is limitless by nature only in a
troublesome few (war-like young men fired up by reading the ancients
on honor), this would suggest that the majority of human beings are
by nature intrinsically capable of moderating their desires for the sake
of peace – that is, in the state of nature, prior to the construction of
the compact. This conclusion would undermine what Hobbes argues
is the self-evidently necessary transition from the state of nature to the
compact and its conflation with the Sovereign, preferably a monarchy,
because it would be possible in principle for men to reach a peace treaty
among themselves in the state of nature prior to such despotic coercion.
I think there is no consistent solution to this conundrum on Hobbes’s
terms. Whether and how often these Sovereign natures would arise is
literally a matter of accident; they would emerge spontaneously from
Fortuna. Reason, being an anthropocentric faculty with no intrinsic
connection to the world, can supply no account of these unfathomable
upsurges; no psychology of statesmanship in which ambition is under-
stood (as in Plato) as a mode of the longing for union with the immor-
tally Beautiful and Good, thereby both dangerous and capable of reha-
bilitation. The link between the anthropocentric ratiocination that, for
Hobbes, demonstrates the necessity of the Sovereign and the sponta-
neous appearance of such natures is, at bottom, fated. This is a corollary
of the larger and central ambiguity of Hobbes’s philosophy. Humans
are able to make sense of nature by assigning it causality, and to rem-
edy its deficiencies by re-constructing it. (The compact, for example,
supplies an artificial supplement and improvement to humans’ natural
inability to pursue their rights without degenerating into the war of all
against all, contradicting their ability to pursue their rights.) But this
human capacity is at bottom unfathomable, since nature itself is not
objectively ordered so as to render itself intelligible to human reason.
Accordingly, the possibility of Sovereign natures emerging can only be
inferred from the primordialist and Machiavellian undertow of Hobbe-
sian methodology, the self-emergence of Fortuna as what/that it is.
Because of Locke’s liberal democratic emendation of Hobbes, and
through the historical evolution of liberalism in practice, this theoretical
lacuna has not been glaringly evident in the world of events. Indeed,

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within the liberal democracies, the taming of eros and thumos is one of
the most striking indications that Hobbes may have been right to believe
that these traits, the psychological core of classical statecraft, could be
ignored, suppressed, or gradually bourgeoisified by the promulgation
of a psychology of pedestrian hedonism and appetitive self-interest “in
the universities,” successfully actualized through the rise of commercial
economies ([1971] p. 728).
However, looking at the pace of modernization in the non-Western
world (Mao, Pol Pot) or in Western regimes hostile to the West (Stalin,
Hitler), one may wonder whether the Hobbesian Sovereign has not in
fact haunted the modern project all along. In these cases, terror has
been used all too literally to reduce people to the “similitude of the
passions” and strip them of all religious, family, and national traditions
so as to convert them into human integers who are interchangeable
with one another as units of a unified and contentless compact. Perhaps
nowhere is the poverty of the liberal psychology of pedestrian power-
seeking more apparent than here. When, as in Hobbes’s theory, a tyrant
is needed to re-shape human nature through terror to make it conform
to a psychology which by definition dismisses such tyrannical natures
as impossible or absurd from the outset, then one invites the emergence
of a tyrannical project which exceeds the worst prognostications of
the classics while at the same time sacrificing the classics’ capacity for
identifying the tyrannical nature as a deformed version of the erotic
longing for immortality by contrasting it with the healthy pursuit of civic
honor and an ambition to serve the common good. When everything
is thumos, thumos disappears, becoming the ghost in the machine of
modernization.

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 II

the tyrant and the

statesman in plato’s
political philosophy
and machiavelli’s
rejoinder
This chapter centers on Plato’s most explicit discussion of the possibil-
ity that a young tyrant’s “eros” for the city might be harnessed to the
Athenian Stranger’s prescription in the Laws for founding a just regime
(709–712).1 This is the classic statement of the relationship between
an ambitious young ruler and the philosopher who should act as his
mentor, a relationship echoed in many later works such as Cicero’s
depiction of Scipio the Younger and in his own real-life (and unsuc-
cessful) attempts to govern the young Octavian Caesar. I then proceed
to present Machiavelli’s very different interpretation of this rubric in
chapter 23 of The Prince on the need to avoid “flatterers,” in order
to show how, in his evaluation, a prince’s methodical exercise of will
can do away with the need for this philosophical governor, in effect
enabling the prince to become the source of his own prudence.
Before turning to the Laws, I begin with some general observations
about the theme of tyranny in classical political thought. The ancient
understanding of tyranny involves both psychological and theoretical
dimensions, as well as considerations of pragmatic statecraft, and all
three dimensions must be kept in play if we are to penetrate it. At
bottom, the ancients, as I suggested in the Introduction, distinguish
between two types of tyranny. The first is ordinary “garden variety”
tyranny based on selfish passion and excess; its need for condemnation

1 “The possibility,” as the Athenian Stranger puts it, “that a divine erotic passion for
moderate and just practices should arise in some of the great and all-powerful rulers”
(711d).

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is straightforward, and its correction lies in the proper education of

eros and thumos within a harmonious soul grounded in a cosmology of
balance and moderation.
In addition, however, the ancients explore the prospects for reform-
ing tyrannical power into virtuous monarchy or statesmanship through
an alliance between the tyrant’s or potential tyrant’s ambition and
a philosophically guided pattern for a justly or at least beneficently
ordered regime (exemplified, as we consider in this chapter, by Book 4
of the Laws and, as we consider in Chapter 4, by Xenophon’s Hiero
and the Education of Cyrus). This case is far more complex because it
involves some relaxation of the moral condemnation of tyranny if it can
be rehabilitated to serve philosophy’s vision of a just regime. As Plato,
Aristotle, and Xenophon were aware, this speculative tangent was play-
ing with fire, and, as we see throughout this chapter and the ones to
follow, it had to be treated with great circumspection lest it backfire,
undermining the condemnation of tyranny essential to the ethos of a
republic without producing the desired transition of the tyrant into a
benevolent ruler. As I argue with respect to Xenophon in particular,
to the extent that the ancients do entertain the reform of tyranny, they
nevertheless do sometimes come quite close – although not all the way –
to being “Machiavellian.”
As we observed in the Introduction, closer to real-world Greek
and Roman practice, a tyrant was fundamentally distinguished from
a basileus, a king by lawful hereditary descent. However, tyrannies
could be relatively beneficent, even hereditary. Sophocles’ Oedipus is
the exemplar of how a charismatic and brilliant usurper, bedeviled
by underlying resentment of his illegitimate status on the part of the
old nobility, is driven to prove himself by ever more brilliant deeds
in the service of the city, sealing his own doom. The Romans had
a deep-rooted abhorrence for tyrants (or “kings”) as monsters of
arrogant passion like the Tarquins, the enemies of free peoples. Yet
the Augustan principate actualized the notion, first entertained by the
Greek philosophers, that a certain kind of tyranny, now decked out in
seemly constitutional garb, might bring about a rational world of peace
and order. Hence the Antonine emperors’ claims to embody the high
moral standards of Greco-Roman culture, Stoicism, and philosophy in
the Pax Romana. In general, going back to the political philosophies
of Plato and Aristotle, tyranny was coeval with “despotism,” the rule

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of a master over slaves as opposed to free citizens, and, as Aristotle

and Thucydides both observed, entire cities could act as collective
tyrannies toward the peoples they conquered (Thucydides 2.64–65;
Aristotle Politics 1324a–b22). In this respect, the categories of tyranny
and despotism, when applied to one city’s relationship to others,
were ways in which the ancients conceptualized what we would now
more likely term “imperialism.” Again, however, a straightforward
moral condemnation of tyranny, whether the tyranny of individuals
within cities or of cities over other peoples, was complicated by the
possibility – explored in varying ways and degrees by Plato, Aristotle,
and especially Xenophon – of a universal rational monarchy ruling
over many peoples in conformity with the beneficent art of household
management. With these preliminary considerations in mind, let us
turn to the specifically Platonic teaching.

the lover of the city

It can hardly be said of the Platonic dialogues that they are squeamish
or unworldly about the existence of tyranny and of tyrannical longings
for pleasure and mastery. In modern political philosophy, the tyranni-
cal longing tends either to be reasoned down to a misunderstanding of
a more primordial impulse for self-preservation and pedestrian gratifi-
cation in the Hobbesian manner, or, in the Kantian manner, banished
altogether to a realm of equally compulsive inclinations to be repressed
by the metaphysics of morals that establishes the identification of moral
freedom with the will’s striving to be unconditioned by natural determi-
nations. By contrast, in Plato’s evocation of the phenomena of political
life, people are quite open about their ambition to gain a degree of
prestige, wealth, and power that exceeds that of their fellow citizens.
As Callicles puts it, to “fare like a real man” means to win distinc-
tion in the agora (Gorgias 485). Success in politics was often identified
with “getting the better” of or “having more than” one’s competitors
(pleonexia).
With some prodding by Socrates, some of these ambitious young
men (Alcibiades, Polus, and Theages to mention three) confess that
they admire and wish to emulate the despots and tyrants of nonpopu-
lar regimes. Socrates often enflames this interest in mastery precisely
because he wishes to redirect it toward philosophically moderated

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statesmanship and some degree of friendliness for philosophy itself.

Hence, in the Theages, he encourages an ambitious young man to con-
flate thinking about being the master of a household (oikos) with think-
ing about what it would be like to rule an entire country as if it were
one’s personal household (138c–d). The limit test case of despotic fan-
tasy in the Platonic dialogues is usually the Great King of Persia, who,
with his multinational empire of millions of subjects and his vast stand-
ing army, represented for the ancient Greeks the very apogee of human
might – and a political stability that, increasingly in the years following
Socrates’ generation, the Greeks could only compare ruefully with their
own fractious city-states. For the Greeks, the oikos, whether private or
encompassing an entire regime, was a human association that, much
more than the civic association, articulated itself naturally in terms of
a ranked division of labor and required moderation and loyalty from
its members. So when Socrates encourages his young interlocutors’ fan-
tasies of mastery, he simultaneously channels that inchoate adolescent
longing toward the ensemble of specific disciplines with their objects in
the world laid down by the ordering of the household – an architec-
tonic rationality that in turn must be grounded in the self-control of a
virtuous character. As we observed in Chapter 1, Alicibades is educated
toward this self-reflection by the royal myth of the two paradigmatic
regimes, the monarchy of Cyrus as the embodiment of household man-
agement and Sparta as the model for virtuous self-government by the
“beautiful and good ones” (kaloi kagathoi). In an analogous manner, in
Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, his Socrates points to the Persian king and
the Spartan king as the two poles of gentlemanliness, corresponding
respectively to reasonable monarchical management according to the
Good and the nobility of the citizen among a free people.
Yet for all this frankness about the natural wish of some people to
rule over others, whether for the fame of political honor or for simple
exploitation, the Platonic dialogues have almost nothing to say about
the role of a tyrannical personality in the founding of new political
orders. Throughout political history, for better or worse, constitutions
have often been preceded by the figure Hobbes terms “the Sovereign”
and Rousseau calls “the Legislator” – the founder who effects the nec-
essarily tumultuous transition from disorder to order, from the old
constitution to the new. Sometimes they use a blend of persuasion and
force to knit together a previously scattered people. Sometimes they are

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the objects of religious veneration. Often they use force to such a ter-
rible degree that the constitutional arrangement they establish finds it
must bury the memory of the enormities of the founding, lest they make
it impossible to believe in the decency of the order thereby established.2
This ambiguity was encoded in the Romans’ contradictory accounts
of their own founders, the pious and heroic Aeneas versus the criminal
gang of Romulus. Yet in all the Platonic dialogues, the references to this
phenomenon of the entirely new founding are so scant as to number no
more than a few pages. There is the notorious but brief passage in the
Republic in which Socrates mentions, almost as an aside, that for the
education prescribed for the citizenry to take root from an early age, it
would be best if they could somehow start with a fresh generation of
children (541a). The reader is left to wonder momentarily what would
happen to their parents on being driven away but not encouraged to
pursue the thought. The other, more pragmatic reference – but still
only several Stephanus pages long – is the discussion we focus on in this
chapter in Book 4 of the Laws of how a young tyrant with an “eros”
for the affairs of the polis might be the best means for quickly founding
the constitution of Magnesia, setting its laws and institutions in place
all at once.
The reasons for this peculiar reticence become clear if we bear in
mind that the chief purpose of Socrates’ investigations of tyranny and
statesmanship is not to provide an agenda for actual reform but to
provoke his interlocutors to self-reflection through exploring the mean-
ing of the virtues. Before turning in detail to Book 4 of the Laws to
see how its frankness about the tyrannical founder is the exception
that proves the rule, let us pause to consider what is by all accounts
the most exhaustive defense of philosophically grounded justice against
the injustice of the tyrant, Plato’s Republic. Although it culminates in the
seemingly resounding critique of the tyrant’s life in Book 9, the grounds
on which that critique is mounted are carefully qualified and not the
entire story. For the Republic itself is very far from being a wholesale

2 This is hinted at in the Republic in the shameful indecency of Leontius’ morbid desire to
gaze into an execution pit full of corpses. At bottom, the laws and the regime presuppose
the use of deadly force, both in the founding and in continuing to enforce the law.
However, healthy-minded citizens will not dwell on this underside of political life lest it
sap their capacity for loyalty to the city’s ways and encourage them to identify with its
foes.

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defense of republican self-government in contrast with the mastery of

a single man. On the contrary, from the outset, its identification of
virtue with knowledge – with an “expert” (technikos) – carries a pro-
foundly antidemocratic undertone. The Republic does not so much
defend republican self-government against arbitrary rule as it explores
a kind of rational absolutism – the rule of the philosopher-king – in
contrast with irrational absolutism. However, for the very reason that
Socrates wishes to make the superiority of the philosophic way of life
paramount over all merely political alternatives, even the best pattern of
authority that is the kallipolis, he must adopt a strategy that occludes the
appeal of rational tyranny in comparison with irrational tyranny and,
by reducing the meaning of tyranny to the most monstrous excesses
of erotic dissipation flowing directly from the vulgarity of democracy
(562a–d, 565d–e), establish the philosophic life as the much more reli-
able path to happiness on a personal level in the here and now, rather
than as a superior form of rule meant literally to be implemented. He
wants Glaucon to internalize the rule of reason over eros and thumos
within himself, not attempt literally to found the rule of reason, which
now simultaneously floats off into a “pattern in the sky” and is buried
as an irrecoverable golden age in the most distant past (546a–547b,
592a–b).
This concealment of the appeal of rational tyranny is evident from
the earliest pages of the dialogue. When Socrates first proposes that
justice be considered on the analogy of an art, he is already implicitly
identifying the art of ruling with expert knowledge, as opposed to the
opinion of the many, especially of the democracy. The first result of this
analogy, however, is the disappearance of politics altogether, because
Polemarchus is driven by Socrates to conclude that, insofar as justice is
an art, it can do no harm, for the arts only improve what they work on
and never harm them. This would appear to make both external warfare
against enemies of the city and coercion and punishment directed at
malefactors within the city impossible (335e).
Thrasymachus’ angry interjection at this point is not only based on
his offended sense of realism, but because he wants to restore the focus
on the question of the regime and how it is ordered. His formula that
“justice is the advantage of the stronger” applies a universal definition
that allows for all possible regime types. He starts out, therefore, in
the pose of the bluff defender of the status quo, of established power,

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as against Socrates’ ineffectual and subversive pacifism (336b–338c).

However, in a key admission, Thrasymachus agrees with Socrates that
it is possible for rulers to make mistakes about what is to their own
advantage. The true ruler will be – or be guided by – an expert, a tech-
nician of injustice who knows how to take advantage most efficiently
of others in all circumstances. Socrates and Thrasymachus agree that
the ruler is the technikos – the superlatively accomplished craftsman of
authority. What they disagree over is the meaning of the most advan-
tageous way of life. When Socrates tries again to show that, insofar
as the ruler’s advantage is practiced as an art, it can do no harm to
the ruled, Thrasymachus distinguishes more explicitly between those
who happen to be in power and those who understand that, by nature,
the best of way of life is untrammeled selfishness resulting, in the most
successful instances, in tyranny (341a, 343b–344d). Those who merely
happen to be in power may actually believe in the conventions promot-
ing justice. The true technikos of rule, by contrast, is like a shepherd
who does benefit his flock by fattening them up, but only for their
eventual shearing and slaughter. In other words, the true technician of
rule could abide by certain conventions of morality and benevolent rule
outwardly and provisionally, as means toward making the people he
wishes to master more prosperous and therefore riper for exploitation
and profit. Yet by making this distinction between the tyrant who is
fully enlightened as to the best way of life by nature and not under
the spell of conventional morality and those who are merely powerful
through convention but may not pursue their self-interest with clarity
or consistency, Thrasymachus can no longer pose as the bluff defender
of the status quo, particularly of regimes with popular rule like Athens,
where democratic government introduces the greatest possible tension
between the morality of the many and the claims of the expert few.
In Book 2, Glaucon restores Thrasymachus’ defense of tyranny as the
most natural way of life, in contrast with the pusillanimous morality
of the majority, by tactfully casting it as the opinion of others, which
he is merely summarizing. He also places techne squarely in the camp
of the tyrant, refining Thrasymachus’ thesis that the ruler by nature
will practice the art of flawlessly pursued injustice, an art so perfect
that it will make its practitioner seem outwardly just in the eyes of the
gullible many. He also demands that if Socrates is to defend the just
life as superior to the tyrant’s life, the defense must not be tainted by

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any “wages” for the just man, because that would suggest a utilitar-
ian motive other than justice itself. In fact, Glaucon claims, the only
way we could be sure a man was being just purely for its own sake
would be if he was stripped of every ordinary benefit of conforming
to conventional morality and, furthermore, was perceived by others as
unjust, suffering horrific punishments as a consequence (361a–362b).
In answering Glaucon’s challenge to show what justice is “all alone in
the soul” and prove that it is more worth possessing than the life of the
tyrant who successfully camouflages himself as just and gains all the
benefits of a just reputation as well as enormous wealth, pleasure, and
power on top, Socrates implicitly denies that he can defend justice as an
entirely inward-directed virtue bereft of any role in relation to others.
The proposal to trace the “city writ large” implies that justice must first
be found as the ordering pattern of the city, then traced back to the
individual. Justice, according to Socrates, can be satisfying both for its
own sake and for the benefits it brings (368d–369a).
Continuing to pursue the analogy of justice to an art, Socrates pro-
poses that each nature in the city will be best suited for one job or
deed (370c–d). Those functions are then internalized as the three com-
ponents of the individual soul. Although initially the transition from
the bucolic “city of sows” based on simple survival is sparked by Glau-
con’s longing for erotic refinements, excess wealth, and luxuries, which
will require a foreign policy of imperial aggression, Socrates proposes
that a class of soldiers will be needed whose main character trait is
not erotic passion but thumotic bellicosity (372c–374a). Paradoxically,
even though the warrior class is summoned into being by the imaginary
city’s erotic excesses demanded by Glaucon, eros is driven underground
in the political psychology of the unfolding best regime in favor of the
thumotic capacity for loyalty to one’s fellow citizens and inflicting harm
on the city’s foes. On the basis of the threadbare comparison of the war-
rior’s capacity to distinguish, like a guardian dog, between friend and
enemy with the philosopher’s capacity to distinguish between what is
and what is not, a ruling class of Guardians, the future philosopher-
kings, is cemented into place in the tripartite relationship between the
city and the soul (376b–c).3

3 For a subtle consideration of the soul-city parallel and its complexities, consider Ferrari
(2003).

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Because thumos does not equate with a single job like material desire
(epthumia) and the lowly crafts that serve it but is dangerously “double”
in its capacity for both friendliness and ferocity, education is needed to
make sure it reserves its friendliness for fellow citizens. The civic edu-
cation of Books 2, 3, and 4 of the Republic fashions a cosmology that
will redirect the combative and bellicose excesses of untamed thumos
into disciplined civic-spiritedness and honorable service to the com-
mon good. The story of Leontius, who tries unsuccessfully through
self-castigation to master his morbid longing to look at the corpses of
executed criminals, proves, Socrates says, that thumos, properly reared
and habituated, could at least “sometimes” be the ally of reason in rul-
ing over aberrant impulse (440a).4 Insofar as the Republic is Socrates’
extended attempt to defend justice against injustice, as Glaucon first
demanded, Socrates appears to believe that the thumotic side of the soul
could best be rehabilitated by a devotion to public service and honor,
as if to suggest that the belligerence of thumos has a collective leaning
toward moral indignation on behalf of the “we.” But this would appear
to skirt the possibility of a supremely ambitious individual’s capacity for
thumotic rage and zeal being the fuel for a purely individual, tyrannical
claim to rule – indeed, even an aspiration to use that absolute power to
establish justice in the city. This is the possibility, to which we presently
turn, briefly explored in Book 4 of the Laws, where the ambitious young
man’s eros for the polis directs his thumotic energies toward the pur-
suit of tyranny, a drive that the Athenian Stranger suggests might be
amenable to redirection by a wise advisor so that the tyrant would find
honor from founding a city that would be just in the future. Instead of,
as in the Republic, thumos acting as the enforcer of reason on behalf
of the common good against tyranny, for these few pages of the Laws,
thumos, guided by an eros for the city, might cooperate with reason to
found a just city by tyrannical means.
This alternative is not openly discussed even briefly in the Republic,
where the argument is skewed in another direction. In Book 5, having
earlier suppressed the erotic side of human psychology in the education
of the Auxiliaries, Socrates now reintroduces it, but only to characterize
the philosophic soul. A second education ensues, that of the philosophic

4 This equivocation parallels Socrates’ earlier remark that it “is possible” that thumos
might be educated to be gentle toward friends and harsh toward enemies (375d).

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Guardian class per se, whose virtue is not grounded in the mere “correct
opinion” inculcated in the Auxiliaries by seemly “tales” about the gods
but by their direct, unvarnished longing to study the Idea of the Good.
Studying the Idea of the Good is now said to be the surest source of
all prudence (505a–c, 536a–b, 539c–540a, 485c–486a). This argument
precisely prepares us for Aristotle’s objection that by failing to distin-
guish between wisdom and prudence, Socrates assimilates all virtue,
including civic virtue, to the single type of the philosopher and robs the
virtue of the nonphilosophic citizens of any independent dignity or self-
sufficiency (Politics 1260a, 1261a10–22; Nicomachean Ethics 1141b).
Consequently, when Socrates finally turns to the long-anticipated show-
down in Book 9 between the philosopher and the tyrant – the ultimate
version of Glaucon’s original contrast between the truly just man reviled
for being unjust and the truly unjust but convincingly outwardly just
man – the basis for the contest is primarily erotic rather than thumotic,
philosophy (like tyranny) being chiefly erotic in its motivation, whereas
civic virtue is chiefly grounded in thumos. Moreover, by depicting the
tyrant in Book 8 as emerging from the debased hedonism of the demo-
cratic regime, Socrates makes tyrannical eros appear vulgar, low, and
contemptible in contrast with the elevated pleasure of philosophy, while
at the same time stigmatizing it by appealing to an aristocratic disdain
for the mob.
The tyrant who emerges from democracy in Book 8, setting up the
showdown in Book 9 between the tyrant and the philosopher, is a
pleasure-ridden demagogue and libertine, a Cataline or a Nero. This
derivation of tyranny from the vulgarity of democracy omits the at
least equally plausible hypothesis that another kind of tyrant – austere
and warlike – could emerge directly from timocracy, the second worst
(or best) regime type in the typology of regimes in Book 8. Only the for-
mal agreement among the interlocutors to trace the decline of the city in
speech as a decline in which each successively worse regime – timocracy,
oligarchy, and democracy – represents a widening gap between the good
of the individual and the good of the whole, which had been absolutely
harmonious in the kallipolis, allows Socrates to ignore the objection that
another kind of tyranny – zealous, austere, self-disciplined, and war-
like – could have emerged (544e–545d). For the argument pulls in the
direction of the tyrant as the most extreme instance of the contradiction
between the common good and the selfish individual, the radicalization

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of the witless pleasure seeking already attributed to democracy, where

even the animals stagger around drunk (562e). Yet history and common
sense both prompt us to recognize that there are ambitious tyrants who
act cold-bloodedly to refound the community in what they perceive to
be a more efficient and even just manner, undistracted by the excesses
of pleasure seeking. Socrates’ way of setting up the critique of tyranny
accounts for a Caligula or a Commodus, but not for Cyrus, Alexander,
and Caesar, Machiavelli’s favored trio of “princely” rulers in chapter 14
of The Prince. Even within the Republic and the way the decline of the
regimes is set up, whereby the thumotic Auxiliaries overthrow the rule
of reason to institute a regime based on honor, it can easily be envisioned
that such a rebellion might be led by an outstandingly ambitious and
honor-driven individual, just as Xenophon (as we consider in Chapter
4) depicts the young Cyrus as leading a rebellion of his fellow peers
against the quasi-philosophically grounded Persian Republic so as to
liberate their ambitions through imperialism. Socrates’ insistence that
the timocrats would collectively and immediately decline into greedy
oligarchs is unwarranted, at best only one possibility among others.
Indeed, Socrates’ own description of timocracy undermines this claim.
For it is clear that a tyrant or aspiring tyrant could emerge directly
from such men as these. They have, Socrates says, fire, magnificence,
and quickness, “but such natures don’t willingly grow together with
understandings that choose orderly lives which are quiet and steady.
Rather, the men who possess them are carried away by their quickness,
wherever chance leads and all steadiness goes out of them” (503c1–7).
Surely a class of men so described is likelier to produce a Julius Caesar
than a Uriah Heap. Only in the Laws is this proto-Machiavellian ruler,
whose ambition disciplines his eros so as to instill self-mastery, briefly
allowed to emerge.
In Book 9 of the Republic, Socrates tries to establish the superiority
of the philosophic life to the tyrant’s life depicted as a purely personal
obsession with one’s own indiscriminate pleasures. Even in this context,
it is tacitly conceded that eros is the main candidate for the leader of the
soul, whether directed toward tyranny or wisdom. Eros leads thumos,
whether for good or for ill (572e–573e). However, tyrannical eros as
depicted here is divorced from the context of a more honor-driven long-
ing for prestige through great public accomplishments. The tyrant of
Book 9 is a pleasure-besotted monster of excess, tormented by jealousy,

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possessiveness, fear of those he has injured through his outrages, driven

from one empty and fruitless spasm of delight to another, haunted by
his inner emptiness (579b). Socrates’ proof of the philosopher’s superi-
ority hinges on the fact that his eros pursues a lasting object – the Idea of
the Good – whereas the tyrant’s eros pursues pleasures that are bodily,
hence transient and perishable. Only the pursuit of the lasting object
makes one truly independent, with a satisfaction that is lasting, not fleet-
ing (582a–d, 583a–b, 585a–c). In emphasizing the philosopher’s eros
for the eternally lasting Good, Socrates draws on the cosmology of the
earlier civic education of the Auxiliaries to show how only philosophy
can defeat with complete certainty the claims of tyranny. The crucial
difference, however, is that whereas the education of the Auxiliaries
treated the honor of exercising the moral virtues as intrinsically choice-
worthy in its own right, Socrates’ defense of the philosopher’s superior-
ity to the tyrant is primarily hedonistic: because the philosopher’s eros
is overwhelmingly absorbed in the pursuit of wisdom, passions that in
the nonphilosopher might lead to aberrant impulses of pleasure seeking
and domination are completely assimilated to the longing for the Good,
thereby entailing a morally virtuous life as a second-order consequence
of a life devoted to the highest and most satisfying pleasure (485d–e).
At bottom, in other words, the philosopher does not choose justice for
its own sake alone, as Glaucon had originally demanded.
The tyrant of Book 9 is not a man whose limitless lust for glory
might incentivize him to discipline himself to undergo every hardship
and privation on the road to his goal of immortal fame. To this extent,
Socrates’ critique of tyranny in the Republic is compelling but incom-
plete. It is still possible, on the basis of the dialogue’s own arguments,
to envision a technikos of rule, an aspiring tyrant whose motivation
is not philosophy strictly speaking but superlative honor and who, in
rationally pusuring that goal, is capable of a steely self-control, absti-
nence from pleasure, and self-overcoming that is a reflection of the
philosophic life, a figure more like (as we consider in Chapters 4 and
5) Xenophon’s Cyrus. The Republic itself largely glides over the issue
of whether and to what extent such a man would, in his lust for glory,
be wholly unswayed by the claims of reason in their own right – the
imperative to establish a regime that was reasonably ordered and benef-
icent – or might, on the other hand, be amenable to a partnership with
those philosophical principles, just as Xenophon’s Simonides tries to

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convert the tyrant Hiero into becoming a benevolent “leader” or as his

Cyrus conquers the world out of a zeal to bring the art of good govern-
ment perfected by the Persian Republic to his millions of new subjects.
These principles of good government, as we see in Chapter 4, are partly
reflected in the education provided for Cyrus by the Persian Republic
and partly conveyed to Cyrus by his father, the Persian King Cambyses,
whose attempt to imprint on his son the need for just government has
clearly identifiable similarities to arguments made by the Xenophon-
tic Socrates. Elsewhere, Plato himself (in the Statesman) sketches the
model for a rational despotism, although he does not discuss the spe-
cific issue of how such a regime would be founded (258e, 300c–e,
307e, 309d).5
The Republic itself contains the seed of the destruction of any kind
of neighborly city-state once its contradictions are exposed to the full
glare of the universality of reason. For the division of labor on which
the tripartite division of the soul and the city is based – that each nature
best performs one job – is inherently universalistic. That is to say,
an architectonic meritocracy could not possibly be confined within the
boundaries of a single polis. For, very simply, the best people for the best
jobs are universally distributed, requiring some kind of cosmopolitan
regime. In this respect, one could say that what is “noble” about the
“noble lie” is that it takes a universalistic principle of meritocracy based
on the division of labor and grafts it onto a single, autochthonous polis,
embedding its natural hierarchy in the earth of a single city’s most
ancient past (the “myth of the metals” according to which each class
springs from the earth their souls mixed, in ascending order, with iron,
silver, and gold [415a–d]). To clarify the lie would mean the doom of the
polis. (As a mixture of myth and reason that invites its own dissolution
through reasoning itself, the Noble Lie illustrates my characterization
of Socratic images in the last chapter as a holistic perspective that invites
analytical refutation while preserving a surface integrity that promotes
the virtues.)
In other words, the very notion of a city ruled by philosophy is
arguably inevitably a way station to some kind of cosmopolitan order.

5 See also the Lovers, where Socrates equates the king, tyrant, statesman, household man-
ager, master, the just man and the moderate man: all possess a single techne of ruling
(138c–d).

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As we see in Chapter 4, this is the alternative Xenophon explores

through his life of Cyrus the Great, and, as we have already observed,
this household pattern of rule recurs throughout many of the Platonic
dialogues themselves. Indeed, Aristotle in his critique of the Repub-
lic argues that it automatically turns into the rule of one man (the
philosopher-king) over a city that becomes his personal oikos, and,
as Aristotle tells us elsewhere in a passage sometimes thought to be a
harbinger of Alexander the Great, the art of household management as
a regime principle can be extended to many “cities and peoples” (Pol-
itics 1261a10–20, 1285b20–33). That Plato’s Socrates tries to conceal
the inevitable universality of the division of labor within the confines of
a harmonious and autochthonous polis likely stems from two sources –
a disinclination for philosophy to be distracted from its truest con-
cern, the love of wisdom, by a real-world project for a more rational
politics through benevolent despotism, along with the Socratic philoso-
pher’s own preference for a neighborly polis in which freewheeling and
spontaneous conversations about virtue provide his eros with the psy-
chological loam for the art of midwifery that he practices on his mostly
younger fellow conversationalists.6

the hidden tyrant

In arguing that Socrates’ chief purpose in investigating tyranny and
how it contrasts with both philosophy and sound statesmanship is not
to provide a blueprint for actual reform, I am not arguing that the
optimal arrangements set forth in the Republic have no bearing at all
on actual government or that they represent an “ideal” in opposition to
the “reality” of political practice. The categorical distinction between
the real and the ideal, or between the is and the ought, is unknown
to Platonic and classical thought. What is highest, noblest, and most
lasting is also what is most naturally real. The Idea of the Good and the
other Ideas are the stable archetypes of perfection in which phenomena
participate, and therefore, to the extent that a phenomenon is connected
to what is immortal and unchanging and entirely reasonable, it is also
in its most natural condition. As Diotima puts it in the Symposium

6 Consider Newell (2000) pp. 89–100.

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in describing the Idea of the Beautiful toward which all erotic longing
ought properly to be directed:

[It] is always being and neither comes into being nor passes away. . . . It is
by itself and with itself, always being of a single form. . . . For this is what
it is to proceed correctly in erotics, or to be led by another – beginning
with the beautiful things around us, always to proceed on up for the sake of
beauty itself, ending at that study which is the study of nothing other than
the beautiful itself. (211a–c)

To the extent that the “beautiful city” of the Republic is governed

by reason, by a meritocracy based on the division of labor, and by a
cosmology of eidetic stability and oneness that provides a guide for
properly fashioned poetry to inculcate in the souls of the citizens the
repose and orderliness that are characteristic of the cosmos as a whole –
to this extent, the kallipolis is the most real of cities, even if the neces-
sities of human vice and circumstance make it virtually impossible that
it will ever coincide with an observable city in our lifetimes.
What I mean to say is that Socrates’ chief purpose in exploring the
prospects for a just political community is to clarify the longings of the
soul. The Republic is a thought experiment about what it would mean
to think through the ultimate object of most political reforms – what it
would mean, that is, to resolve the contradiction between self-interest
and the common good. The dialogue deliberately offers an extreme
hypothesis for investigation – that a certain set of local political con-
ventions might be coterminous with reason itself, such that obedience
to its authority would be to the degree humanly possible voluntary and
based on rational assent, rather than, as is much more frequently the
case in political life, coerced or a matter of customary and unreflective
loyalty. By extrapolating from the parts of the soul what the proper
objects of the soul’s activities would be in a just community, Socrates is
able to offer an articulation of a well-ordered soul that is in harmony
with just behavior toward others (435e, 464c–e). The fact that the opti-
mal city is unlikely ever to come into existence – dependent as it is on
the extraordinary chance of a philosopher willing to govern coinciding
with a king who is genuinely philosophic (472d) – and unlikely to last
even if it did come into being, takes nothing away from the fact that the
soul of the individual in its relations with others should be patterned
to the degree possible on this city arranged according to the Good.

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For whether or not this city is possible and whether or not it is desirable
from every plausible perspective on human happiness (given its demands
for the abolition of family life, property, and every other version of the
love of one’s own), it is the paradigm for what it would mean for politi-
cal arrangements to be naturally good. It is the only pattern of authority,
in other words, that would enable human nature to develop toward its
fullness and completion within the constraints of political convention,
to the degree that any political convention might fulfill human nature.
Indeed, when turning to the education of the philosophic Guardian
class in Book 7, Socrates argues that even the philosophers actually
existing in the world today are in some measure deformed because
they have not had the experience of an education in governing and
the experience of governing itself (539e–540a, 520d–e, 534d, 536a–d).
That there might be private pursuits, or blends of private pursuits and
civic engagement, that might as well or better fulfill the fullest range of
natural human potentialities for the good life than could an optimally
ordered city is a question that remains open, of course, throughout the
Platonic dialogues, which are not exclusively concerned with politics
even in the broad sense discussed here. The purpose of elaborating the
city in speech is, in short, as a propaedeutic for the education of the
soul, regardless of the likelihood of those arrangements coming fully
into existence. In the Republic, the soul’s erotic ascent to philosophy
proceeds by way of the question of justice. The ascent to philosophy
entails the moral virtues, just as the cosmology guiding the Auxiliaries’
education flows from the Ideas, although the ascent to philosophy ulti-
mately does not account for those moral virtues as good in themselves
but as consequences of the philosopher’s absorption in studying the
Idea of the Good. Nevertheless, the philosopher will also possess the
character traits of the Auxiliaries: moderation, steadfastness, and self-
control, even if they derive from a source other than the Auxiliaries’
civic education. So in a sense, the moral life of civic virtue will imitate
the life of the philosopher.7 In the education of the Auxiliaries, Socrates’
own quality of steadfastness (karteria, a virtue of Socrates praised by
Alcibiades in the Symposium 219d–221c) becomes a standard for the
citizenry (Republic 399a).

7 See the argument in Pangle (1985) p. 14.

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These themes are crystallized in a crucial exchange between Socrates

and Glaucon (472c–e):

“It was therefore for the sake of a pattern,” I said, “that we were seeking both
for what justice by itself is like, and for the perfectly just man, if he should
come into being, and what he would be like once he came into being; and,
in their turns, for injustice and the most unjust man. . . . We were not seeking
them for the sake of proving that it’s possible for these things to come into
being.”
“What you say is true,” he said.
“Do you suppose that a painter is any less good who draws a pattern of what
the fairest human being would be like and renders everything in this picture
adequately, but can’t prove that it’s also possible that such a man can come
into being?”
“No, by Zeus, I don’t,” he said.
“Then what about this? Weren’t we, as we assert, also making a pattern in
speech of a good city?”
“Certainly.”
“Do you suppose that what we say is any less good on account of our not
being able to prove that it is possible to found a city the same as the one in
speech?”
“Surely not,” he said.

Socrates’ analogy to painting here suggests that the optimal city is an

imitation of a beauty found in nature. At the same time, the fact that
painting is a mere semblance of natural beauty delicately reminds us
that the best regime is no more than an approximation of what reason
unconstrained by any concern with political life might discover about
nature and how best to live. However, the optimal city is at least pat-
terned on nature, if only ambiguously so. It is not an “ideal” in the sense
of being a construct of reason meant to highlight the deficiencies of a
merely naturalistic conception of political motivation, whether rooted
in the utilitarianism of Hobbes or the ethical imperative of Kant aimed
at striving to overcome that utilitarianism. Again, the very use of the
term “ideal” to describe the kallipolis distorts Plato’s thought by freight-
ing it with a modern distinction between nature as matter in motion
and reason as an anthropocentric capacity for utilitarian calculation

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or ethical formalism that it does not recognize. For Plato, as a matter

of practicality and circumstance, and given the prevalence of the love
of one’s own, the best city may be vastly less likely ever to come into
being than the flawed democracies, oligarchies, timocracies, and tyran-
nies we usually encounter. Yet because the kallipolis is the best city, it
is, however rare, more real than they are.
As Glaucon comes to see, then, the main practical purpose of the
optimal city is that one can “found it” in one’s own soul regardless
of what kind of regime one actually lives in. This does not, it must be
emphasized, imply a kind of withdrawal into the self, because what
one “founds” in the well-educated soul is a series of virtues elaborated
precisely through a reflection on our involvement with other people
in accordance with the common good (the search for the soul “writ
large” as the polis, yielding the tripartite parallel between the soul and
the city). Moreover, although democracy is ranked very low by Socrates
because of its wide divergence between the self-interest of the individual
and the common good, democracy is, due to this very lack of communal
cohesiveness and uniformity, the regime in which all the other latent
regime types and their accompanying psychologies can be found and
explored (557b–e). In other words, the democracy is bustling with real
or would-be timocrats, oligarchs, and tyrants, so that it is possible
to compare them with one another, whereas in each of those other
regimes, one type of soul would predominate to the exclusion of the
others. Hence, as Socrates says in Book 10 when returning to the theme
of the reform of poetry, we first have to grasp the “forms” of all the
souls as a guide for poetic imitation, an inventory that has been filled
by the examination of the defective regimes in Book 8 in their falling
away from the best regime, an inventory that democracy possesses in
its fullest variety (595a).
Moreover, Socrates is not suggesting in the Republic that nothing is
ever to be hoped for from actual political reform guided by philosoph-
ical reflection. This is how I would interpret the otherwise seemingly
absurd assertion by the politically powerless Socrates in the Gorgias: “I
think I am one of the few Athenians, not to say the only one, attempt-
ing the true art of statesmanship [politike techne]; nowadays, I alone
am handling political affairs [prattein ta politika]” (521d). A person
who has founded the kallipolis within himself – or, it must follow from
the reforms of Book 5, herself – will look for opportunities to achieve

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whatever reforms are possible, to a relative degree in the given circum-

stances, in the direction of the optimal conditions revealed through the
city in speech. In other words, a citizen will look for opportunities to
decrease, comparatively speaking, the influence of private property over
public affairs, if not to abolish private property altogether; to decrease
divisions and inequalities between men and women, if not to make men
and women identical; to educate children to become citizens who care
for the public good rather than identify themselves unthinkingly with
ancestry, family, and clan, if not to abolish family and clan. The practi-
cal message is one of conservative reformism, Burkean in temperament
if not in theoretical principle. At the same time, the Republic offers
no encouragement whatsoever for setting about actually to create the
conditions for founding the best regime. Only if a basileus – meaning to
say a lawfully established king, not a usurper or revolutionary – should
also “chance” to philosophize “genuinely” might the optimal city come
into being. This is such a big “if,” such an extraordinary coincidence
(sumbebikos) of qualities rarely observed to coincide, that one might
as well pray for an endless summer of blue skies in San Francisco. As
my analogy suggests, of course, that coincidence would still be a natu-
ral occurrence, however incredibly rare – not an ideal reconstruction of
nature’s parts to remedy the limitations of nature, a hallmark of modern
political rationality characteristic of Machiavelli and Hobbes.
What the Republic precludes from consideration by the lack of any
hint of its possibility is that a nonphilosophic political genius – a Cyrus
the Great, Alexander the Great, or Augustus Caesar – might make the
rule of philosophy, or of its reflection, his practical agenda, in the sense
of patterning an actual regime, a multinational cosmopolitan empire,
on the universality and unity characteristic of reason. Indeed, as Hegel
argues, the very emergence of Socratic philosophy may have sounded
the death knell of the polis, for, however much the universality of reason
may have been sheathed in the preference for the aristocratic republic,
its dynamism was bound to bore through the confines of the neighborly
polis and lead to the great cosmopolitan empires of Alexander and
Rome.8 In the case of these ancient imperial masters, it should be

8 More generally, as Hegel observes, Socrates’ claim to be guided by a demonic sign,

tantamount to the introduction of new gods for which he was indicted, really was sub-
versive of established Athenian religion, public life, and family life: “Is it then to be

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noted, they still attempted to legitimize their rule as falling within

the bounds, and actualizing the highest potential, of nature. Not for
nothing did Augustus very deliberately promote the philosophical
school of Stoicism as encouraging the kind of civic character he claimed
to embody in himself and to whose imitation he morally exhorted his
fellow Romans in the ruling classes.9 Or consider Trajan’s Forum,
the architectural embodiment of the Augustan Principate in its finest
flowering under the Good Emperors – the great library encircles
and is higher than the column illustrating Trajan’s military victories,
reminding every citizen that the life of the mind in its contemplation of
the eternal truth must always transcend civic and martial virtue even
at their most glorious.10 It must wait for the modern summons, first
sounded by Machiavelli, to stand outside nature and master it before
the conditions can be planted for the totalitarian project of literally and
fully removing, by untrammeled violence, every normal human tie that
prevents the political community from coinciding with the universality
of pure reason, extirpating private possessions, faith, patriotic and
family ties, and any erotic bonds that might interfere with the complete
submergence of the individual in the community. More about that in due
course.
Even without the prospect of this modern project for the mastery
of nature, one can infer readily enough Socrates’ reticence about the
rehabilitation of tyranny as a means for founding a just regime. To
encourage such a project would be to invite, in the greatest conceiv-
able magnitude, the aggressive and erotic passions for victory that it
is Socrates’ overriding concern to moderate, sublimate, and redirect
toward philosophy. Attempting to institute literally the rule of wis-
dom, or of the one universally valid philosophic teaching, entailing the
eradication of all substantive and customary human ties that interfere
with conformity to the common good (the prescription for the com-
munism of property and the family set forth in Books 3, 4, and 5) is a
project that might well afford tyrannical ambition with a vast agenda
for the destruction of tradition and conventional decencies, and for the

wondered at that Socrates was found guilty? We might say that it had to be so.” Hegel
(1962) pp. 388–389.
9 Syme (1982) remains the classic analysis of Octavian propaganda.
10 See the splendid study by Carcopino (1960).

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concentration of power. It could provide a fair pretext for the grossest

acts of violence and plunder. Thus, the Republic largely masks the pos-
sibility that tyrannical force might play a constructive role in political
reform. The dangers it would be likely to unleash through the nonphilo-
sophic master’s ambition would far outweigh the prospect of benevo-
lent change. Only with Xenophon, as we will presently consider at some
length, do the classics provide us with another route, a prescription for a
rational multinational despotism as a derivation from the art of house-
hold management patterned on Socrates’ own understanding of the
Good.
In Plato, the same elements of an analysis of tyranny that we
encounter in Xenophon are present, but distributed in a much different
way and given a much different emphasis. For Plato, tyranny is funda-
mentally the rule of one man unconstrained by law. However, to recall
our taxonomy from Chapter 1, that definition of tyranny pulls in two
very different directions, the primordial and the transcendental. The
primordial tyrant is the monster of passion and excess whose deformed
character parallels the Sophists’ and pre-Socratics’ view of the world as
a chance flux issuing in “great motions,” an upsurge of unfathomable
force mirrored in the tyrant’s own bellicosity, impulsiveness, and lust
(Laws 888–890). This is the tyrant famously excoriated in Book 9 of
the Republic, a denunciation that was transmitted to posterity down
through the Renaissance humanists and beyond. However, lawless rule
can also move in the other direction, beyond the restraints of conven-
tion to the despotic imposition of a rational and architectonic art of
ruling, the “art of herding featherless bipeds” limned in the Statesman,
in which citizens are stripped of any responsibility for their own political
deliberation and assigned their role by the politikos in the architectonic
division of labor (Statesman 266e). This transcendentalist despotism is
a mirror of the orderly and hierarchical unity of the whole. Whereas
the denunciation of the primordialist version of tyranny is front and
center as one of the culminating peaks of the Republic, the depiction
of the rational despot concludes a trilogy of works generally character-
ized by their immersion in questions of epistemology and the theory of
knowledge, and relatively (although not completely) unconcerned with
discussions about political life in the everyday meaning of the term, in
which the characters openly debate the meaning of justice and the other
virtues.

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The rational despot of the Statesman, moreover, is not a Socratic

philosopher. Rather, he corresponds to the second of two types of
philosopher between whom Socrates distinguishes in the Republic. The
first philosopher is one like himself who, through his love of sights and
variety, is able to clarify through his erotic longing for wisdom how the
heterogeneous world of experience in which we are enveloped proves
to “participate” in the Ideas that crown the various families of phe-
nomena as stable archetypes. But there is another kind of philosopher,
Socrates observes, who is able to directly intuit the Idea of the Good
without needing to tarry in a love of spectacles (476b–d). This kind
of philosopher closely parallels the rational despot of the Statesman,
more Parmenidean than Socratic, able to leap over the middle realm of
participation and access the Good through direct noetic intuition and
apply it directly to political affairs as the art of human herdsmanship.
It has plausibly been argued, moreover, that even the philosopher-king
of the Republic, a regime that, unlike the architectonic art of ruling in
the Statesman, is supposed to permit an independent dignity for civic
life and a degree of reasonable participation in public affairs by the
Auxiliaries, more closely resembles the transcendentalist Parmenidean
ruler of the Statesman than the Socratic philosopher. Socrates, whose
ceaseless thirst for wisdom through his immersion in the variety of daily
experience also incentivizes him to ceaseless skepticism as he interro-
gates appearances and opinions in the quest for what is, would arguably
be unable to live as a conformist even in the kallipolis, where, despite
its reasonableness, there must be a large degree of doctrinal fixity to
the institutions and education of the best regime, a fixity perhaps better
guarded over by the unerotic Parmenidean statesman with his indiffer-
ence to spectacles or to a thirst for variety.11 Finally, in addition to
the two types of lawless rulers sketched so far (primordial and tran-
scendental), there is yet a third variety explored by Plato, that of a
tyrant who is erotic, and therefore primordialist, in his spontaneous psy-
chology, but whose primordial passion might be educated to serve the

11 As Zuckert observes (2009), the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides is depicted by Plato

as unerotic because he already possesses wisdom and does not need or long for it like
Socrates. This unerotic stance toward philosophy also informs the Eleatic Stranger’s
science of ruling in the Statesman. On the acceptance by “young Socrates” of the Eleatic
Stranger’s reduction of the art of ruling to a technique of management with no regard
for eros or human psychology, consider Griswold (1989) pp. 141–167.

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transcendentalist aim of founding a just regime guided by the correct,

anti-Heracleitean cosmology of orderliness and eternal oneness. This
third variety, even more than the alternative presented in the States-
man, receives the very scantiest of treatments, in Book 4 of the Laws.
By contrast, as we see in Chapter 4, the rational despot, incentivized
by an eros for universal honor, grafted onto the historical personage
of Cyrus the Great and the multinational empire he founds accord-
ing to the art of household management, is the theme of Xenophon’s
magnum opus, the Education of Cyrus, the parallel work in his corpus
to Plato’s Republic. What is most muted in Plato is most explicit in
Xenophon.
In the Platonic dialogues generally, tyranny is depicted not primarily
as an agent of political change but as an inclination or temptation on
the part of an ambitious young man who is ready to embark on a pub-
lic career within a city that already has an established constitutional
authority of a more or less popular tincture. The dialogues, in other
words, take place in a setting of “normal” constitutionality. The dan-
gers of war, violence, usurpation, and revolution darken the edges of
these discussions as Athens’ imperial rise and decline unfolds behind the
conversations, and through them as well. However, the conversations
themselves open up havens of discursive leisure in which it is always
“now”; in which it is possible, at least for a time, to discuss justice
and the other virtues without being compelled to make a decision and
act. Indeed, it is of great importance to the whole Socratic enterprise
of redirecting tyrannical longings toward philosophy and the common
good that they not present themselves in the context of an “emergency”
or “postconstitutional” situation in which excessive daring and revolu-
tionary aggressiveness might be publicly sanctioned and find the excuse
to act in the dire need to stave off collapse from internal strife or exter-
nal conquest. For to the extent that it is, to use Thucydides’ terms,
normal and desirable for the city to be at rest rather than in motion –
looking inward to the responsibilities of daily self-government rather
than launched outward on the seas of imperialism – to that extent
also, tyrannical longings not only distort the soul but harm the polis.12
When Socrates enflames Alcibiades’ ambition so as to make him tran-
scend the limitations of Athens and reflect on his soul by way of the

12 For a discussion of rest and motion in Thucydides, see Kleinhaus (2001).

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two archetypal regimes, Sparta and Persia, it is in the hope that, for
Alcibiades, the universality of his ambition will be but a way station
to the universality of reason and the Idea of the Good. When Socrates
tries to moderate Callicles’ eros into friendship, that psychological ther-
apy serves a prescription for self-government that looks inward to its
own domestic affairs and avoids the external entanglements prompted
by an eros for ever-increasing wealth and glory abroad, summoning
the most ambitious and potentially tyrannical men to the forefront of
public affairs.
Plato’s circumspection about the possibility of a constructive role for
tyranny in public life is closely connected, in my view, to his emphasis
on eros as the key to the tyrannical character. For Plato, the desire for
political mastery stems from a misguided eros, and the therapy for it
lies in the redirection of this longing for wholeness and completion.
According to Socrates, Callicles is a “double” man because he is con-
fused about the objects of his erotic longing – the Athenian Demos and
the boy Demos. That the names of these objects of longing are identical
suggests that Callicles believes he can gain the same kind of satisfaction
from success in public life as he would from a personal love affair – that
he can possess the city and be loved by her just as he wants to possess
and be loved by the boy. In reality, according to Socrates, he will end
up pandering to the city just as he panders to the boy, servant rather
than master (513, 519). Socrates, by contrast, has distinct but ranked
objects of eros – Philosophy and Alcibiades (482). By keeping these two
loves distinct, with an eros for political excellence clearly subordinate
to an eros for wisdom, Socrates claims his love life is ordered in a way
that, in contrast with the divided Callicles, unifies his soul.
In considering the Platonic approach to tyranny, however, we should
beware of making too hard and fast a distinction between diagnosis
and therapy. For when we return to the political phenomena that such
a distinction helps to clarify, it may well be that the Socratic diagno-
sis of the tyrannical longings of an erotic would-be politician such as
Callicles already entails a large part of the therapy. By emphasizing
the extent to which tyranny is primarily a consequence of the aberra-
tions of eros in its spontaneous, untutored, primordial manifestations,
Socrates encourages Callicles to interpret his own experiences in this
way. Because Socrates consistently defines the art of ruling on the anal-
ogy of a selfless managerial techne, Callicles is driven to articulate his

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dissatisfaction with this mundane interpretation of civic eminence by

reaffirming the erotic scope of passion that Socrates is trying to subdue
and redirect. When Socrates engages Callicles in dialogue after both men
have given their speeches about what makes a man happy, the defini-
tion of the “best” man, the man most entitled to rule, is quickly refined
as the most “prudent” man (489). Socrates then pushes Callicles to
identify prudence with art and with the expert. Yet while Callicles sees
techne as a means to the skilled acquisition of power, Socrates char-
acteristically presents it as leading to beneficence and self-forgetting,
incapable of taking advantage of others. Callicles tries to prevent this
drift by adding courage to the definition of the best man.13 For Callicles,
both prudence and courage are means to be employed in the contest
for honor at the service of Athens’ recovery of her faded Themistoclean
and Periclean imperial glory.14 For Socrates, by contrast, the orderliness
and benevolence of the arts intimate a cosmos of harmonious propor-
tionality mirrored in a moderate political community that looks inward
and avoids excessive wealth and empire – a transition that increasingly
alienates Callicles from the discussion. Whatever the success of Socrates’
diagnosis and therapy for Callicles, by psychoanalyzing him from the
outset as a man whose “doubleness” stems from a lack of clarity about
the rank ordering of the objects of eros – a clarity that Socrates claims to

13 It is because he wishes to reopen the gap between nature and convention that Callicles
responds so eagerly (“Yes, by Zeus!”) when Socrates suggests that a “better” man
be defined as an intelligent and prudent man (phronimos, 490a). Prudence or practical
wisdom (phronesis) generally meant an understanding earned from a wide experience of
human and especially political affairs. In what proves to be a key move in the dialogue,
Socrates narrows the meaning of prudence to the expertise of a craftsman (technikos)
and defines rule on the analogy of craftsmanship (490b). Callicles lets this narrowing
of prudence slip by. His receptiveness to the notion of an art of skillful ruling doubtless
reflects the fact that a number of professional teachers of rhetoric, including Gorgias,
stressed the manipulative might of the techne of rhetoric that their instruction could
impart to the politically ambitious. Socrates offers a very different conception of art,
however – art as a reflection of the regularity and form that characterized nature, not
the human capacity to mold and shape nature’s formless becoming. Socrates wants
to convince Callicles (in a clear repudiation of the ontology of the motion-men) that
“excellence” of soul is “present” and “most nobly” effected by an arrangement of art,
not through chance becoming (506d–e): “Surely the virtue of each thing, whether of
an implement or a body or a soul or any living being, does not come about in the
noblest way through a mere accident, but by an order, a correctness, and an art that is
apportioned to each one specifically.”
14 As Irwin observes, “Callicles cannot both reject all restraint and advocate a way of life
which requires courage” (1977) p. 121.

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embody in his own love life – Socrates tries to prepare him for precisely
the sort of refutation of tyranny that he sets forth at length in Book 9
of the Republic. There, Socrates presents tyranny as a kind of eros that
is less satisfying than the eros of the philosopher. The tyrant’s pleasures
are manifestly connected with his power to plunder and ravish his sub-
jects. Yet by having the tyrant compared with the philosopher, whose
life is presented as one of superior personal happiness, the effect of
Socrates’ refutation is to present tyranny mainly as a form of personal
satisfaction and to expose its deficiencies on those grounds. Tyranny as
a form of actual political authority, let alone as the foundation of the
best regime, receives scant attention.
In other words, the chief Socratic refutation of tyranny abstracts from
the full-blown context of governance in which we ordinarily encounter
tyranny in the political world. The main treatment of tyranny as a con-
stitution occurs, as we have seen, in the typology of regimes in Book 8,
but the discussion is summary, and it too is mainly in personal terms,
concentrating on how defective the tyrant’s way of life is as opposed
to how tyrannies differ from each other and operate in practice. As
we have noted, the whole discussion of regimes in Book 8 ranks them
in descending order according to how far the individual interest strays
from the common good. The decline from one constitution to another is
depicted as a series of revolts by less worthy sons against more worthy
fathers, the sons being given over increasingly to the nonphilosophic
love of one’s own. Hence, the timocrats rebel against the philosophers
because they feel their honor as warriors has been slighted. Their sons,
in turn, find that public honor is too frail a guarantee of success and
influence and so turn to moneymaking. The sons of the oligarchs want
to spend the money earned by the diligence of their fathers on feverish
luxuries, a relaxation of standards that ushers in democracy as a society
of hedonistic laissez-aller in which even the animals are corrupted. The
tyrant emerges from the democracy as the hedonist with the biggest
appetites. By ranking the constitutions in this way, Socrates is able to
impart to timocracy, the constitution of the spirited honor seekers, a
dignity second only to that of philosophy, for the Auxiliaries are edu-
cated and habituated to practice the moderation that the philosopher’s
own overwhelming passion for wisdom automatically entails (by drain-
ing off the erotic energies that might normally expend themselves in
pleasure seeking). Because the tyrant is depicted here as a monster of

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erotic dissipation, he drops to the bottom of the list of human types – a

radicalization of the sloth and self-indulgence characteristic, in Socrates’
depiction, of the open rule of the demos. Because tyranny is ranked in
terms of the dignity of one’s personal life, there is no hint in Books 8 or
9 that some tyrants might be seriously interested in upholding or even
improving orderly government for the good of the populace and might
achieve this as readily as or even more ably than the ostensibly superior
timocrats or oligarchs.
There are, of course, examples from history of “democratic despots”
who largely fit the depiction of tyranny in the Republic, rulers who
first emerge as tribunes of the people and who increase their power by
pandering to the baser passions of the majority, freeing them from the
responsibility of governing themselves so that they can devote them-
selves to moneymaking and pleasure. Tocqueville regarded this as a
danger peculiar to democracy and believed it was confirmed in prac-
tice by the rise of Napoleon III from the presidency of the Second
Republic.15 This is plainly not the whole story about despotism, how-
ever, for there have been at least as many examples of individual and
collective despotism motivated by martial honor (Napoleon III wanted
that too), aristocratic pride, and religious zealotry. Tyranny is as likely
to emerge, as it were, among the Auxiliaries – among the Junkers, or the
colonels, or the Mujahadeen – as it is among the populist demagogues
and shameless libertines of democracy, but by ranking timocracy well
above tyranny and by stigmatizing tyranny through tracing its origins
to the basest aspects of the most vulgar constitution, Socrates appeals to
an aristocratic inclination among his listeners not to identify themselves
with such a low type. We can see the seed of this aristocratic rhetoric
in the Gorgias when Socrates goads Callicles into declaring that the
strength of a superior mind and character was worth “ten thousand”
of the many with their mere strength of numbers (490). Socrates elab-
orates the typology of constitutions ranking timocracy above hedonis-
tic democracy and tyranny both as a description and a prescription,
just as he consistently tries to enlist the pride Callicles invests in his
hopes from a public career in the service of contempt for hedonistic
self-indulgence.

15 See the discussion of Tocqueville’s fears regarding the “democratic despot” in Newell
(2009) Part II.

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Altogether, then, Socrates’ refutation in the Republic of tyranny as

base in comparison with timocracy and as erotically unsatisfying in
comparison with philosophy abstracts from the dangerous but all-too-
real potential that despotic authority can possess in some circumstances
for restructuring the political order and getting worthy things done.
Julius Caesar, for instance, was reviled as a tyrant and usurper, a king
in false constitutional clothing, by his Senatorial opponents, but he
could rightly reply that their generational paralysis and incapacity to
make the slightest concessions to public need rather than lose an iota
of their exclusive supremacy had made the Republic unworkable and
that only dictatorial means could salvage it.16 Caesar was erotic, but his
ambition to be admired for doing good displaced his eros from hedo-
nistic self-indulgence to the longing for political immortality and safely
confined it from committing outrages on those around him based on
spontaneous lust. His violence was purposeful and limited, deployed
against inveterate foes, never whimsical or prompted by jealousy and
cruelty. This type of despotism is absent from Socrates’ treatment in
the Republic. By identifying tyranny primarily with ungoverned eros,
an immersion in personal pleasure that is the very negation, Socrates
argues, of any regime principle, Socrates is better able to reduce it to a
strictly personal sphere. He presents it largely as a debased and unfulfill-
ing individual alternative within a constitutionally normal situation in
which civic virtue is manifestly the only respectable and useful form of
political activity, a normalcy that also harbors the pursuit of friendship
and philosophic intercourse about the meaning of human excellence.
Socrates’ circle is in effect a philosophic polis within the larger Athe-
nian polis, one whose members share a common good of reflecting on
the very virtues of justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom that all
sound-minded Athenians would agree are indispensable to the political
community, disagree as they might on what precisely they mean.

the hidden founding

In Book 4 of the Laws, however, Plato draws the curtain back ever
so briefly from the constitutionally normal situation. The Athenian

16 This is the burden of Meier’s argument in his to my mind unsurpassed biography of

Caesar (1997).

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Stranger takes us, if only for a few minutes, to a place where Socrates
will not go – to the dangerous, violent underpinnings of the established
order; to the moment when the foundations were laid upon which
the normal order could grow. Readers of the Republic will recall
that Socrates will not grant the premise of Glaucon’s rehearsal of
the Sophists’ account of justice, according to which the “nature” of
politics resides in its prepolitical origins, so that law and convention
are but artificial constructs through which the pusillanimous minimize
their suffering in the competition among selfish individuals for survival
and well-being. As Socrates describes the first city, the “city of sows,”
nature comes into being already articulated according to the division
of labor among the banausic arts, and those arts simultaneously serve
a community based on the simplest needs (370d–372a). Contrary to
the Sophists’ teaching, the city precedes the individual. In Book 8, the
city “according to speech” is transported to the most distant past, both
because what is oldest and ancestral is best, and because, according
to Socrates, the natural origins of justice are not the strife, violence,
and motion ascribed to nature by the pre-Socratics and Sophists but an
already long-established harmony and community.
Unlike Socrates (who does no more than hint at it), the Athenian
Stranger does concede that even a virtuous political order must begin
at a specific historical juncture and that the energy and ambition of a
naturally masterful individual might have a constructive role to play
in instituting it properly and all at once. In the Athenian Stranger’s
description of this personality, we encounter a variant of the relation-
ship between eros and thumos that is rather different from the variants
we encounter in the Republic, Symposium, and Gorgias. In the Sympo-
sium, well-directed eros entails civic virtue on its way to philosophizing:
The immortal fame gained through engendering virtue for the city is a
comparatively more lasting object of erotic longing than the mere physi-
cal immortality perpetuated through reproduction, and is a way station
on the ascent to the philosopher’s apprehension of the truly eternal
and imperishable Good. In the Republic, as we earlier observed, eros is
repressed within civic life on behalf of the civic virtue of the Auxiliaries,
rooted in the thumotic part of the soul, then rehabilitated as a motive
for philosophy. Common to both paths to a moderate and orderly soul
is the notion that eros cannot be thought to satisfy itself in the proper
way through political glory and mastery alone.

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The young tyrant briefly described in the Laws, however, combines

qualities of both the erotic and thumotic dimensions of the soul, and
they are directed neither toward civic virtue strictly speaking nor phi-
losophy. Instead, the Athenian Stranger is more receptive than Socrates
to the spontaneous passion to possess the polis as a lover that Socrates
diagnoses as the public pole of Callicles’ confused longing for the boy
Demos and the Athenian Demos. Callicles delusionally longs for a pre-
eminence in political life that would have the same direct satisfaction of
possessing the beloved in a personal love affair, a delusion that, Socrates
forecasts, will compel him to pander to the many just as he panders to
the boy. However, the Athenian Stranger takes a different tack. He
implies that the founder of an entirely new order is likely to be moti-
vated by this dangerous erotic passion for the regime he is fashioning.
To find the motivation and energy to face the dangers of rearing this
city into being, he must want to own it for himself, to possess it in its
entirety like a lover possesses the beloved. For Plato, this is the root of
tyranny in the soul – the longing to “own” the city like a jealous lover;
the inability to distinguish the public good from the object of a pri-
vate passion. Socrates strives to correct this deformity in Callicles and
the other ambitious young men among his interlocutors, assimilating
this erotic longing for completion to the noble restraint of citizenship
or to philosophy itself. In this one situation in the Laws, however,
Plato concedes that this dangerous passion might have to be given a
looser rein, prior to any attempt at its rehabilitation; that it might have
an indispensable role to play in a form closer to its spontaneous first
impulse. For although Socrates ordinarily tries to redirect and sublimate
his interlocutors’ eros through the pursuit of public honor in serving a
moderate common good and through philosophy, in the situation of the
founding, there is as yet no common good to which ambition could be
redirected, and the foundations for the community can most efficiently
be constructed by the very type of personality it will later try to educate
out of existence, or forestall from ever arising. Here, in other words, if
we were to take the Republic literally, is the kind of man who might
drive out everyone over the age of ten so that the citizens of the kallipo-
lis could be reared free of taint. But in order to be capable of acting in
this tyrannical way, he could not possibly have received that rearing in
citizen virtue himself. Moreover, how would one get rid of him when
the job was done?

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I will return to the passage in the Laws momentarily with some

detailed observations. For the moment, I want to elaborate on the gen-
eral point that the Socratic diagnosis of tyranny tends to cover over and
direct our attention away from a kind of eros that is purely and prop-
erly political – a “pleasure” that cannot be dismissed as sheer personal
self-indulgence (like Socrates’ comparison of Callicles to a catamite)
and yet is at the same time not assimilable to civic virtue either, since
it is needed to found the constitution under which civic virtue might
later flourish. Just as Socrates generally discourages the erotic passion
to possess the city, he is equally circumspect about the possibility of a
constructive political purpose for the thumotic side of the personality
in its spontaneous, untutored, and primordial manifestations prior to
civic and philosophic education. One of Socrates’ rhetorical and ped-
agogical purposes in presenting tyranny chiefly in terms of misguided
eros, it seems plausible to argue, is to obscure the sheer savagery of the
thumotic side of the soul – its pathological defensiveness, combative-
ness, fury toward competitors, moralistic zeal, and taste for death and
destruction. In other words, by getting the tyranically inclined individ-
ual to understand himself primarily in terms of erotic longing rather
than thumotic rage, Socrates already begins to tame the tyrant even
before suggesting a new direction for this eros, for to the extent that
the tyrant is a hedonist absorbed in his pleasures, he is less absorbed
in the fury and vengefulness characteristic of thumos. Consider again
in this context the story of Leontius in Book 4 of the Republic. The
morbid characteristics of thumos – the desire to gaze on the corpses
of criminals, thus savoring the violence and perhaps arbitrary injustice
underlying every established order, perhaps thereby putting oneself in
that criminal’s place and summoning up dark currents of alienation
and a wish to be oppressed so that one can lash back – are softened by
the somewhat comedic light in which the story is cast. Leontius casti-
gates his eyes for wanting to look at the foul sight while simultaneously
running toward the pit (440a). By affecting to “punish” his eyes by
forcing them to revel in the very sights for which he is castigating them,
like a perfect Tartuffe, he is able to gratify his passion while affect-
ing a stance of moral probity. It is as if someone with a weakness for
wine grabbed a bottle and before downing it, shouted, “There you go,
you wretched throat! You wanted wine? Well, go ahead and drown
in it!”

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Upon reflection, the rather Basil Fawlty–like comic touch of Socrates’

depiction of Leontius’ rage puts into the background two dangers the
story illustrates. One is that although Leontius is morally outraged
at the rebelliousness of his own senses, he fails to stop gazing at the
corpses. Thus, as Socrates carefully puts it (and to reiterate an earlier
observation), the story does no more than prove it is “possible” that
thumos might be the ally of reason in governing the desires in the soul
and in the city. The other danger, however, is that even when thumos
has been properly educated in the mode of the Auxiliaries (as Leontius
has not) to become the fierce guardian of civic justice, it must never be
allowed to become too harsh an enforcer of morality. The danger that
the enforcer of morality could become a bloodthirsty fanatic is muted,
however, because the bearing of the discussion shifts midway through
the Republic from a comparison of the unjust and unjust lives first
broached in Book 2 to a comparison of the pleasures of the philosopher
vis-à-vis the pleasures of the tyrant. The danger does not disappear,
however: Indeed, the indignation of the Auxiliaries toward their philo-
sophic Guardians for being too wan in their defense of the city’s code
of honor is arguably what prompts the overthrow of the best regime by
the timocrats.
Much of the Socratic therapy for tyranny is devoted to preventing
an alliance of erotic wantonness with thumotic belligerence, zeal, and
fury – in the Symposium by assimilating aggressive impulses to a ranked
hierarchy of the virtuous objects of erotic longing; in the Republic, by
extirpating eros from the political psychology of the Auxiliaries and
attempting to educate thumos to a communal moderation and stead-
fastness grounded in a taste for the orderly harmony of the cosmos.
Alongside the danger that thumos might align itself with eros to serve its
untrammeled desires lurks another, possibly even greater danger – that
spiritedness might feed on its own bellicosity, self-righteous zealotry,
and gloomy fixation on the stark alternatives of mastery or defeat.
Although our theme in this book is tyranny, it is not irrelevant to bear
in mind that Socrates himself was to suffer from the zeal of Meletus
and his other accusers and their indignation that Socrates alone cor-
rupted the city, rejected the gods, and alienated sons from their fathers.
As brought back to life by Plato, Socrates has a compelling personal
reason to want to avoid rule by the zealots. It is not surprising when,
on the eve of his trial for impiety, Socrates remarks to Euthyphro, who

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complains that the Athenians laugh at his soothsaying, that he would

be only too pleased if the Athenians were merely laughing at him rather
than aroused in their angry thumos (Euthyphro 2 c–e). Under certain
circumstances, one can wish for a ruler whose ambitions are exhausted
by gluttony or lust rather than someone who enjoys the spectacle of
death, like Leontius’ peculiar fixation on the mangled bodies in the exe-
cutioner’s pit. Even more dangerous than an erotic but self-controlled
reformist tyrant like Julius Caesar, or even a monster of eros like
Caligula whose depradations are confined to those in the ruling classes
unfortunate enough to live nearby, is a Robespierre or Himmler, the
joyless executioner and fanatic. Socrates’ story of Leontius partly dis-
arms our perception of this danger by casting it in a humorous vein.
But we are made discretely aware of the disturbing and subversive
pathology evinced by his lust to look at disfigured corpses. The danger
of regarding the founding situation as the most natural and revealing
situation in political life – the danger, in other words, of viewing the
emergency situation as if it were in fact the normal one – is that this
taste for destruction, which can ordinarily be stigmatized as danger-
ous, destabilizing and indecent, is offered a legitimate scope for action.
Although it is no longer fashionable to do so, it is not so many years
since Stalin’s campaigns of forced collectivization with their millions of
victims were defended by some as regrettable but necessary “start-up
costs” for building a stable and rationally planned socialist order where
the public good would always prevail over private self-interest.
Of course, while we are peeling away the decent surface of everyday
political life and probing its dark underpinnings, we are also constrained
to observe that never to use force in the defense of authority can be
as harmful as a constant reliance on it. At this juncture, I want to
begin bringing Machiavelli into the discussion, since, as we will see, the
discussion of a tyrannical founder guided by a wise man in Book 4 of
the Laws is a locus classicus for Machiavelli’s advice in chapters 22 and
23 of The Prince on what kind of counsellors the prince should have.
Whereas Plato gingerly concedes for a few Stephanus pages of the Laws
that sometimes the emergency situation will have to take priority over
the normal situation, for Machiavelli, the emergency situation is the
normal situation: All politics is a series of continual re-foundings. As
Machiavelli puts it, sometimes it is cruel to be compassionate, especially
if a ruler’s reluctance to use the force at his disposal to suppress riot

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and subversion ends up by bringing on collapse and hence ruining the

lives of his law-abiding subjects (The Prince chapter 17). It is always
better, Machiavelli observes, to be ready to go to war today against a
minor foe than to wait until that foe is so strong that one is forced to
go to war to survive, and at a much greater cost (The Prince chapter 3).
This wisdom Machiavelli attributes, not to “the writers” among the
ancients like Plato and Aristotle, but to the reality of ancient political
practice, above all that of the Romans. As much as it would be, in some
circumstances, an insane and paranoiac foreign policy always to launch
pre-emptive wars against potential future foes, in other circumstances
it arguably lessens human suffering. One need only think of the thirty
thousand lightly armed troops Hitler possessed when he occupied the
Rhineland in a daring bluff, as against France’s one hundred divisions.
By failing to knock out Hitler then when he was at his weakest, the
Allies swelled his prestige and seeming infallibility in Germany, and
convinced him they would not fight back, bringing about a war killing
tens of millions.
Plato, however, is not willing to go down this road. He insists that
tyranny be deplored in general and that even at its arguably most con-
structive, it never be allowed to displace the priority of the political
community as a pattern of nature. Hence, as we will presently con-
sider in more detail, although in Book 4 of the Laws the Athenian
Stranger briefly entertains a constructive role for the tyrannical founder,
he quickly qualifies it by adding that the danger that such a ruler will
lack moderation – and will therefore not limit his tyranny to the nec-
essary measures for founding a good constitution but will continue to
tyrannize over the newly founded city as if he were its jealous lover –
probably outweighs anything positive to be achieved from consider-
ing this alternative further. (Not every Cincinnatus will be content to
return to his plough after tasting the powers of a dictator.) The Athe-
nian Stranger then promptly covers over the whole violent substratum
of the founding by invoking “the god” and beseeching Kleinias to act
as if the conditions for the founding had sprung into being in answer
to a prayer. This has the same effect of grounding the just regime in
nature while discouraging its creation by force majeure as Socrates’
placing the kallipolis in the venerable past, proving that it is still the
best life for man in principle but irrecoverable due to our own failings
and the inevitable decay of all things partnered with man. In neither

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dialogue can the best regime be brought about by human action. After
this invocation of the god, the Laws resumes its proper topic, which is
not how an entirely new order is to be founded but how the common
good might best be ordered in normal times.
In striking contrast, Machiavelli’s main theme in The Prince and, in
a less obvious way, the Discourses is founding, which he regards as
indispensable not only to making sure that the constitution is securely
and properly ordered but to keeping it so. For at bottom, Machiavelli
argues, there is no normalcy, no “middle way,” only emergencies kept
at bay or creatively deployed against each other to generate a dynamic
equilibrium of selfish interests, “each power checking the other”
(Discourses 1.2.6). Machiavelli in effect therefore asks: Might we dis-
pense with the Platonic concerns and reservations over the tyrannical
founding in order to think through how the act of founding might unfold
and perpetuate itself in the working of the constitution? Might there be
a founder who did not require the moderate character said by the Athe-
nian Stranger to be necessary for even considering this alternative, and
so unlikely to exist among potential young tyrants as therefore to make
it unwise to consider it at length or too explicitly? Machiavelli’s answer
is that, in a sense, the founder’s possession of this moderate character
is immaterial, so long as the founding is carried out in a way that is
both methodical and in the service of the founder’s and the citizens’
interests. In making this argument, though, Machiavelli also means to
say that the whole Socratic diagnosis of tyrannical ambition and the
reticence it entails is both false as a description of the phenomenon
of rule and harmful to the prospects for stable, prosperous, and well-
governed political orders. As we will see, Machiavelli’s teaching is not
simply a negation of the Platonic one. He is not simply saying: Tyrants
and would-be tyrants, go ahead and indulge your passions to the fullest,
including your longing for mastery. What he is saying is something more
akin to the following: Do not commit the error encouraged by ancient
“writers” such as Plato of understanding yourself to be erotic – and
therefore of longing for the “offspring” of noble deeds and immortal
honor through the cultivation of justice, moderation, and humaneness;
of longing for transcendental repose in union with the beautiful and the
good through the ascent up Diotima’s Ladder. For the Platonic char-
acterization of the ruling passion as erotic, even in its spontaneous,
untutored, and therefore dangerous manifestations, already implies the

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possibility of the transcendence of princely ambition and therefore,

according to Machiavelli, the abandonment of the prospects for real
success in politics.
For Machiavelli, it is not simply that Plato’s strictures against mis-
guided erotic longings are in error, as if it would be enough simply
to liberate those unvarnished longings and dispense with the rehabil-
itation. More fundamentally, it is Plato’s understanding of the ruling
passion in erotic terms altogether that is the flawed starting point. For
Machiavelli, not only does the attempt to redirect eros toward civic
virtue frequently fail to convince anyone to do so, but, worse, to the
extent that it does succeed, this rehabilitation and sublimation of eros
actually does more to undermine political order and republican virtue
than if the effort had never been made. Encouraging a prince to win
the “love” of his fellow citizens by making himself the object of their
affection and admiration subverts the republic by offering an impossi-
ble combination – a preeminence of fame and honor that can in truth
only be monarchical, allegedly put at the service of a constitution that
regards citizens as equals. As we see in Chapter 5, this is the brunt of
Machiavelli’s critique of Scipio, shining exemplar of the classical mirror
of princes, and his preference for the cruelty of Hannibal or Manlius
Torquatus. To take a clear case of what Machiavelli views as the fun-
damental Platonic flaw, Socrates attempts in the Gorgias to persuade
Callicles that the combination of natural independence and the political
mastery he longs for can only be combined at the expense of the former.
For to woo the Athenian Demos and become its possessor, Callicles will
have to pander to it and be at its beck and call, just as he is with the
boy Demos. Only by subordinating his personal erotic longings to a
civic order that mirrors the transcendental order of the cosmos can
he exchange pandering for citizenship devoted to the common good.
Machiavelli, by contrast, is saying that the pursuit of transcendence
in the Platonic sense by citizens and statesmen can only come at the
expense of the civic order, robust citizenship, and the common good.
For Machiavelli, it is the Platonic teaching that corrupts.
As Leo Strauss famously observed, for a proper appreciation of
Machiavelli’s originality and boldness, we need to begin with the per-
ception of him held in his own time and later by adherents of traditional
political morality – the imposing civilizational conglomerate of classi-
cal and Christian teachings that was at the heart of the meaning of the

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West – that he was a teacher of evil.17 It is equally important, however,

having begun with this view, that we not rest with it. For what might be
regarded, from the viewpoint of the Platonic tradition, as Machiavelli’s
immoralism in deriding the naiveté of thinking that the traditional stric-
tures on pleasure and power seeking could ever persuade – or had ever
persuaded – real-world political actors is only the first stage in his cri-
tique of the classics. Although a part of Machiavelli’s charm is to invite
his readers to smile at the foolishness of the old teachings for thinking
that people ever really subordinate their self-interest to the common
good, at bottom Machiavelli no more encourages unrestrained erotic
passion than does Plato – indeed, far less so. For, at bottom, Machi-
avelli’s conception of the art of princely rule is one in which the prince
methodically represses eros in himself and obviates its connection with
thumos and the other passions within an overall economy and harmony
of the soul. The tripartite Platonic soul, in which reason, that part of
us closest to the immortality of the truth governing the cosmos, enlists
spiritedness to wage moral war over the lower desires is collapsed and
transformed by Machiavelli into the psychology of the lion and the
fox. Rage and bellicosity are to be selectively released by the cunning
of the fox, an animalized, carnalized, and desacralized wisdom. It is a
somatic and anthropocentric wisdom, unconnected with what Machi-
avelli takes to be the delusions caused by relying on Fortuna in the guise
of the “imagined republics” of classical and Christian transcendental-
ism. The lion and the fox symbolize the vital worldly intelligence that
is the parallel in the individual self of the collective devotion to the
this-worldly “fatherland” which Machiavelli exhorts us to prefer over
the heavenly Kingdom of God (Discourses 2.1). Not only does Machi-
avelli deny that the princely nature is characterized by the spontaneous
unfolding of erotic longing prior to rehabilitation that Socrates diag-
noses in Callicles, but, by denying the centrality of eros, Machiavelli
obscures the character of thumos as well – again, it must be empha-
sized, not merely the reformed version of that passion once it has been
educated Platonically, but the character of the passion at its immediate,
pristine, and spontaneous emergence, including its openness to the gods
and the mysteries of the whole. Machiavelli is not merely reversing the
Platonic ranking of the transcendental over the primordial and urging

17 Strauss (1969) p. 9.

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the liberation of the latter. He is fundamentally reorienting our under-

standing of the primordial realm itself, which, in its Platonic evocation,
even at its most spontaneous, still contains the potential for education
toward transcendence and is therefore in Machiavelli’s view a source of
delusion.
In the Platonic understanding, the natures of eros and thumos are
delineated and clarified by abstracting them from each other, as we
observed earlier about the relationship of the Symposium to the Repub-
lic. Eros is at its purest when its sheer absorption in the beautiful object
of longing causes jealousy and anger to subside. Thumos is at its purest
when its possession of that object is threatened, such that the prospect
of pleasure does not relax the passion for honor and victory. The inca-
pacity of either passion to make us entirely satisfied demonstrates the
need to reintegrate their capacities within an overall harmony of the
soul. For Machiavelli, however, the de-eroticization of statecraft that
his new science of politics envisions dissipates the distinctions among
this ensemble of affects. There is nothing to harmonize and no need
for an elaborate phenomenology of the passions or an elaborate ped-
agogy that might restrain them while satisfying them. Because eros is
forgotten, so too is thumos, which is sundered from its Platonic well-
spring of an openness to the divine, holy awe, ruminations on our place
within the whole, whether or not the gods care for us, and so on and
begins to collapse into the abstractions of “power” and “domination”
that attempt to say everything and so say very little about how political
life observably unfolds. This truncation is necessary for the methodical
concentration on the achievement of “effectual” rule.
To understand how the passions, which for Plato possess their own
substantive natural articulation and can be harmonized by the virtues
to achieve a concretely satisfying way of life, begin with Machiavelli to
devolve into a series of uniformly compulsive inclinations, we must also
consider Machiavelli’s relationship to Christianity and how it places the
meaning of rule and statecraft on a new ontological basis. If my inter-
pretation is plausible, we would have to see Machiavelli as not merely
returning to the focus of the Sophists on material acquisition and power
seeking, important as that dissident tradition may be for Machiavelli’s
own approach. I will argue that Christianity both makes it impossi-
ble fully to revive that alternative ancient tradition and at the same
time offers a much more dramatic scope for the transformative power

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of princely rule, far exceeding anything envisioned by the Sophists.

Before turning to that theme, however, I want to draw together some of
the preceding observations about Machiavelli’s relation to the classical
tradition by looking more closely at the discussion of the tyrannical
founder in the Laws.

paradoxes of the tyrannical founding

The Athenian Stranger begins with a reflection on the power of fortune
over human affairs that at first sight seems almost despairing:

I was going to say now that man never legislates at all. Accidents and calami-
ties occur in a thousand different ways, and it is they that are the universal
legislators of the world. If it isn’t pressures of war that overturn a constitution
and re-write the laws, it’s the distress of grinding poverty, and disease too
forces us to make a great many innovations. . . . Realizing all these possibili-
ties, you may . . . say what I said just now, that . . . human affairs are almost
entirely at the mercy of chance. (709)

In these few lines, Plato anticipates and evokes the full force of the
primordialist ontology of the pre-Socratics and Sophists that the Athe-
nian Stranger summarizes later on in Book 10 and with which this
chapter concludes. Stated briefly for now, the identification of nature
with motion and strife led to the view that law and government are as
chaff before the wind compared with the awesome, underlying motions
of tuche – the power of fortune to overturn human plans both in the
obvious sense of disease and bad weather and in the subtler sense that
chance is operative on human nature through the necessity of passion,
prompting the struggle for mastery within and between nations, so that
the turmoil of class warfare, hunger, and ambition are always seething
behind the settled pattern of the laws.
But the Athenian Stranger just as quickly rejects the view that tuche is
what chiefly characterizes human nature and the world at large. Instead,
he goes on to maintain, the supreme element of control over life comes
from (the) god. As we learn elsewhere in the Laws, for the Athenian
Stranger, the god is not the interventionary deity of revealed religion
whose acts of mercy or punishment are ultimately unfathomable within
the limitations of reason. Instead, this is a god of nous – an overarch-
ing divine presence that upholds the prevalence of order and reason in

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the cosmos over chance and strife. By practicing virtue, human beings
can make themselves the “allies” of this god and help the Good super-
vene in human affairs progressively throughout the ages, so that justice
increasingly becomes the normal human condition rather than unbri-
dled passion (just as, by analogy, clement weather is more ordinarily
representative of the cosmos than storms or hurricanes [896–897, 903]).
As the Athenian Stranger puts it here, chance and opportunity are mere
ancillaries to the noetic rule of (the) god, temporary lapses from a more
superordinate unity. As such, they are openings in the current of events
for human beings to assist the power of nous to supervene over disorder
and licentiousness. Chance and disorder are, in other words, temporary
rifts in a more typical orderliness in the world that human beings may,
paradoxically, seize upon so as to work actively for the continuing
influence of that cosmic orderliness on human cities and affairs.18
Techne is the chief exemplar of the way in which human beings can
minimize the reversals of fortune by laying hold of and introducing
into their own affairs a portion of the orderly beneficence governing the
cosmos. Characteristically, in Plato’s use of techne, it is not aimed at a
human being’s control of nature. Instead, the arts tap into the order-
liness of the cosmos through their various aims, and, through their
bodies of knowledge and technique, introduce a degree of that order-
liness directly into human affairs. Furthermore, just as the disciplined
routine of the arts helps us in all manner of practical affairs, the Athe-
nian Stranger goes on, the same pursuit of skill in statecraft will help
found and maintain a virtuous political community:

For instance, in a storm the steersman may or may not use his skill to seize
any favourable opportunity that may offer itself. . . . So the same will apply
in the other cases too, and legislation in particular must be allowed to play
the same role.

The craftsman of the founding will be a tyrant – young, with a good

memory, quick to learn, courageous, and possessed of a natural eros
for the city (709). The description of this young founder combines a

18 Cropsey’s meditations on seven of Plato’s dialogues vividly evoke the disjunction

between the vision of an orderly and just cosmos adumbrated by philosophy and the
world of contingency – of injustice and absurdity – within which we all find ourselves
placed. Improvement is possible but far from guaranteed and can often be undermined
by character flaws, bad luck, and even good intentions. Cropsey (1995).

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number of the traits attributed elsewhere in the dialogues to thumos

and eros: Socrates’ characterization of the spirited part of the soul in
Book 2 of the Republic as quick, tenacious, and courageous, his attribu-
tion to Glaucon of courage as the energizer of his boldness in learning
(357a, 374e), and the tendency of the erotic politician as exemplified by
Callicles to conflate the satisfaction he looks for in personal love affairs
with the wish to possess the city as a whole like a lover.
Kleinias, the Athenian Stranger’s interlocutor, doubts that people
could readily be expected to obey a ruler who claims such an abso-
lute latitude for persuasion and compulsion. In effect, he is raising an
objection to the tyrannical founder from the viewpoint of a republican
constitution before the conditions for such a constitution have been
established. For the Athenian Stranger, however, given the absence of
any competing communal loyalty in the founding situation, it will be
easy for the tyrant to mold the people in whatever way he chooses:

When a tyrant wants to change the habitual ways of a city, he doesn’t need
to exert himself very much or spend a lot of time on the job. He simply has to
be the first to set out on the road along which he wishes to urge the citizens –
whether to the practice of virtue or vice – and give them a complete model
by setting his own example; he must praise and commend some courses of
action and censure others, and in every field of conduct he must see to it that
anyone who disobeys is disgraced. (711)

On the face of it, the Athenian Stranger’s language is not unlike Machi-
avelli’s description in chapter 6 of The Prince of princes of the most
“outstanding virtue,” those who, like Cyrus or Moses, create “entirely
new modes and orders” through violence and persuasion. But there is
a crucial difference. For the Athenian Stranger, the challenge is distin-
guishing successfully ahead of time between a virtuous founding and a
vicious one. For Machiavelli, by contrast, as we see in Chapter 6, the
challenge is making the new beliefs stick, regardless of whatever specific
kind of order is created.
The “hard” part of the founding, the Athenian continues, is to ensure
that the blueprint will be in conformity with virtue rather than vice.
Here, two conditions are indispensable. The first is that the young tyrant
have a natural leaning toward moderation, the kind that “flowers early
in life . . . and in some cases succeeds in imposing a certain restraint
in the search for pleasure, but fails in others.” The other condition is

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that the young tyrant have the good fortune to be instructed by a wise
lawgiver. As the Athenian Stranger puts it: “When supreme power in a
man joins hands with wise judgement and moderation, there you have
the birth of the best political order with laws to match; you’ll never
achieve it otherwise. So much for my somewhat oracular fiction.” In
other words, you have to take a chance on picking the right young
man. As Socrates says in the Republic, the best natures are so delicate
that they can turn into the worst natures if they are not well reared
(491a–492d). As we see in the next chapter, Aristotle warns that what
appears to be the man best suited to rule may be a tyrant disguised as a
benefactor, or may even be a genuine benefactor who nevertheless will
display flashes of tyrannical violence and indignation over having his
opinions challenged. As Machiavelli will argue, however, if you get rid
of the requirement of a natural leaning toward moderation, you quite
simply dispense with taking that chance, because you are not dependent
on such a virtuous character arising in the first place. Mastering the
situation of the founding requires the correct method, in which both
prince and people are made secure and prosperous, not relying on hopes
that a good man will arise. Here we have a precise and revealing locus
for the contrast between the classical and modern approaches. The
classical approach is to pin one’s hopes on what Hobbes terms the
“wit” of the prince: his putative virtues of character and mind. The
modern approach, inaugurated by Machiavelli, is to avoid relying on
those hopes, to assume the worst about the nature of the prince, and
to compensate for those deficiencies with a straightforward appeal to
everyone’s self-interest and the methods needed for the aggrandizement
of both prince and people.
The Athenian Stranger began by denying that despair over fortune’s
power to thwart man’s aims is justified if we properly understand
the cosmos. He then introduced the heady prospect that a tyrannical
technikos, a craftsman of politics, could “easily” establish the sound
basis for a good constitution. Yet although this prospect is possible
according to nature and reason, it quickly transpires that the conditions
that must be met for it to unfold are extraordinarily rare to the point
of being, as he himself concedes, “oracular.” It requires a young man
whose leaning toward moderation is so strong that it innately directs
his political ambition in such a way that he fulfills his love for the polis
and exercises his ambitions by guiding the city toward virtue rather

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than using the city to gratify his passions. As the Republic makes clear,
in Socrates’ view, the most typical sort of politically ambitious per-
son will require the education fomented by an already well-established
constitution in order for this self-restraint to be inculcated. Moreover,
the innate moderation of the young founder cannot come to construc-
tive fruition unless he is guided by a wise lawgiver. The chances of
this happening are, in the end, almost as rare as the coinciding of the
philosopher and basileus in the Republic. Indeed, the Athenian’s word-
ing here (“my oracular fiction”) reminds us of Socrates’ claim that only
the extraordinarily unlikely conjunction of these two “jobs” will estab-
lish the optimal constitution and bring an end to “the ills of the cities”
(473d).
The most one can say in favor of the greater practicality of the dis-
cussion of founding in the Laws is that the coincidence of a young lover
of the city joining up with a wise advisor is somewhat less unlikely
to happen than the coincidence of wisdom and power in the Repub-
lic. For whereas Socrates maintains that the king and the philosopher
must actually be the same person, the Athenian only requires that the
city be founded by a ruler of potentially extraordinary natural moder-
ation who is closely guided by a wise lawgiver. Moreover, whereas the
philosopher-king would have to truly philosophize, the young founder
presumably need mainly be guided by the correct opinions provided by
his advisor (perhaps like the advice Cyrus receives, with mixed results,
from his Socrates-like father Cambyses in the Education of Cyrus,
an encounter we discuss in Chapter 4). Even so, the unlikelihood of
this partnership between political genius and wise statesmanship, com-
bined with the danger that a founder possessing the tyrannical power to
change everything might well choose to imbue the new city with thor-
oughgoing viciousness, quickly leads the Athenian Stranger to abandon
further reflection on the practical exigencies of the emergency situation
and return to a concern with how the citizens of a republic somehow
always already founded ought best to be educated and governed. “The
god” comes to the fore at this juncture as a symbol of Platonic cir-
cumspection as the young tyrant recedes from the discussion. “The
god,” heralded by the Athenian’s “oracular” prelude, in effect replaces
the young tyrant as the founder, obscuring the original measures in a
haze of pious custom. The tyrant’s withdrawal and replacement by the
god is evocative of the fact that it would take a partnership between

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wisdom and authority so rare as almost to be miraculous to found the

new constitution from scratch. It is also evocative of the fact that there
is a certain impiety and hubris attached to going on at length about
a mere human being wielding such godlike powers of transformation.
Certainly it would not do for the type of spirited young men who will
form the bulk of the citizenry of Magnesia to dwell on the founder’s
superhuman achievements, lest they seek a similar field of action.19
Thus, the emergency situation is discreetly covered over by the Athe-
nian’s pious hope that they will be able to act as if the founding has
already been taken care of: “Let us therefore summon the god to attend
to the foundation of the city. May he hear our prayers, and having
heard, come graciously and benevolently to help us settle our city and
its laws.”
This brief segment is Plato at his most candid about the emergency
situation of the founding. I will try to show through my interpretation
of The Prince and the Discourses that Machiavelli reverses this Pla-
tonic circumspection over tyranny and the founding, just as he reverses
the Platonic ontology that reduces fortune to a mere privative mode of
true being.20 A few preliminary observations will help to establish this

19 For a discussion of this rubric in the history of political thought leading up to Abraham
Lincoln’s great Lyceum speech, see Newell (2009).
20 Did Machiavelli read Plato? Blanchard (1996) writes: “Machiavelli tells us, in his famous
letter to Francesco Vettori, that he invested in his Prince the capital accumulated from
numerous nocturnal conversations with ancient men.” More specifically, as Blanchard
notes, the first paragraph of chapter 25 of The Prince is a gloss on parts of the passage
from Book 4 of the Laws discussed earlier, although, in contrast with Blanchard, I
conclude that Machiavelli’s understanding of the connections among chance, art, and
prudence is diametrically opposed to that of Plato. Blanchard is not claiming that
Machiavelli’s engagement with Plato is necessarily conscious, but the gloss on the Laws
in The Prince is compelling evidence that it was, along with his own insightful contrast
between Machiavelli’s preference for “touch” and the Platonic epistemology of “sight,”
which I examine in Chapter 6. For a detailed treatment of the reception of Plato among
civic humanists of the Renaissance in Italy, see Hankins (1990) vol. 1: pp. 58–81. As for
Machiavelli’s specific references to Plato and Aristotle, their paucity is, I argue beginning
in Chapter 5, strategic. Plato is mentioned by name only once, and quite dismissively,
in Discourses 3.6.16 as a mentor for conspirators. Aside from alluding to an unnamed
Aristotle when discussing the regime types in Discourses I, Machiavelli mentions him by
name but once in 3.26.2, referring to his depiction of tyrants in the Politics as prompting
their own overthrow because they plunder and outrage their subjects. Is this perhaps
Aristotle’s best moment in Machiavelli’s view? He may also be alluding to Aristotle
among others, but not by name, when he mentions “philosophers who believe in the
eternity of the world” (Discourses 2.5.1).

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contrast. As we have just considered, Plato treats the theme of found-

ing with circumspection. Looking at The Prince, we might say that it
treats the constitutionally normal situation with circumspection, as if it
is dwelling upon it, rather than its opposite, that impedes sound state-
craft. Scant paragraphs are devoted to the “hereditary” principality and
republic in The Prince. There is little to say about them because nothing
much happens to them. In discussing hereditary principalities in chapter
2, Machiavelli may deliberately run together the identities of two Dukes
of Ferrara, as if drolly to suggest that these rulers, required to do so little
and displaying such minimal talents, are hard to tell apart. “It is with
new principalities,” he announces at the beginning of chapter 3, “that
the difficulties begin,” setting the theme for the rest of the book. It tran-
spires in both The Prince and the Discourses that constitutions always
face these kinds of difficulties, so that prudent statesmanship consists of
a capacity for recurrent refoundings – a knowledge of how to preempt
the disasters that will naturally occur because of ambition and class
strife and tap into them, revitalizing the constitution with new elements
and projects. Indeed, Machiavelli is not merely maintaining that one
must know how to restore stable conditions (the ancients would have
agreed with this, and, as we consider at length in Chapters 3, 4, and
5, even with the occasional need for coercive measures), but that, as
an ontological matter, there is no order and normalcy in the world. To
hope and plan on the basis of this putative normalcy, then, is an error
of thought as likely in Machiavelli’s outlook to result in bad political
practice as it is in Plato’s outlook to minimize it. So far is Machiavelli
from arguing merely that disorder is a defect of the constitution that
can be remedied by reorienting its laws toward the nous that supervenes
over chance in the cosmos that he explains how the Roman Republic
was “perfected” by “chance” and how the “disunion” between rulers
and ruled there made that republic stronger, more virtuous, and more
free (Discourses 1.2).
The difference between Machiavelli’s approach to the founding and
Plato’s is brought out especially well by Machiavelli’s discussion of
how the young tyrant might create “new modes and orders” from
the bottom up. Like the Athenian, he sees this founder as having the
opportunity to impose a constitutional blueprint on a people whose
latitude no subsequent civic leaders will be able to duplicate, because
they will be bound by its provisions. However, whereas the Athenian

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specifically mentions the young tyrant’s power only to persuade and

punish by disgrace, circumspectly downplaying his capacity for violence
and leaving it for Kleinias to mention at all (711), Machiavelli is explicit
that force is even more crucial to the founder’s success than his ability
to persuade:

Whence it comes to pass that all armed prophets conquer and the unarmed
ones are ruined. For . . . the nature of the people is variable, and it is easy to
persuade them of a thing, but difficult to keep them firm in that persuasion.
Therefore it is needful to order such matters in such a mode that when the
people do not believe any more, one is able to make them believe by force.
Moses, Cyrus, Theseus and Romulus, had they been unarmed, would have
been unable to make them long observe their constitutions, as in our times
happened to Fra Girolamo Savanarola. . . . Therefore such men as these have
great difficulty in the conduct, and all their perils are on the way, and they
must with their virtue surmount them; but having surmounted them, and
commencing to be held in veneration, having extinguished those who were
envious of their qualities, they remain powerful, secure, honoured, happy.
(The Prince chapter 6)

The Athenian had observed that the “easy” part of the founding
would be the young tyrant’s ability to shape the new constitution,
brushing aside Kleinias’s doubt that people would readily obey some-
one claiming such titanic authority over them. The hard part would be
that such a tyrant should be naturally moderate and fortunate enough
to have associated with a wise legislator. For Machiavelli, however, the
hard part of the prince’s path is to establish his absolute authority in the
first place, such that he is in a position to implement reforms (“all their
perils are on the way”). Although Machiavelli is thus more informative
than the Athenian Stranger about the actual dangers of becoming the
master of the state, he says nothing about what for the Athenian was
truly the hardest part: the alliance between wisdom and a naturally
moderate character. Furthermore, in discussing the greatest founders,
Machiavelli makes no distinction between the use of the founding power
for virtuous as opposed to exploitive ends. Instead, he mentions histor-
ical examples of successful princes such as Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus,
and Moses and derives from the fact that they succeeded the judgment
that they must have been outstanding in virtue. If a prince is success-
ful in founding new modes and orders on the magnitude of such great

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precedents as these, this is a sufficient criterion for calling him virtuous,

regardless of whether he was a prophet of God or founder of a pagan
empire.
It is thus not necessary to wait – or pray – for the coinciding of a
naturally moderate character in a lover of the city with guidance by
a wise lawgiver. Machiavelli does not believe that a virtuous prince
requires the rare natural disposition of an innate leaning toward mod-
eration, or the rare good fortune to have been brought together with
a wise counsellor. Nor does a prince require some elaborate pedagogy
of character formation to direct his passions toward their proper ends
and away from their spontaneous first inclinations. In chapter 17 of
The Prince, Machiavelli goes out of his way to contrast Hannibal, with
his rude, untutored belligerence and “inhuman” cruelty, favorably with
the Roman gentleman-statesman Scipio, ancestor of the Scipio idealized
by the statesman-philosopher Cicero, an admirer of Socrates and of
Xenophon’s the Education of Cyrus, and the conscious imitator of the
qualities of generosity, humaneness, and honesty praised by the “writ-
ers” of antiquity. For a prince to be successful, Machiavelli says, it is
only necessary to pursue “the natural desire to acquire” with sufficient
vigor and skill (The Prince chapter 3). For whereas innate moderation
and receptivity to wise guidance are rare qualities, the desire to acquire
is “perfectly ordinary.” Because, as Machiavelli might contend, both he
and Plato would agree with this latter observation, why not think this
aspect of human behavior through to the conclusion that the universal
desire for “security and well-being” is the only sound basis for polit-
ical success and stability? Echoing Thrasymachus and other Sophists,
Machiavelli observes that people only blame the ambitious for their
vices when they fail to achieve mastery; when they succeed, people sing
their praises and attribute the traditional moral virtues to them anyway,
out of fear of offending them or in the hope that such a man will pro-
tect their own interests. (As we will see in the final part of this chapter,
however, Machiavelli differs profoundly from the Sophists in the key
aspects of his new political science.)
Thus, no especially virtuous character or education of the kind
sketched in Plato’s great images of the soul that we considered in Chap-
ter 1 are necessary for princely virtue, only an intense desire to acquire
and master – although, as we see in Chapter 5, this wantonness of
impulse paradoxically requires a new kind of discipline for its effective

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functioning that may well be aided by a reading of past writers on the

exploits of great men, carefully guided by Machiavelli’s editorial con-
trol of these sources. It follows that the optimal founding need not wait
upon the rare coinciding of power with wisdom, or of ambition with
wise counsel. As he does so often with the rubrics of traditional political
philosophy, Machiavelli begins his discussion of the advisors to princes
with what sounds like a Platonic formulation, only to subvert it from
within: “For this is a general rule that never fails; that a prince who is
not wise by himself cannot be counselled well, unless indeed by chance
he should submit himself to one person alone to govern him in every-
thing, who is a very prudent man” (The Prince chapter 23). For Plato,
as we have seen, the difficulty is that this chance is so unlikely to occur
that it would be tantamount to an answer to a prayer, while experi-
menting with reformist tyranny in the absence of real certainty that it
was indeed wisely guided would only encourage a tyrannical blueprint
of the vicious kind, Thrasymachus’ shepherd who manages the flock
efficiently so as to fatten it up (Republic 343b). For Machiavelli, how-
ever, the difficulty is not merely that the coincidence of princely power
with wise counsel is unlikely but that hoping for it at all is undesirable.
For, as he mordantly remarks, if it did chance to happen that the prince
submitted himself to a “very prudent man,” that prince would indeed
be well counseled, “but it would not last long, because that governor
would in a short time take away his state.”
In order that a prince not be dependent on a counsellor and thereby
in time lose his power to that counsellor, Machiavelli concludes, “good
counsel, wherever it comes, must arise from the prudence of the prince,
and not the prudence of the prince from good counsel.” Yet that is to
collapse altogether the classical distinction between wisdom and power.
Beginning with what sounds like an endorsement of Plato – the need
for wise counsel and power to coincide by “chance” as the only hope
for sound politics, reiterated in both the Laws and in the famous dis-
cussion of philosopher kings in the Republic – Machiavelli ends by
completely overturning it. If the prince is the source of his own pru-
dence, his reliance on the “chance” connection with a wise counsellor
is obviated, a particularly revealing illustration of the prince’s need to
avoid relying on fortune or chance in general and to master it instead. In
this trenchant reformulation of a Platonic maxim, Machiavelli uproots
the whole Platonic conception of the relationship between the art of

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governing and the soul of the ruler. Socrates had defined prudence in
the Gorgias as a variant of techne – the expert (technikos) on the art of
ruling – and had argued from the structured beneficence of techne to the
geometrical proportionality of the cosmos approached through philos-
ophizing. At bottom, then, for Plato, the “prudence of the prince” must
and can only arise from the “good counsel” of the wise man – whether
through their direct association or indirectly through a civic education
that inculcates, through the twilight medium of correct opinion, those
tenets of philosophical cosmology that best ensure an orderly soul in the
citizen. Machiavelli’s way of dealing with the tension between wisdom
and rule, however, is not to attempt to subordinate rule to wise counsel
but to break down the distinction between prudence and what a prince
must do to gain and maintain his state.
To a certain extent, Machiavelli as it were takes the side of the Auxil-
iaries in the Republic in their rebellion on behalf of martial prowess and
honor against the rule of philosophy. Given that, even on Plato’s argu-
ment the Auxiliaries are incapable of grasping with theoretical clarity
the grounds for their submission to the good counsel of the Guardians,
we might view Machiavelli’s solution as a radically simple one to the
quandaries that torture the political psychology of the Republic as it
attempts to ameliorate the tension between ambition and reason. To
put it another way, Machiavelli supports Callicles’ side of the argument
with Socrates over the meaning of the art of ruling, encouraging us
to share Callicles’ indignation and amazement when Socrates tries to
separate the meaning of phronesis and statecraft from what Callicles
regarded as the concern of a sensible man of affairs with expanding the
city’s power and honor, along with his own, emulating the great impe-
rialists of the past, Themistocles and Pericles. As we will see, crucial to
this inversion is Machiavelli’s way of looking at the relation of techne
to the art of ruling. For the Athenian Stranger just as for the Platonic
Socrates, the art of ruling is, like the other arts, in conformity with an
orderliness that intimates the supervening stability of nous and eidos
over disarray and perishability – a propaedeutic for the soul’s reconcil-
iation to the larger natural order within which human nature also finds
its place. For Machiavelli, by contrast, the art of ruling is a power that
a prince achieves over natural conditions, enabling him to “introduce
any form” he pleases into the “matter” provided by the adversity that
challenges him (The Prince chapter 6).

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We can now sum up the contrast between Machiavelli’s and Plato’s

understandings of the relationship between virtue and fortune as
brought out by the situation of the founding. For Plato, opportunity
and chance are openings in the flux of events whereby we may, by prac-
ticing the arts that intimate the nous governing the whole, move human
events closer in the direction of that eidetic stability and virtue and
further away from their potential for vice and decline. Politically, this
means that the art of ruling is above all dedicated to educating citizens
to be virtuous, which will impart to them as much of the orderly repose
of the cosmos as it is in human nature to receive and which will, by
fortifying their souls against the primordial pull of the passions, enable
them to rise above their dependence on external goods, hence above (to
the degree possible) the reversals of fortune. The art of ruling has its
place within the natural whole. For Machiavelli, however, nature is a
field of hostile happenstance. It provides princes and aspiring princes
with an “opportunity” to achieve power and glory – nothing more. It
does not provide any innate, substantive leaning toward moderation
of the sort that the Athenian Stranger says the founder should possess.
There is no need for a prince to cultivate such virtues of soul in himself
or in his subjects, although, as we will see in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, the
reputation for them can be a considerable source of power.
For Machiavelli and the moderns, then, art is not a reflection of the
rationality that governs the world as a whole, in cultivating which the
soul learns one way of surmounting the disorder that tugs it down
through the passions. Instead, art is the means whereby people of
spontaneously bold and vigorous ambitions can impose their will on
the world, reshaping events so as to maximize their strength. Whereas
Plato and the other classics believed one might transcend the reversals
of fortune to some degree by minimizing one’s dependence on the exter-
nal and perishable objects of the passions through cultivating the soul’s
inner harmony, Machiavelli argues that a methodically deployed art can
conquer nature’s impediments in a very different way – through aggres-
sion rather than reconciliation – and in this sense conquer chance. As we
will see, for Machiavelli, to “rely on one’s own arms and virtue” and to
avoid relying on “fortune and the arms of others” (The Prince chapter
1) is not at bottom or in the first instance a matter of the crude power
struggle to disarm and defeat one’s competitors. The transformation
Machiavelli has in mind, although it entails actual power struggles and

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domination, is a more profound reorientation of human longing toward

the world, centering on the subtlest inward psychological treacheries of
the reliance on Fortuna. It is a transformation that in the first instance
requires that princes or potential princes (including, as we will later con-
sider, princes of thought who write about politics) liberate themselves
from the belief that the world is predominantly orderly and beneficent,
a world in which it would make sense to believe that philosophy and
rule could conceivably in principle – and perhaps aided by our prayers –
coincide.

machiavelli and the sophists

Machiavelli is sometimes interpreted as returning behind the main-
stream tradition of classical natural right established by Plato and
Aristotle and reviving the dissident stream known to us now as “the
Sophists,” reanimating their original defense of selfish individualism,
materialism, and the pursuit of political mastery as against the classics’
emphasis on a virtuous common good and the elevation of duty over
self-interest. Before entering further into Machiavelli’s new science of
politics, it will be useful to consider this relationship. There are indeed
parallels. For instance, Machiavelli writes in chapter 3 of The Prince:
“Truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and
always, when men do it who can they will be praised or not blamed,
but when they cannot and want to do it anyway, here lie the error and
the blame.” Thrasymachus argues similarly in Book 1 of the Republic
that taking advantage of others is the most natural way of life, culmi-
nating in tyranny, and that when a man attempts to become a tyrant
and fails, he will be condemned and punished, but should he succeed,
all will praise him and attribute to him the conventional moral virtues.
Similarly, when Machiavelli argues in chapter 18 that the prince should
“appear all mercy, all faith, all honesty, all religion” while never actu-
ally practicing those virtues for their own sake as opposed to mounting
the appearance of them for the sake of enhancing his power, one is
reminded of Glaucon’s contention in the Republic that the perfectly
unjust man will be outwardly perceived as possessing all the virtues
while never practicing them for their own sake, whereas the truly just
man who practices the virtues for their own sake without regard to
profit not only will not achieve the wealth and power of the unjust man

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but will actually be condemned and executed for being unjust. Owing
to such parallels, not only is Machiavelli sometimes seen as the succes-
sor to the Sophists, but, conversely, the Sophists are sometimes viewed
as direct precursors of modern political rationalism and utilitarianism,
as for instance when Lessing in Laacoon describes Simonides as “the
Greek Voltaire.” Finally, one can detect a resemblance between the
view of the pre-Socratics and Sophists that nature is fundamentally to
be characterized as motion, chance, and necessity and Hobbes’s view of
nature as matter in motion, itself derived from Bacon, who attributed
this view of the external world to Machiavelli, more poetically expressed
as Fortuna.
These are valid parallels, but they are also limited in important ways.
For, in my view, there is no direct parallel among the pre-Socratics and
Sophists for Machiavelli’s radical summons to the new prince to con-
quer nature or chance and introduce into matter “whatever form he
pleases.” Moreover, when they identify nature with motion, the pre-
Socratics and Sophists do not mean precisely that nature is a field
of sheer random and empty happenstance, of clashing particles, as
in Hobbes’s version. The closest parallel among the ancient schools
to Hobbes’s Baconian physics is that of Lucretius. Even in Lucretius’
atomism, however, the atoms evolve continuously through ever more
complex concatenations into entire worlds and civilizations, whereas for
Hobbes matter in motion always stands across a barrier from artificially
constructed political convention, a secularized version of Augustine’s
categorical distinction between the City of Man and the City of God in
which the City of God is replaced by man’s own power to reshape the
chaotic realm of human and nonhuman nature. More fundamentally,
whereas for Lucretius the understanding of nature as the clash of atoms
should predispose us to eschew the irrationality of political life with its
toils and dangers and cultivate our private pleasures, for Hobbes, it is
precisely the way in which matter in motion individuates us by acting
upon us through our fear of violent death and desire for continued life
that should motivate us to join the social contract.
For the pre-Socratics and Sophists as they are depicted by Plato and
as their views survive in the fragments attributed to them, nature’s
originary power as “chance motion” has a substantial content and a
direct bearing on how we understand the human realm of politics,
justice, and morality. For “motion” is not necessarily merely atomistic

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but is more fundamentally a wellspring of primordial myth and passion,

which is why Socrates in the Theaetetus includes Homer and the poets
along with cosmologists such as Heracleitus and the other “motion
men,” arguing that, in their eyes, Homer’s poems taught esoterically
and through myth and allegory what the natural philosophers taught
openly – the ontology of primordialism.21 Socrates’ characterization of
Homer as the hidden founder of the ontology of motion is paralleled
by the fragments of Gorgias (8–13) in which he claims that those like
him who possess expertise in the art of rhetoric have now replaced the
poets because of their power to make any appearance seem utterly real
in the minds of their audience:

Speech is a great power, which achieves the most divine works by means of
the smallest and least visible form. . . . The power of the incantations uniting
with the feeling in the soul soothes and persuades and transports by means of
its wizardry. [This] can be shown firstly from the arguments of the cosmol-
ogists, who by removing one opinion and implanting another, cause what is
incredible and invisible to appear before the eyes of the mind, and from legal
contests, in which a speech can sway and persuade a crowd by the skill of its
composition, not by the truth of its statements.22

In Book 10 of the Laws, the Athenian Stranger gives a succinct

and telescoped summary of this pre-Socratic ontology of primordialism
(what the Gorgias fragment terms “the arguments of the cosmologists”).
Nature issues in “great motions,” emerging “according to chance” and
“out of necessity” (889). The first beings, such as the heavenly bodies,
are the “greatest” and “noblest” because of their temporal priority and
huge scale. They generate numberless smaller combinations of “chance
powers” down to the appearance of the settled world as we experience
it in daily life. These concatenations come into being bereft of “mind”
or “art,” which came “late” in the generation of phenomena and which
exist in the “mortal” realm alone, the world of convention, including
politics and morality. In a sense, therefore, nature for the pre-Socratics
is akin to revelation, an unfathomable matrix of origination in which

21 The poets were commonly included among “the wise.” As Jaeger observes, the Sophists
“were the heirs of the educational tradition of the poets; they were the successors
of Homer and Hesiod, Solon and Theognis, Simonides and Pindar. Jaeger (1965)
pp. 289–296.
22 All references to the pre-Socratics and Sophists are from Freeman (1948).

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the gods are replaced by the alternation between chance and necessity.
As one of the Heracleitus fragments (30) puts it: “This cosmos, which is
the same for all, was not created by any one of the gods or of mankind,
but it was ever and is and ever shall be ever-living Fire, kindled in
measure and quenched in measure.”
The arts are “mortal” and “paltry” because they are short-lived
fabrications of man in contrast with the great primordial motions of
nature. Certain arts like “music” (tragic and lyric poetry) are utterly
paltry. (This judgment probably reflects the claim of Gorgias and other
rhetoricians to have replaced the role of the old poets in shaping opin-
ion.) Some arts, however, like medicine, farming, and gymnastic, are
relatively “serious” because they share their power “in common” with
the life forces of nature. We can tap into the potency of nature through
agriculture and through the care of the body. The realm of convention,
by contrast, is utterly artificial and opposed to nature, even more so
than the arts. Nomos adjures us to be pious, just, to seek peace and
respect the lives and property of others. However, to live naturally
is to allow the impulsive motions of nature to well up in ourselves
as the passion to maintain our lives and gratify our desires. The
“correct” life “according to nature” is to “dominate the rest,” to “get
the better” of others. The natural man’s passions will impel him to
strive spontaneously for “victory” over others, “by force” if need be,
shattering the artificial dictates of conventional morality and equality.
Echoing Callicles’ speech in the Gorgias extolling the natural master,
the pre-Socratics’ and Sophists’ view as summarized in the Laws stresses
that, although the laws say we must reject the natural life as unjust and
impious, for a real man to accept these dictates is to live like “a slave.”
It may be just and noble by convention to treat others as equals, but
it is just and noble by nature (another echo of Callicles) to tyrannize
over others whenever one can. Finally, the whole subject matter of
statecraft and legislation is held to be purely by art, and therefore
entirely unnatural – except for a “small part” of the art of ruling
which is in “partnership with nature” like the other “serious” arts of
medicine, gymnastic, and farming. That “small part” is in my view
the art of rhetoric, which for the Sophists is tantamount to everything
meaningful about statecraft, a point I will enlarge on subsequently.
Although a “small” part of art is connected to nature, according to
the Athenian Stranger’s rehearsal of the ontology of the motion-men,

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the realm of convention including justice, piety, and moderation has no

basis in nature as an underlying matrix of origination at all. Nature as
origination does well up into the realm of nomos, however. Each city
evolves from its unique and unfathomable origins in local “motions” to
embody its own special “way.” The realm of convention is “authorita-
tive” (kurios) for as long as it lasts. In other words, although motions
issue out of chance, whatever settled form they eventually achieve must
exist according to necessity, because it cannot be other than it is until
the temporary concatenation of motions making it up dissolve back
into the flux of becoming.23 The city’s way is authoritative while it
lasts, because no conventional view of justice can be transcended in
the direction of the eternal and universal truth, inasmuch as justice pos-
sesses a wholly phenomenal and local existence confined to the realm of
temporal mutability. Accordingly, as Socrates has Protagoras put it in
the Theaetetus, the characterization of a city’s way of life including its
view of morality is not “true” – because the truth about nature is that
“nothing is” – but an assessment of that way of life can be “correct,”
inasmuch as it is rooted in that city’s unique historical way of life. As
an advisor (like Protagoras was to Pericles), the Sophist can help a city
better and more clearly pursue its own given way, whatever that has
turned out to be.24
Some of the motion-men such as Protagoras tried to defend the realm
of convention by arguing that, precisely because its natural underpin-
nings are in violent strife, we should cling all the more dearly to whatever
bulwark of order the city has achieved over time (this is the implication
of his myth in the Protagoras [320c–323c]). As a fragment attributed to
Antiphon put it: “Nothing is worse for mankind than anarchy. Hence

23 Anaximander: “Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away accord-
ing to necessity; for they must pay the penalty and be judged for their injustice, according
to the ordinance of time.” Quoted in Heidegger (1984) p. 13.
24 Dodds translates nomos as “the conglomerate,” a web of interlocking social, religious,
legal, and customary prohibitions against vice and impiety. He also argues that not only
those whom we now term the Sophists but the earlier natural philosophers and cosmol-
ogists including Heracleitus had been deeply subversive of traditional and conventional
morality. Dodds (1984) pp. 21ff. For an impressive interweaving of historical, cultural,
and theoretical contexts for the emergence of the pre-Socratics and the Socratic school,
see Balot (2006), especially “Archaic Greece and the Centrality of Justice,” pp. 21ff.
Kerferd (1981) makes an insightful and detailed case for the philosophical and intellec-
tual coherence of the pre-Socratics and Sophists, rescuing the latter from the charge that
they were mere charlatans. See also Newell (2000) chapter 2.

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our forefathers instilled obedience into their children, so that when they
grow up they might not be overcome by any great change of fortune
(61).” Others, however, used the primordialist ontology as the basis
for a direct assault on all conventional morality in the name of selfish
individualism and, taken to its logical extreme, tyranny. According to
the Athenian Stranger, the most consistent implication of the view of
nature as motion is indeed the praise of “getting the better” of others as
the only truly natural way of life. This does not mean that the Sophists
were what we would now term moral relativists, however. They had a
definite view of natural human excellence and fulfillment that could be
defended on reasoned grounds. Because, as they would have it, nature
originates in strife and impulse, those “great and noble motions” can
well up as the ruling passion of individuals and cities, meaning that,
although treating people well and as equals may be just and noble by
convention, tyrannical mastery, whether achieved by individuals or by
cities, is just and noble by nature.25
The successful tyrant, reveling openly in his glory, is arguably the
most direct human counterpart of those great and noble motions at
the heart of becoming, a sheer spontaneous impulse to rule. There is
an echo of this implication in the Gorgias in Callicles’ professed admi-
ration for Hercules as the pattern of the natural master, a Bronze Age
cattle thief, brute, and killer who, Callicles somewhat fancifully relishes,
might return and smash through the placid and pusillanimous egalitar-
ianism of the Athenian democracy. Callicles also echoes the view just
noted, attributed by the Athenian Stranger to the pre-Socratics and
Sophists, that there is a distinction between what is just and noble
by convention (equality) and what is just and noble by nature (manly
victory) [483]). All in all, then, the motion-men do recognize certain
natural and substantive human excellences as rooted in, and flowing
from, the primordialist view of nature. Gorgias, for example, in another
fragment attributed to him, regards courage and prudence as the two
natural virtues most important to any city (8; 11.1). By “prudence”
he means the real-world sagacity of experienced and powerful leaders,

25 Heracleitus’ fragment number 80 could thus be read on both a nonhuman and a human
level: “One should know that war is universal and jurisdiction is strife, and everything
comes about by way of strife and necessity.” Freeman (1948) p. 30.

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not the Socratic derivation of prudence from philosophical contempla-

tion of the Good. For Hobbes, by contrast, illustrating the differences
between ancient and modern conventionalism, all virtues exist solely by
convention, created by human compact in the wholly artificial realm of
the state.26
As for that “small” part of art said by the primordialist ontology
as presented in the Laws to be connected to the underlying motions
of nature, I have suggested that it can most plausibly be identified as
the art of rhetoric, the possession of which is claimed by Socrates’
most prominent Sophistical interlocutors including Gorgias, Protago-
ras, and Thrasymachus. The rhetorician can manipulate conventional
appearances for his own sake or that of his clients. Finding himself in
a given city, he can adapt himself to the coloration of the local cir-
cumstances like a chameleon. He can defend that city’s justice in his
speeches or undermine it, depending on the client’s needs. Protagoras
argues that any given city’s conventions about virtue can be “picked
up” by an exposure to the locality, like children pick up language,
denying Socrates’ attempt to connect a knowledge of virtue to a rig-
orous and universally valid standard of reason of the kind prefigured
by the arts, one that does not change from place to place.27 In a sim-
ilar manner, when Gorgias says in reply to Socrates’ question about
whether he teaches justice that he can indeed teach justice if asked to
do so, he too means that he can give a plausible defense of however
the city he happens to be in understands its morality (460). He does
not fathom Socrates’ implication that there could a universally valid
knowledge of politike that, like geometry or astronomy, would tran-
scend mere local custom and prejudice, showing genuine perplexity for
the first time when Socrates introduces this notion to Polus (463). For
Gorgias, as a student of the primordialist ontology, local custom and

26 As Hobbes writes in chapter 10 of the Leviathan: “Nobility is power, not in all places,
but only in those Commonwealths where it has Privileges; for in such privileges consis-
teth their power. . . . The public worth of a man, which is the value set on him by the
Commonwealth, is that which men commonly call dignity. And this value of him by the
Commonwealth is understood, by offices of Command, Judicature, public employment;
or by Names and Titles, introduced for distinction of such Value. . . . So that, of Civil
Honour, the Fountain is in the person of the Commonwealth, and dependeth on the
Will of the Sovereign, and is therefore temporary.”
27 Consider the analysis by Nussbaum (1983) p. 105.

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prejudice is all justice could ever mean as a phenomenon. For these rea-
sons, both the Athenian Stranger and Socrates argue that the ontology
of motion leads most consistently to tyranny as the most natural way
of life and can offer no binding argument based on its own principles of
reasoning to prefer justice to tyranny. Still, as we have observed, some
of the Sophists like Protagoras did regard themselves as the guardians
of conventional morality – only some, like Thrasymachus, assailed it
openly. Moreover, as the Gorgias fragment praising courage and pru-
dence as natural virtues suggests, the haleness and energy of nature as
great and noble motions could be seen as imparting manly vigor and
boldness to the city living in accordance with nature, and that is a
kind of moral standard or standard of excellence, if radically different
from the Socratic one. Hence, Callicles echoes Gorgias in agreeing with
Socrates that Athens needs both courage and the prudence of successful
statesman, while omitting any agreement with Socrates about the need
for justice and moderation.
Now, it might be argued that the Sophists sometimes come close,
in the claims they make for the power of rhetoric, to Machiavelli’s
exhortation that fortune can be mastered. A fragment attributed to
Empedocles, the teacher of Gorgias, is apt here: “You shall check the
force of the unwearying winds which rush upon the earth and lay waste
the cultivated fields. And again, if you wish, you shall conduct the
breezes back again. And you shall bring out of Hades a dead man
restored to strength (111).” Control over nature is certainly implied.
But I would take this to mean that rhetoric cannot literally refashion
nature in the ways the fragment details but instead, as in the Gorgias
fragment about the power of rhetorical persuasion, can produce the
appearance of such transformations in the minds of the audience – not
so much create a storm as create one on stage. Yet even if we take
their claims more literally, I would argue that the Sophists thought of
controlling nature mainly in the sense of managing its shifts and eddies,
of surfing its waves, of using the protective coloration of whatever
arbitrary conventions locally obtained in order to disguise their own
pursuit of pleonexia. Even Empedocles’ fanciful talk of “summoning”
this power is more like a shamanistic incantation or a spell (to echo the
language about “wizardry” in the Gorgias fragment quoted earlier), a
way of tapping into and releasing the potent energies residing under the
surfaces of life in the primordial wellsprings of physis. Machiavelli’s

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play The Mandragola may point to a similar taproot of fecundity in

nature as one way of gaining power over it. However, managing nature
by cultivating its potencies is different in principle, I would argue, from
Machiavelli’s larger and more distinctively modern claim that a prince
might exercise the radical capacity to stand entirely outside of nature
and impose rationality on it through an act of sheer willpower.
To sum up: the pre-Socratics and Sophists do differ profoundly from
the Platonic Socrates over man’s relation to nature and what way of life
is naturally best by nature, but their dissent remains within the bound-
aries of nature and the debate about its character. Whereas I am arguing
that what is distinctively new and modern about Machiavelli’s political
science is the prospect it offers of standing outside of nature altogether.
Analogously, the pre-Socratics’ and Sophists’ concession of the need
to recognize that nature’s motions do well up into and ground in his-
torical existence the authoritative “way” of the city differs radically
from Hobbes’s argument, based on Bacon’s narrowing of Machiavelli’s
project for the conquest of nature, that man as homo faber can repli-
cate the ordering of the cosmos like a clockwork and remake the social
contract into a perfect mechanism of self-regulation. This enormous
expansion of the prospects for mastering nature, outstripping anything
to be found in the dissident strain of the Sophists and pre-Socratics
within classical thought, requires, I will try to demonstrate, the con-
cept of an antinatural will borrowed from the Abrahamic God and the
diminution of nature into random and empty motion already implied
in Augustine’s understanding of the world when it is bereft of God’s
sustaining will to uphold all phenomena.
For the ancient primordialist ontology, to reiterate, nature is a fecund
force to which one can adapt oneself, a wave one can ride, a power for
pleonexia that a “real man” can tap into. In this sense, as we earlier
observed, the story of Gyges’ Ring in the Republic symbolizes both an
investigation into nature and the unlocking of mythical subterranean
powers and Bronze Age heroism, the joint pedigree of cosmology and
poetry that Socrates attributes to the motion-men in the Theaetetus.
When Protagoras famously remarks that “man is the measure of all
things,” he is not, like Hobbes, Hume, or Kant, arguing that man assigns
causality to matter in motion through an act of will. The Greek phras-
ing has, on the contrary, the connotation that this is a truth that man
must “bear” (Theaetetus 152a). In other words, in the ontology of the

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motion-men, there is something uncanny and disturbing about how the

great motions of nature press in on us, threatening to overwhelm us
through life’s unfathomable reversals and the chaotic promptings of
our own passions. The tragedians reacted to this ontology of chance
and necessity by suggesting that the very attempt to master it must
lead to destruction. Sophocles’ Oedipus begins with the confidence of a
Sophist in his power as a “child of chance” to navigate its eddies with
his Apollonian powers of reason and boldness. However, he is ulti-
mately ground down by the “breakers” of these titanic clashing forces
of chance and necessity (1080, 1525–1530). In contrast to the tragic
teaching of Sophocles, the Sophists are generally more confident that,
through the art of rhetoric, they can continue to tack and trim against
the overwhelming power of nature. Even so, at bottom, they do share
with the tragedians a sense of how much of life is beyond our control;
how much we are the playthings of destiny, and why we should cling
to convention as the bulwark built up by civilization to protect us from
our own savage and hubristic natures, from the strife at the heart of
existence. This cautionary stance is exemplified by Aristophanes’ myth
in the Symposium, where the laws of the city constrain us to modera-
tion and protect us from reverting to the heavens-storming hubris that
led Zeus to split us all in half. Never do the Sophists suggest, as will
Machiavelli and his successors, that man can remake his own political
condition from the ground up. That requires a distinctively modern,
and post-Christian, conception of the will.

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 III

superlative virtue,
monarchy, and
political community
i n a r i s t o t l e ’ s POLITICS
In this chapter, I look at an important ambiguity in Aristotle’s political
philosophy – the issue of whether the “best regime” is a self-governing
republican aristocracy (the theme of Books 7 and 8 of the Politics) or the
much more muted claim that there may be a single ruler of superlative
virtue and prudence who might rule over many “cities and peoples”
according to the art of household management, a rational monarchy
of the kind sometimes associated with Alexander the Great but also
with Xenophon’s idealization of Cyrus the Great. I argue that Aristotle
mutes the claim because, while true, it would undermine the integrity
and claim to merit of the self-governing political community that is at
the forefront of his political philosophy. Although arguably more ratio-
nal, the monarchy of the “best man” is a regime in which citizenship
vanishes altogether under the architectonic art of household manage-
ment conducted by an all-powerful ruler. Hence, what is true, strictly
speaking, according to reason may have to retract its claims in order
that the political community of shared civic deliberation can flourish in
its own right. This, as we will see, is the context for Aristotle’s well-
known and forthright critique of what he takes to be Plato’s insistence
on excessive unity for the city, the Platonic Socrates’ failure to distin-
guish theory from prudence, and his belief in the unity of virtue. Yet
Aristotle’s own analysis of political authority cannot entirely exclude
his partiality toward precisely the kind of rational monarchy for which
he takes Plato and the Platonic Socrates to task.1

1 Although I have used the familiar translation of arete as “virtue,” one should bear in
mind that the Greek word has a broader range of meanings than its English equivalent.
Literally, it means “excellence.” Hence, it can make perfect sense in ancient Greek to

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By way of conclusion, I compare Aristotle’s notion of the “architec-

tonic” monarchy of the man of “superlative virtue” with Hobbes’s pre-
scription for monarchy to show that, despite some surface resemblances,
the Hobbesian Sovereign is a fundamental departure from Aristotle’s
rational monarch. Whereas Aristotle’s monarch exercises his superla-
tive virtue as the fulfillment of his nature within a cosmos that is itself
architectonically and teleologically ordered, Hobbes’s Sovereign har-
nesses the art of household management in the service of an explicitly
modern project, inspired by Machiavelli and Bacon, for the conquest
of nature. Hence, whereas for Aristotle monarchy requires the high-
est degree of virtue within the natural order, for Hobbes, sovereignty
is entirely a matter of the correctly applied method for reconstructing
nature, especially human nature.
Before proceeding, we should bear in mind that Aristotle’s critique
of the doctrine of the unity of virtue that he attributes to the Platonic
Socrates and which forms the basis for his critique of the Republic is
underlain by a deeper shift in the relationship between reason and polit-
ical virtue that we first broached in Chapter 1. For Aristotle’s capacity
to criticize Socrates for failing to distinguish clearly between prudence
and wisdom flows from his own disinclination to embrace a single pas-
sion, whether it be eros or thumos, as the unifying dimension in political
psychology.2 There is no equivalent in Aristotle’s political philosophy
of Diotima’s Ladder or the Image of the Cave, in which a philosophic
eros for the truth entails the moral and civic virtues along the path of
the soul’s ascent. In terms of the ontological framework outlined in

speak of the “virtue” of a carpenter, doctor, orator, or general, meaning their talent for
what they do. This can strike a modern reader as odd because we usually take “virtue” to
mean something disinterested, the capacity to rise above our own desires and preferences
for the sake of the general good. We therefore might think that a general’s talent to kill
and conquer people, or an orator’s talent at persuading someone to believe that a lie is
the truth, are too prone to deceit and self-interest to be considered properly virtuous.
The Greek arete certainly can have the connotation of self-denial and a preference for the
common good above one’s own self-interest, but its meaning is not restricted to this kind
of moral purity, and virtue is never categorically defined in this way to the exclusion of
all other meanings.
2 For an interesting history of thumos, see Koziak (2000). She draws attention to the fact
that, for Aristotle, thumos represents a general capacity for all manner of emotions and
desires. To me, this means that Aristotle deliberately strips it of its Platonic status as one
of the primordial passions that open us to the question of the gods and the transcendence
of our mortal limitations.

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Chapter 1, Aristotle moves to fence off the transcendental much more

firmly from the primordial than does Plato. Whereas Plato explores
how the primordial longings of eros and thumos might, if properly
clarified and educated, lead continuously upward through the virtues
of character required by a just regime toward the study of the Good,
Aristotle is more bent on compartmentalizing the levels of this ascent.
This means that philosophy changes from an erotic longing for wisdom
about the whole to a more formally resolved doctrine on how to study
the whole, such that, whereas for Plato the knowledge of all phenom-
ena leads us toward the Good which is the source of their being and of
their completion, including knowledge itself, Aristotle is able to sepa-
rate out formal categories for the study of Being itself as an object of
knowledge.3 More central to our concerns, it also means that Aristotle
denies that transcendence can only be approached by way of the study
of the city or that only the philosopher is the perfect guardian of the just
and the source of all prudence, including civic virtue. Instead, there is a
body of knowledge appropriate to politike and another body of knowl-
edge appropriate to theoria. By the same token, however, precisely by
compartmentalizing the political virtues and setting them apart in their
own right, Aristotle can be seen as portraying the realm of civic virtue
as self-sufficiently noble in its own right, saving it from vanishing, as it
arguably does in the Platonic dialogues, into the overwhelmingly supe-
rior claim of philosophy, with the consequence that its own satisfaction
and the status of the knowledge grounding it are radically dubious, the
mere twilight of Platonic “correct seeming.” These larger considerations
inform my specific treatment of the theme of monarchy and superlative
virtue, and their relationship to tyranny, in what follows.

monarchy and the political community

My aim is to demonstrate the importance of the monarchical dimension
of Aristotle’s political thought for understanding the character and lim-
its of his preference for political community by examining the problem
of what Aristotle calls “superlative virtue” in the Politics (1284a–b,
1286a5–10). In Aristotle’s presentation, the public claims of the “best

3 On the relationship between the Idea of the Good and the other Ideas in Plato’s meta-
physics, consider Newell (2010).

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man” to rule monarchically constitute an especially revealing test case

for the political community’s claims to be able to govern itself. For here
the community’s aims are at loggerheads not merely with selfish desires –
which Aristotle of course has no difficulty in repudiating – but with
the highest degree of virtue itself. As I argue in this chapter, Aristotle
has a way of resolving this problem in favor of what he takes to be
the requirements of politics and the political community. Yet although
the cumulative message of the Politics is Aristotle’s endorsement of an
aristocratic political community as the preferred regime, the claim of
superlative virtue to rule monarchically continues to undulate through-
out it, leaving this endorsement a nuanced and conditional one.
The problem of superlative virtue in the Politics comes clearly to light
in Aristotle’s equivocal definition of the best claim to rule. In the sixfold
classification of constitutions presented in Book 3, the “correct” con-
stitutions are monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, and the “deviations”
are tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Aristocracy means, literally,
“rule of the best” with respect to virtue, making it the “best constitu-
tion” (1279a–b, 1278a15–20, 1284b20–30, 1293b1–10). Aristotle also
argues in Book 3, however, that the rule of the best could be monarchi-
cal. In fact, if the “best man,” a man of “superlative virtue,” were to
appear, even an aristocracy – indeed, especially an aristocracy – should
give him complete authority, because virtue is its principle of justice.
Strictly speaking, then, it appears that the rule of the best – aristocracy –
is monarchy, rather than the self-governing community that bears this
name in the sixfold classification. Some commentators regard this aspect
of Book 3 as a rather puzzling relapse into Platonism, as if Aristotle had
suddenly conceded the possibility of the Platonic philosopher-king and
of the assimilation of the political association to the “royal” art of rul-
ing so roundly trounced in Books 1 and 2. It is all the more puzzling
because when Aristotle turns, in Books 7 and 8, to the full analysis of the
“best constitution,” he proceeds to describe an aristocratic community –
as if he had never admitted that, strictly speaking, the most virtuous
form of rule was monarchical (1252b30–40, 1326b9).
We can make sense of this apparent inconsistency by relating it to
some broader issues in the Politics. The case of the individual possessing
“superlative” virtue is part of an extended discussion of the meaning of
justice in Book 3. The core of this argument is the section on ostracism,
in which Aristotle says that to exclude the man of superlative virtue from

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monarchical authority bespeaks “a certain political justice” but would

not conform to the “absolutely just” (1284b17, 1284b25). However, to
understand the full bearing of Aristotle’s distinction between “absolute”
justice and “political” justice, we should first consider more closely what
he means by “political.” I begin, therefore, by examining Aristotle’s way
of distinguishing between political and other kinds of authority. As we
will see, this turns out to be a distinction between a political community
whose members possess enough virtue to be able to govern themselves
and a prudent monarch whose virtue is so outstanding that he deserves
to rule the city with the same kind of authority that a master exercises
over a household. However, the claim of superlative virtue to exercise
this kind of authority leads to the destruction of the city understood
as a community of diverse contributions and interests. Having shown
the tension between political community and monarchy, I then turn to
Aristotle’s consideration of what happens when the claim to possess
superlative virtue rears its head in the midst of the political community
itself.

The association that aims at the supreme good, according to Book 1 of

the Politics, is the political community (koinonia politike).4 A member
of this community is a citizen who holds office in alternation with
other citizens. A political community, in other words, is one where, by
natural endowment and condition of life, people are equal – or, at least,
no one is sufficiently superior to the others to be entitled to hold office
permanently. The other kinds of rule, although they are associations,
are thus not political associations, but varieties of monarchical rule:
the king or royal ruler, household manager, and master. Aristotle is
at pains to point this out become “some” hold the view that these
forms of rule do not differ in kind, but only in number. If this were so,
Aristotle argues, it would mean that statesmanship, kingship, mastery,
and household management could be conflated. However, the three
types of one-man rule do have more in common with each other than
they do, taken together, with the political community. As we soon learn,

4 The political community is Aristotle’s most general term for a community of shared rule
in contrast with monarchy. The “constitution” (politeia) is the more specific ordering
of the city, and the distribution of offices and authority within it, in accordance with a
correct or deviant interpretation of justice. “Constitution” is also the name of one of the
six “constitutions.” I translate it in the familiar way as “polity” to avoid confusion.

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household management and the mastery of slaves are both required by

the household (oikos) to secure the necessities of life. As for kingship,
some have evidently thought that the city itself could be ruled like
a household – a view that, in Book 2, Aristotle attributes to Plato’s
Republic (1261a10–22). From the very outset of the Politics, then,
and with Plato’s Republic as well as the Statesman likely in mind,
Aristotle is disputing the argument that all human associations, public
and private, could be organized by a single royal “science” (episteme)
of governing (Plato Statesman 259; Xenophon Memorabilia 3.4.12,
3.6.14). A city ruled like a household in which the monarch’s subjects
do not participate in rule but passively carry out the tasks assigned
to them is the alternative that Aristotle is concerned to prevent from
overwhelming the validity of deliberative self-government by the citizens
of a political community.
The distinction between political and monarchical rule sheds light
on the long discussion of the household that completes Book 1 (1253b–
1260b). Many commentators see the aim of this discussion as estab-
lishing the superiority of public, communal existence over the private
household’s concerns with material necessities and comfort. This is one
of its aims, but focusing on this aim alone misses what for Aristotle is
the more problematic and extended part of the investigation: can the
household’s forms of rule be applied not only to managing one’s pri-
vate affairs but to entire cities? When Aristotle poses the question of
whether the art of household management is identical with the acquisi-
tion of wealth, he is concerned not only with private households. This
question is one of his ways of exploring more fully the possibility that
there is a “science” of mastery that would swallow up not only the
management of private households but the spheres of statesmanship
and kingship as well – an error, he points out, “which we raised at
the beginning” (1253b15–20). The discussion of the household and its
place vis-à-vis the city thus doubles back to that alluring prospect of a
single monarchical science of government. Moreover, whereas Aristotle
is certain that the life of citizenship is better for a human being than
absorption in private moneymaking and acquisition, he is not nearly so
categorical in asserting the superiority of the “political community” to
a certain version of the household as a pattern for government.
The analysis of the household begins with the rule of a master over
slaves. According to Aristotle, the tools, including slaves, that the master

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employs are either for production (poiesis) or action (praxis). The epit-
ome of productivity is the “architectonic” rule of a master-craftsman
(architekton) over a ranked division of labor, his slaves being “tool[s]
serving tools.” Optimally, Aristotle suggests, tools would direct them-
selves automatically to fulfill their part of the master-craftsman’s plan.
The fanciful comparison of such tools to the legendary self-moving stat-
ues of Daedalus implies that, just as the most productive tools would
be animate, the most productive slaves would be inanimate, or as close
to automatons as human beings could become. Perfect productivity, in
other words, would abstract from all action. However, a slave, rightly
considered, is an instrument for action rather than production (1254a1–
10). It is like a bed, which provides nothing beyond its use, rather than
like a shuttle, which produces a commodity. A slave is thus someone
who by nature belongs to a master as an instrument of action. In this
way, Aristotle tries to prevent the identification of mastery with the
open-ended acquisition and production of wealth.
As to the question of whether the authority of master over slave can
be justified quite apart from the question of its economic consequences,
Aristotle argues that this is a matter of distinguishing natural slavery
from merely conventional or legal slavery.5 Despite the attention this
particular passage has understandably received from commentators, we
should bear in mind that Aristotle is not only or even mainly concerned
with the frequent injustice of conventional slavery (which he admits),
but to distinguish political rule over naturally equal citizens from the
rule of a master over slaves even when the latter would be just. Although
some details of the argument justifying natural slavery are drawn from
private life, in its conclusion we are reminded once again that its main
target is that error discussed during the initial distinction between polit-
ical and other kinds of authority: “all [forms of] rule are not [the same],
although some say they are” (1235b15–20).
In order to come to grips with Aristotle’s assessment of the role of
property and the economy within the political community, we must
avoid imposing on it an inappropriate set of modern distinctions.

5 The degree to which Aristotle believed that conventional slavery coincided with natural
slavery – or whether he believed such a coincidence ever occurred – is a much argued
question. See, for example, Ross (1960) pp. 241–242; Strauss (1977) pp. 22–23; Nichols
(1983); Mulgen (1977) pp. 42–45; Smith (1983); Fortenbraugh (1977).

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Aristotle is not making a rigid distinction between something like our

modern “bourgeois” or “nuclear” private family and a political com-
munity selflessly dedicated to the common good, with the implication
that the household is an entirely negative realm of materialism, self-
interest, and apathy in contrast with an entirely communitarian realm
of idealistic civic dialogue. The reality is a good deal more complicated.
It is true that the first discussion of the household reduces it to the
level of necessity, thereby denying it entry into the realm of ethical
choice, because it is restricted to the drives of physical survival and
reproduction (1252a24–1252b27). However, this is the family only
in its most primitive version, isolated or part of loose and scattered
settlements. When the household is incorporated within a fully evolved
city, its status is also ennobled, such that, in Aristotle’s second discussion
of its virtues, the household and its members dwell within the properly
ethical realm of deliberative choice and education (1259a37–1260b20).
As such, it is the first source of the city’s future citizens.
Moreover, although the city, fully evolved, is devoted to the “good
life” as opposed to the “mere life” of material survival, it does not
entirely transcend that realm of material necessity nor, therefore, the
economic realm of the household. The city “is” for the good life but
“becomes” for material life (1252b25–1253a30). Its telos is deliberative
communal citizenship (the realm through which the city participates in
what truly is). But that highest aim is always coeval with the economic
wherewithal guaranteeing the leisure for its pursuit (the lower realm
of becoming). Moreover, to the extent that the telos of deliberative
citizenship is fulfilled, the good life is actualized not only for cities,
but also “for households,” an addition often overlooked in discussions
of Aristotle’s famous definition of man as being by nature a political
animal. Again, its proper integration within the political community
ennobles household life as well as the civic life whose participants the
household provides.
More than this: For Aristotle, the household is not primarily a pri-
vate sub-political association at all. Allowed to unfold to its fullest
degree, it is a regime-level principle of monarchical rule, the most
widespread and in some ways most compelling alternative to republican
self-government altogether. The main theme of Book 1, accordingly, is
the contrast between these two fundamental variants of authority, the
political community and some form of oikonomia, the art of household

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management. Therefore, when we turn to the discussion of the latter,

we must always bear in mind that Aristotle, in discussing the art of
household management and the proper limits of acquisition, is always
simultaneously discussing both a regime-level pattern of authority and
a pattern of authority within private households belonging to a polis.
The household manager can mean the citizen of a polis in his capacity
as head of a family and its economic concerns, or the chief overseer and
steward for that family head. But it can also mean the single monar-
chical ruler of an entire society organized according to the household
paradigm. The four main themes in the rest of Book 1 are components
of this over-arching paradigm: 1) the authority of masters over slaves;
2) the proper art of household management; 3) how much the natural
environment will provide for man’s material needs; and 4) the virtues
that subordinate members of the household, when it is properly ordered
within a city, might contribute to the family, and thereby to the political
community at large.
As we have seen, the discussion of “mastery” over slaves and ser-
vants introduces the fundamental criterion by which Aristotle will assess
all forms of economic acquisition and production as either proper or
improper – the distinction between making (poiesis) and doing (praxis).
To the extent that pure untrammeled making is the goal of household
management, the best slave would be like a machine programed for
ceaseless fabrication within the architectonic division of labor required
for maximized productivity (1253b23–1254a8). However, the proper
use of slaves and servants is as a means for doing, to provide masters
and household heads in their roles as citizens with the wherewithal
for a devotion to “politics or philosophy” (1255b30–1256a1). Public
life is the end, moneymaking only the means. The proper purpose of
economics is to furnish the chremata, the equipment, for actualizing
the virtues. For example, you cannot be liberal toward the deserving
if you do not possess an adequate income beyond what is needed for
your own self-preservation (1263a40–1263b7). Intending to reward the
meritorious without the means to do so is not fully virtuous, for virtue
is above all a deed, not merely a leaning, temperament or aspiration
(Nicomachean Ethics 1098b30–1099a5, 1176b1–5). Hence, although
someone born into a position of wealth may have done nothing to earn
it, while someone born into straitened circumstances will be compelled
to labor for a living regardless of his potential merit, only the wealthier

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man can practice the virtue of liberality, however good may be the
intentions of the poorer man (Nicomachean Ethics 1120a4–15).
As to whether slavery or servitude is ever just, Aristotle argues that
nature as a whole is characterized by the pairing of ruling over ruled,
such as the soul over the body and the intellect over the appetites. To
be just by nature, the master’s rule over a slave would have to be as
beneficial to the slave as the rule of the soul over the body or the intellect
over the appetites within a single man (1254a17–1254b32). By impli-
cation, this natural standard, in which the slave is the chief beneficiary
of the arrangement because he could no more take care of himself than
could a body without a mind, rarely if ever coincides with the conven-
tional institution of slavery, as evidenced by the fact that those who
are masters by convention feel compelled to seek a natural justification
for what is almost inevitably their arbitrary and unmerited power over
other human beings (1254b32–1255a3, 1255a20–1255b16).
To maintain the distinction between the proper use of the art of
household management in the service of doing and its improper use
in the service of making, Aristotle argues that there are limitations on
the degree to which acquisition is natural to human beings and nec-
essary for meeting their natural needs. We need only acquire what
is sufficient for life, not luxury. Wealth should primarily be based
on agriculture and livestock, not commercial exchange and liquid
assets. Commercial exchange, when unavoidable, should be limited
to procuring the basic necessities of life, not for the sake of luxury
or surplus income (1256a1–18, 1256a40–1256b7, 1257a5–1257b40).
Of course, these parameters are imprecise, meant only as general
guidelines, because some level of surplus between the means for self-
preservation and superfluous luxury will be required to practice virtues
such as liberality that are impossible to actualize without some extra
wealth.
If, to argue the contrary, household management were synonymous
with open-ended acquisition, then all the virtues would have to be
viewed as means to moneymaking and material pleasures (1257b40–
1258a15). Someone who is unable to fulfill his desires in private life
may seek to do so “by other means” such as “courage” or “general-
ship” – that is, by political and martial daring (1258a5–15). Aristotle’s
examples of virtue in this passage remind us again that the art of house-
hold management can be employed at the regime level, and not only by

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the private family within the city. Courage and generalship are public
virtues that, properly directed, are employed by citizens in defense of the
political community’s internal way of life from external aggression. If,
however, the political community is swallowed up by a project for lim-
itless economic acquisition, then these virtues could be perverted into
means for launching imperialistic expansion and exploitation abroad.
The improper use of household management, in other words, is coeval
with tyranny, whether of a ruler tyrannizing over his own city or of a
city tyrannizing over other peoples as a conqueror. The tyrant, Aristo-
tle remarks, is in many ways like the personal owner of an enormous
household made up of his subjects, someone who disposes of an entire
city as his private property and business enterprise (1259a23–37), echo-
ing the Platonic diagnosis of this political disorder. As we recall from
the discussion of the proper end of the polis, the good life and mere
life are copresent in the city. The good life outranks mere life, just as
“being” (the mode in which the good life is) outranks “becoming” (the
mode in which mere life is [1252b28–30]). The household, as the sphere
of mere life, must be limited and circumscribed by the city, by the good
life that can only be actualized in the public deliberations of the citi-
zenry. Otherwise, it is possible that the economic aims of the household
pattern of authority may slip its bonds and absorb the city itself, so that
the polis becomes a monarchical household or even an empire.
The tenability of Aristotle’s distinction between the proper and
improper employment of oikonomia hinges, at bottom, on the onto-
logical relationship between human nature and nature as a whole. For
what if, as Machiavelli will argue, nature is in truth unremittingly hos-
tile to human efforts to survive and prosper? In order to maintain
the distinction between proper and improper oikonomia, according to
Aristotle, we need to envision nature as providing for our basic needs
without an excessive emphasis on transforming nature through human
productive techniques. Only in this way can we stress doing (praxis)
over making (poiesis) and circumscribe the latter by the former, which
is tantamount to circumscribing the household by the polis. If, on the
contrary, nature were to prove inherently too poor, sterile, or hostile to
provide for those basic needs, we would be driven to remake nature and
force it to yield the material for our survival – to “master Fortuna,” as
Machiavelli will put it, or as Bacon, following upon this fundamental

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shift in the meaning of politike, will argue, to convert science into the
power for “the relief of man’s estate.”
The first conclusion Aristotle draws, then, about the art of household
management is that it should not be identified with productivity. Were
this identification to be made, the inflated desires such productive arts
would serve in private life could, Aristotle observes, fuel an ambition
for power, wealth, and status in public life or even abroad through
the pursuit of empire. The productivity of the private household must
therefore be circumscribed by the requirements of the common good.
The proper use of wealth is to enable the heads of households to pursue
public affairs and philosophy within the city.

Although this argument might seem to dispose of the claim of the house-
hold as a model for good government, it is far from the whole story. For
the question remains as to whether some form of one-man authority
besides the exploitive, tyrannical kind might be more beneficial for the
city than the “political community.” This leads to the more complex
level of Aristotle’s investigation. If there are not enough people in any
given city who are sufficiently naturally talented to be able to pool their
abilities and govern their own affairs, might not a monarch who orga-
nized them into their respective functions be a superior alternative to a
self-governing community? Anticipating this objection, Aristotle argues
that “nature” will provide “human beings” fit for citizenship just as she
can be expected to provide both household managers and statesmen
with the material necessities. Statesmanship, therefore, does not have
to “make” or produce (poiein) human beings fit to live in a city, just as
weaving does not produce wool but “uses” wool already provided for
it (1258a20–30). At most, statesmanship must be able to distinguish
between the good and bad people already present. The derogation of
“making” in favor of “using” what has already been provided recalls
Aristotle’s earlier criticism of the household devoted wholly to pro-
ductivity, epitomized by the rule of a master-craftsman over a ranked
division of labor. Just as the household does not need to be wholly given
over to the “architectonic” organization of the arts, Aristotle implies,
neither does the city.
In light of what has preceded, Aristotle goes on to make the rather
startling remark that “the ruler must have complete moral virtue, for
the work [he does] is, taken absolutely, that of a master-craftsman,

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and reason (logos) is a master-craftsman” (architechton; 1260a10–20).

Until now we have received the impression that Aristotle prefers shared
rule to monarchical rule and that the monarch’s skill in “producing”
people fit to live in a city need not override the community’s claim to
be able to govern itself. Has Aristotle now reversed himself to endorse
the “architectonic” pattern of rule? This question must be pondered on
several levels. As we have observed, Aristotle makes a direct connection
between the proper stance toward nature as the source of the where-
withal for economic sufficiency and the proper relationship between
technical fabrication and the political community. For, just as there
should be no project for the conquest of nature, there should be no
project for the conquest of human nature. We do not have to intervene
radically in nature with our powers of fabrication because nature pro-
vides a sufficiency of wealth on hand through the cycles of agriculture
and herdsmanship. Because a sufficiency of wealth is on hand from the
start, we can stress the good life over mere life and need not be preoccu-
pied with scarcity and survival. Similarly, we do not need to re-create or
radically recraft human nature to achieve political order. Nature pro-
vides a sufficiency of sound human material on hand from the start, a
widespread parity among human beings in their receptivity to an educa-
tion in or habituation to virtue. This allows us to stress the actualization
of our potential for moral and intellectual virtue through the political
community – to stress the good life for citizens over a project for sheer
political coercion. The parallel is clear and compelling. If nature at
large is too poor, we will have to stress economic productivity over
purposeful use. If human nature is too vicious from the outset, if its
psychological material is too poor or intractable, statecraft will have to
stress compulsion based on fear and coercion over relying on people to
be capable of virtue if properly educated in an environment where the
laws support virtue.
Aristotle is not unaware of the need for coercion in political life. As he
puts it in the Nicomachean Ethics, for base natures, or for noble natures
who occasionally lapse into baseness, education and noble rhetoric may
require the supplement of punishment and the dread it instills (Nico-
machean Ethics 1179b1–30). However, if politics is assimilated into a
project for the rational reconstruction of human nature to coerce it to
behave in an orderly way, then the very prospect of a virtuous political
community vanishes into the Gulag and the reeducation camp. Poiesis

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would entirely displace praxis. We would be brought to the Hobbesian

model of sovereignty, where both of Aristotle’s criteria for the relation-
ship of nature to human nature are reversed: 1) nature is inherently
hostile to human hopes for survival and must therefore be remade in
order to yield material wealth; 2) human nature inherently lacks a suffi-
ciency of excellence for the capacity for a voluntary acceptance of virtue
and must therefore be reconstructed by a Sovereign who employs terror
openly as the only alternative to disobedience leading to anarchy.
Paradoxes abound here. Do we need to conceive of nature in the
way Aristotle recommends because that will encourage us to behave
properly? Or is it that understanding nature properly in this way would
lead directly to that behavior? Is it possible that Aristotle is rhetorically
exaggerating nature’s friendliness, downplaying the degree to which we
do have to labor for survival all the time, because otherwise the leisure
time we need for philosophy and political deliberation would be under-
mined by our preoccupation with mere life? At the same time, we also
know that, in Aristotle’s view, human nature does not unfold automat-
ically like a flower from its seed. It requires a degree of poiesis, like the
sculpture carved from the stone: the lawgiver must “make” laws that
foment correct opinion and education (Nicomachean Ethics 1179b–
1180a10, 1180b20–1181a10). So it might be necessary for Aristotle to
rhetorically exaggerate to some degree nature’s beneficence as an ele-
ment in the climate of opinion surrounding the “making” of character
through law, habit, and pedagogy that will nudge the nature of citizens
into unfolding correctly.
The Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics together might be seen as
guides for statesmen of the greatest prudence in their fashioning of the
education, habits, and opinions that citizens of lesser virtue require.
If so, then the seed of or predisposition toward virtue must really be
in human nature and nature as a whole, even if human nature needs
some assistance or nudging from political craftsmanship. Otherwise,
the account of nature as supportive of virtue would be a purely salutary
fiction made up to disguise nature’s emptiness of purpose or even its
hostility toward man. For how could people be habituated to behave
virtuously in Aristotle’s way unless at least the seed, the potential, for
it existed in nature? If the account of nature is entirely a fiction, how
would Aristotle be different from a modern like Hobbes, who argues
that nature is a purposeless flux that can and must be reshaped to

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serve man’s material needs and buttress social peace? Why make up
this particular story? Why not tell the truth about nature openly, like
Machiavelli or Hobbes? At bottom, in however qualified or attenuated
a sense, Aristotle does believe that nature will provide. The closest
analogy for understanding nature, Aristotle tells us in the Physics, is a
physician who heals himself. Similarly, a statesman must employ the art
of governing to encourage the healthy flourishing of the human potential
for virtue – in which statesmen themselves share – with which nature
furnishes politike. We return to this analogy when looking at some
broader differences at the end of this chapter between the classical and
modern ontologies of tyranny.
For Aristotle, the danger posed by the art of household manage-
ment and its household paradigm of rule to the political community
is not merely the danger that the polis might be usurped by a tyrant
or a tyrant city. Although every decent person would surely agree that
the political community should not be swallowed up by the improper
use of the art of household management, what about the possibility
that it might be assimilated by the proper use of that art? The deeper
difficulty is that there is something inherently reasonable about the
division of labor itself. Human nature is fulfilled, Aristotle has told
us, by citizens employing logos to deliberate about what is just, noble,
and advantageous (1253a10–20). Yet now he tells us (to reemphasize
this arresting phrase) that “logos is an architechton” – reason itself is
a master-craftsman, the architectonic art (1260a13–18; Nicomachean
Ethics 1094a25–30). In other words, the search for reasoned clarity
about the meaning of justice, nobility, and the advantageous may lead
ineluctably away from shared deliberation toward the hierarchical dis-
tinctions uncovered by unhindered reason, because, as we recall, the cos-
mos as a whole is constituted by hierarchy (1254a17–1254b2). There is
thus a very real sense in which the political community’s shared deliber-
ations must, if left untrammeled, transcend themselves in the direction
of a rational oikonomia and the rule of “one or a few” statesman
of “superlative” prudence (1277a15–25, 1277b25–32, 1278a40–b6).
This is why Aristotle will eventually tell us that “the whole of justice”
must occasionally be sacrificed to preserve the “political justice” of the
city (as in the ostracism of the best man [1284b1–30]), and why the
best regime per se may not be a self-governing aristocracy so much as
a rational monarchy that exercises prudence and rules over “cities and

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peoples” according to the paradigm of the art of household manage-

ment (1285b20–35). The fullest employment of reason in politics may
threaten the very existence of politics.

the claim of superlative virtue in the debate

about justice
So far we have considered the rule of the “best man” in the context of
oikonomia and its own regime principle of monarchy. Now we exam-
ine the claim of superlative virtue as one being advanced within the
political community itself. I will begin with a general observation about
Aristotle’s notion of politike, a word that means both the study and
the practice of statesmanship. Aristotle’s ambiguity about the role of
monarchy at its best vis-à-vis the claim of the political community at its
best mirrors his general injunction that statesmanship cannot aspire to
the deductive necessity of mathematics (Nicomachean Ethics 1094b12–
1095a6). Its irregularities and messiness are intrinsic to its character as
a field of study. In this, he is at odds both with other classical attempts
and with certain modern attempts to make politike more closely akin
to mathematics and rigorous science.
Among the ancients, the Platonic approach, at least in the dimen-
sions of it on which Aristotle focuses his criticism, and chiefly char-
acterized by the Statesman and the Republic, attempts to derive the
science of ruling directly from the Idea of the Good. Consequently,
Aristotle argues, because the virtues are commensurable like number,
all the virtues of character are directly assimilable to the virtue of the
philosopher (1260a–b; Nicomachean Ethics 1144b–1145a). Among the
moderns, as the mirror-image opposite of this Platonic science of rul-
ing, Hobbes argues that “the similitude of the passions” provides a
formal universal from which the structure of the social contract can
be deduced with the logical necessity of geometry. In the Platonic case,
statecraft is informed by the geometrical proportionality that informs
the whole. In the Hobbesian case, geometry is an anthropocentric fac-
ulty that enables us to impose rational causation on nature understood
as matter in motion. In this respect, Aristotle thus occupies a middle
ground between the cosmological transcendentalism of Plato and the
anthropocentric transcendentalism, the project for the manmade recon-
struction of nature, of Hobbes.

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In Book 3 of the Politics, we learn that although rulers and ruled

may share certain virtues of character in common, one virtue is peculiar
to rulers alone. This is prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis). Pru-
dence therefore demonstrates why the virtue of the good citizen rarely
coincides with that of the good man (the prudent man) per se, because
prudence cannot be exercised by citizens who do not themselves gov-
ern. Prudence is at all events uncommon, characteristically exercised by
“one” or “one with others.” Aristotle emphasizes its rareness with two
illustrations. First, the ruled do not need prudence for understanding
political affairs but can get by with “true opinion.” This presumably
enables them to understand and carry out the prudent judgments of
their rulers without sharing the capacity to make them. Aristotle likens
this relationship between ruler and ruled to that between a pipe player
and his pipes. Second, Aristotle’s example of the prudent ruler here
is Jason, who could not bear to retire from tyranny into private life
because he had such a “hunger” to rule. All in all, a large gulf sep-
arates the virtue of the ruler from that of the citizen (1277a15–25,
1277b25–32).
The virtue of the “best man,” Aristotle observes later in Book
3, is “superlative” specifically with respect to “political capacity”
(1284a10). Prudence is similarly characterized in Book 6 of the Nico-
machean Ethics, and the discussion there clarifies a number of the terms
we have encountered (1180b25–1181a10). Prudence is both the chief
intellectual virtue apart from wisdom and the condition for the pos-
session of the moral virtues in their entirety. The rare individual who
possesses prudence will therefore also possess such virtues as greatness
of soul, liberality, moderation, and courage, whereas people possessing
one or more of these lesser virtues will not necessarily achieve prudence.
Prudence is not an art (techne) because it does not “make” or “produce”
(poiein) things. It is not a science (episteme) like geometry because
it does not deal with permanent conditions but with variable ones
(1140a25–1140b10). However, prudence is something considerably
more precise and skillful than instinct, improvisation, or even debate
among informed citizens. For prudence must be guided by an “archi-
tectonic” faculty for “statesmanship,” applying this faculty according
to “correct reason” (1141b10–30, 1144b10–25). Aristotle’s example
of prudent statesmanship in the Ethics is Pericles, whose predominance
over the Athenian democracy Hobbes, in a comment on his translation

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of Thucydides, compares to a monarchy in all but name.6 Whereas

Socrates in the Gorgias would not, to Callicles’ indignant amazement,
deign to include Pericles among the ranks of prudent rulers, Aristotle’s
use of him as the exemplar of the highest practical virtue reflects his
critique of Socrates for failing to distinguish that crowning virtue of the
statesman from philosophical contemplation.7 By opening up a realm
for political genius and even (as the example of Pericles implies) a kind
of measured imperial ambition between the empyrean heights of phi-
losophy and the arguably robotic conformism of the Auxiliaries in the
Republic, Aristotle is trolling for men like Callicles who fit into neither
extreme. He is promising them a life of political preeminence that is
noble and satisfying in its own right.
The characterization of prudent statesmanship as an “architectonic”
faculty guided by correct reason also suggests that the gap between
technical and scientific reasoning on the one hand and prudence on the
other is not as wide as it might at first appear. As we have observed
in Book 1 of the Politics, Aristotle regards the architectonic organiza-
tion of the arts as the optimal one for technically skilled production
(poiesis). Moreover, although “intelligence” (nous) is initially charac-
terized in the Ethics as the source from which “science” intuits the
first principles of deductive proofs, Aristotle later suggests that “intelli-
gence” also furnishes prudence with an intuition of the particulars with
which it must deal (1143b1–10). In Book 10 of the Ethics, when Aris-
totle discusses the transition from ethics to government, the distinction
between art and science on the one hand and prudence on the other
is relaxed further still. This appears to parallel Aristotle’s contention
that we must turn from ethics to government because persuasion is
not enough to make most human beings prefer virtue to vice: for most
people, “force” and law are also required. The prudent ruler is now
said to have to know “statesmanship” with the same acuity as scien-
tists know science and artisans know art, so as to be able to “make
(poiein) people better.” In other words, the transition from questions
of ethics to questions of government and rule leads to less emphasis on

6 In Schlatter (1975) p. 14.

7 See the fascinating study by Burger (2008), who argues that the Nicomachean Ethics may
be read as the dialogue that Plato never wrote, a dialogue between two philosophers, in
which Aristotle is directly engaging Socrates.

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persuasion and the voluntary aspect of citizens’ habituation to virtue

and to more emphasis on the need to supplement persuasion with regu-
lation and punishment. As this transition occurs, prudence moves corre-
spondingly closer to (although it never fully coincides with) poiesis and
episteme.
These modulations in the meaning of prudent statesmanship take us
back to the underlying debate between Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle
will not abandon the distinction between prudence as a kind of skilled
and seasoned judgment of political experience and the pure expertise
of scientific and technical knowledge. In contrast with what he takes to
be the teaching of Plato, Aristotle will not allow the sphere of practical
statesmanship to be assimilated entirely to a monarchical science of
rule. This parallels his unwillingness to see the sphere of public life
obliterated by the monarchical science of household management. His
examples of prudent statesmen, although individuals of rare ability, are
flesh-and-blood actual rulers such as Jason and Pericles (warts and all)
rather than the totally disinterested and intellectually pure prototype
of Platonic monarchy. On the other hand, however, Aristotle is willing
to modify the distinction between prudent statesmanship and technical
reasoning as he moves from the formation of a gentlemanly character
in the Ethics to the frequent need in wider political practice for more
direct and coercive modes of habituation.
Let us return to the passage in the Politics from which this excursus
began (1260a10–20). If the ruler in the “absolute” sense, who rules
according to “reason” and “complete moral virtue,” is to pattern his
rule on that of the master-craftsman, then it would seem that politics
ought indeed to be organized according to the ranked division of labor.
For this is the master-craftsman’s way of organizing the household.
In Book 2, we learn that Aristotle interprets Plato’s Republic – the
city, as the Platonic Socrates put it, “according to reason” (Republic
369a) – as functioning according to just such a division of labor. In this
context, Aristotle observes that just as it is more productive for shoe-
makers always to do the same job rather than rotating their jobs for
others, so would it be “better” if the rulers of the political community
were “always . . . the same” (1261a30–1261b10). When consulting the
criterion of the good, in other words (beltion [better] being the compar-
ative of agathos [good]), Aristotle seems to be at one with Plato on the
best form of rule. Where that is not possible because “all are naturally

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equal,” he continues, the members of the community should rule and

be ruled in turn.
Yet even if the ranked division of labor between ruling and ruled
were possible, it is difficult to reconcile Aristotle’s approval of it in
the context just cited with the main drift of his arguments in favor of
shared participation in ruling. The way to make sense of this, however,
is to keep before us the fundamental distinction he makes between
political and nonpolitical associations. The Republic, Aristotle argues, is
so unified owing to its hierarchy of labor that it is like a single household
rather than a city. For the nature of the city is differentiation. Diverse
contributions, selfish interests, and conflicting opinions about justice
comprise its fragile unity. According to Aristotle, Socrates’ demand for
the total unity of the city turns it into an oikos, a household ruled by
its “owner,” the philosopher-king. The polis is entirely swallowed by
the “economy.” Perfect unity, Aristotle maintains, is not appropriate
for the plural, composite nature of the city. The more the city tends
toward complete unity, the more it moves in the direction of household
management and royal rule with its architectonic division of labor.
Human nature is a composite of intellect and appetite. These can be
well arranged but not made unitary, nor can classes be sorted out on
the basis of only one character trait or the other (as Plato does with the
Guardians and Auxiliaries). The division of labor is not practicable in
political communities, where freezing the ruling element permanently
in place will cause “outrage,” especially among the spirited Achillean
kind of men whom the Republic is meant most particularly to assuage
(1264b6–10).
This outrage is precisely what does lead in the Republic itself to the
overthrow of the Guardians by the honor-loving Auxiliaries, a revolu-
tion which, as we discussed in the last chapter, might just as plausi-
bly take the form of an individual tyrant coming to power as a timo-
cratic class. As we will see in the next chapter, something roughly akin
to this happens in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, where the young
Cyrus leads a revolution of the other young aristocrats of military age
in the Persian Republic (a self-governing regime partly patterned on
Platonic prescriptions) against the gerontocracy that rules the repub-
lic and its unchanging laws and institutions, including its avoidance
of foreign conflict as a source of internal disorder through overween-
ing military ambition and its concentration on purely inward-looking

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self-government. In one of his many interesting variations on Plato

and Aristotle, whereas Plato believes wisdom should rule and Aristotle
believes this will be intolerable to the nonphilosophic honor-loving cit-
izenry, Xenophon’s Cyrus is motivated by his love of honor to lead a
revolution of the honor-loving citizenry issuing in a world-state based
on the Xenophontic Socrates’ art of oikonomia.
To return to Aristotle: the division of labor, as Aristotle concedes in
Book 2, is natural to the arts. No rotation is needed because each artisan
is an expert and is assigned his most efficient place. In cities, however,
offices must rotate because citizens are equal, or if not entirely equal,
sufficiently on a level with each other so as to not need to be ruled over
permanently (1261a30–1261b10). In this connection, we might recall
from Book 1 Aristotle’s argument that nature will provide sufficiently
sound human material for statesmanship from the outset. There as well,
Aristotle criticizes Socrates for having held virtue to be the same in every
soul, differing only in the amount of it that each soul possesses. Instead,
Aristotle continues, different kinds of virtue are distributed in varying
degrees among men, women, and children, depending on which virtue,
and how much of it, is needed for their tasks as slaves, servants, family
members, or citizens – tasks that will vary further with the particular
kind of constitution under which they live (1260a–b). Aristotle here and
elsewhere speaks of “absolute” or “whole” virtue, but by this he means
something very different from the prospect that, as in the Symposium,
for example, eros might lead us on a continuous ascent from family life
through civic virtue toward the highest good, contemplative virtue, of
which the lower rungs are but approximations, with a single passion
acting as the soul’s leader. Instead, in keeping with what Aristotle takes
to be the composite character of the soul, the wholeness of virtue comes
from the harmonious actualization of its respective parts. Prudence,
the highest of the active virtues, actualizes and brings to completion
the other virtues of character like greatness of soul and magnificence,
which, nevertheless, are self-sufficient and noble in their own right. For
Aristotle, although it is doubtless better to climb all the way to the top
of the ladder ascending from family life to civic virtue to contemplation,
you can stop off on one of the lower rungs and still be entitled to be
regarded (and regard yourself) as virtuous. Man’s fulfillment of his telos
as the member of a political community is without qualification noble
and even “godlike” in itself (Nicomachean Ethics 1094a19–b12).

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Let us sum up the results so far of this analysis of Aristotle’s dis-

tinction between political and monarchical rule. Aristotle argues that,
although there is such a thing as a good form of household rule, it is not
a city, and that although there is such a thing as the rule of the “best
man” employing “superlative virtue,” it need not assimilate the lesser
and diverse varieties of virtue which make the city go.8 Thus, while the
prudent ruler may indeed be the ruler in the “absolute” sense, reason
need not assert its claim to rule where nature has supplied people of
sufficient, diverse virtues to govern themselves. Where human nature is
not deficient, the “architectonic” rule of reason would be unnecessarily
and unjustly coercive. Even where human nature were so deficient as
to require this kind of rule, however, it would still be unpolitical rule,
destructive of the city and citizenship. With these arguments in mind,
we can now consider how Aristotle treats the claim of superlative virtue
to monarchical authority when it presents itself among the other claims
to authority that contend in actual political life. What happens, in
other words, when the man of “superlative virtue” rears his head in the
midst of the community of shared rule and strides forward to claim his
place?

a godlike man in the city?

The claim of the “best man” to supreme authority is taken up in the
midst of a discussion of the meaning of justice in political argument.
According to Book 3 of the Politics, justice is equal treatment for people
in those respects in which they are equal, and unequal treatment in those
respects in which they are unequal. Yet while there is widespread agree-
ment on the comparative value of things, there is serious disagreement
over who really deserves which things. Our own interests are inextri-
cably involved when we argue about what constitutes just treatment.
Hence, for example, partisans of oligarchy mistake their superiority in
wealth for superiority in all contributions to the political community.
The partisans of democracy mistake their equality in free birth for the

8 On the difficulties of reconciling the civic friendship that ought to take place among
citizens with the conflicting claims to rule made in political deliberation, as well as the
difficulties of reconciling civic friendship with the higher claims of friendship per se, best
actualized through philosophic friendship, see the fine study by Lorraine Pangle (2000).

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equality of human beings in every respect. Thus, Aristotle says, “all

adhere to a kind of justice, but they only proceed so far, and do not
discuss the whole of justice” (1280a5–15). The decision about the mean-
ing of justice, commonly a blend of the contending party’s self-interest
and a “part” of justice, generates the distinctions among constitutions.
Roughly but not intolerably imprecisely put, Aristotle’s approach to
political argument is a blend of Marx and Kant.9
In Book 3, however, Aristotle raises doubts about the adequacy of
his own sixfold classification of constitutions. In effect, he asks: Is not
even this variety of possible decisions about how to constitute the polit-
ical community too limiting of the possible meanings of equality and
inequality, each one too exclusive and narrowly based within itself?
Does not each of these regime principles, even the good ones, contain an
element of tyranny? For there are other qualities (for instance, ancestry
and family background) that contribute to the city’s survival and pur-
suit of the good life besides those contained in the six principles. How,
then, can we judge precisely a person’s equality or inequality in com-
parison with other people so as to know who is entitled to “offices”?
Distinguishing equality from inequality in a politically relevant way,
it transpires, is a problem for which we need “political philosophy”
(1282b).
Aristotle offers an illustration of the problem (1282b20–1283a30).
Some would argue that if people are equal in other respects, any remain-
ing superiority will suffice to justify the unequal distribution of offices.
To this, he responds that not all forms of superiority justify superior
political authority. Using an analogy, Aristotle argues that a superior
pipe player will always deserve the best pipes. This will be the case even
where another person is superior to the pipe player in birth or good
looks in a greater proportion than the pipe player is superior to that
other person in pipe playing, and even supposing looks and birth to
be greater goods than pipe playing. In other words, the diverse contri-
butions that people make to the city are not commensurable.10 They

9 See the detailed and probing exegesis of Aristotle with respect to economics and redis-
tributive justice by Balot (2001).
10 In Book 4, where the most inclusive constitution, polity, is discussed in detail, Aristotle
observes that not only are there many claims to virtue, but they may coexist in the same
people, making it even more difficult to decide precisely who is equal and unequal in
a politically relevant way: “the same people (may be) soldiers, farmers and artisans, as

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cannot be super-added to arrive at a ranked hierarchy of who deserves

what. This is in keeping with Aristotle’s criticism, earlier noted, of the
Socratic argument for the unity of virtue – the notion that virtue is the
same for all people, varying only by the amount each person possesses.
If this were the case, it would be possible to conclude that the sec-
ond man was more entitled to the best pipes than the best pipe player,
because his superior birth and looks added up to more “superiority”
than the pipe player’s musical talent.
Of course, in another sense, the analogy does point toward the unity
of virtue and monarchical rule. For even though the contributions of
different types of people cannot be added up into one overriding claim
to rule, apparently one person could possess enough virtue to make this
claim from the outset. After all, the best pipe player does unambigu-
ously deserve the best pipes. Earlier in Book 3, as we observed, Aristotle
makes this point more explicitly by comparing the relationship between
an outstandingly virtuous ruler and his subjects to that between a pipe
player and his pipes (1277b25–30). Here, though, the drift of the argu-
ment is toward inclusiveness. Hence, returning from the analogy to the
problem of justly distributing political authority, Aristotle concludes
that the well born, the free, the wealthy, the educated, and the virtuous –
taken together, in combinations of two or more, or separately – can-
not claim all political honors and influence, although they are certainly
entitled to a share of them.
The specific mention of “education and virtue,” the concomitants of
aristocracy (1283a35–1288b), makes it clear that Aristotle is not just
speaking of virtue in the relative sense of the many talents which keep
the city going. While allowing that education and virtue have the “most
just” claim to political authority, he maintains that even these do not
deserve “inequality in all” (1283a20–25). It therefore transpires that
“all such constitutions,” including aristocracy, are “deviant” because
in each case the ruling part mistakes superiority in one quality for
superiority in all. We are not surprised to learn this about the regimes
previously described as deviant because they do not rule for the common
good but only for the ruling part’s advantage. It is surprising, however,

well as councillors and judges, and indeed everyone thinks they are capable of holding
most of the offices” (1291b1–10).

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to learn that virtue itself can push its claim to authority too far – that
virtue can be “overbearing,” even tyrannical, in its claims.11
But this is just what Aristotle means, and his reason for it is “politi-
cal” in the sense discussed earlier. Here we should bear in mind that the
most inclusive of the correct constitutions – most conveniently trans-
lated as “polity” – is both specifically distinguished from rule accord-
ing to virtue (aristocracy) and given as its own particular name the
name common to all six principles of rule (politeia – “constitution,”
1279a35–1279b). Although it is the least virtuous of the correct con-
stitutions, polity is evidently closer to what Aristotle takes to be the
practical aim of “constitutional” government as such – the inclusion
within the political community of as many diverse and conflicting inter-
ests and abilities as possible.12 For a city that excludes too many people
from rule will be “full of enemies,” and hence unstable, making both
mere life and the good life impossible to sustain (1281v25–35). The
derogation in this context of the politics of virtue in favor of the “con-
stitutional” politics of inclusiveness helps to explain Aristotle’s remark
that we have to consider what will happen when all six claims to rule
“are present in one city.” This appears to mean that the sixfold schema,
although useful as a heuristic device, is too abstract; that there will sel-
dom if ever be a precise fit between real cities and the six principles of
rule. Cities as we observe them in practice are more likely to be a kind
of political cauldron in which all the claims are contending for power at
once. Even in cities that do fit closely to one of the classifications, other
claims are seething beneath the surface, waiting for their opportunity.
Far from being able to stabilize the political community, therefore, each
of the constitutions (with the probable exception of polity) is likely to
be felt as a tyrannical imposition by those whom it excludes. Aristotle
underscores this deficiency by arguing that, pushed to its extreme, each

11 As Newman notes, the problem cannot be solved by assuming that “all such constitu-
tions” refers only to tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy or to ones in which authority
is claimed on the basis of something other than virtue. Aristotle is clearly referring to
the correct regimes as well as the deviant ones. Newman in Aristotle (1950) vol. 3
pp. xxii–xxiii.
12 Polity is the most inclusive and stable of constitutions because it blends the principles
of democracy and oligarchy that, between them, include the most people and are the
source of the most explosive and prevalent conflict: rich versus poor. Consider Clark
(1975) pp. 104–105; Randall (1968) pp. 263–264.

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principle of rule, as it were, self-destructs, ruining the self-interest and

authority of its very claimants, necessitating a more inclusive approach
to power sharing. Thus, the oligarchs, in order to live up to their own
principle, must give way to the one or few richest in their midst or to
the common people if they are collectively richer than the oligarchy.
Those claiming to be equal by free birth will have to yield to the freest-
born by background and ancestry. Those who claim to rule through
virtue will have to yield to the one or few most virtuous in their midst
(1283b5–1284a).
Up to this point, Aristotle’s argument seems strongly to favor a
broad definition of contributions to the city and a broad claim to public
authority. In a rather abrupt shift, however, he goes on to argue that
there may be “one” whose virtue is so outstandingly superior to all
other virtues as to make him a “god” among “human beings,” and
who cannot even be considered “a part of the city” (12841–15). The
sudden transition to this godlike ruler is in keeping with the preceding
discussion of the self-shattering of the other regime types, which might
appear to deny anyone this supreme status, if one bears in mind that
Aristotle’s denial of supremacy to any one virtue, and the overall dero-
gation of virtue in favor of “constitutional” rule, was made squarely
within a “political” context as that term was discussed earlier. The point
here, by contrast, is that the man of “superlative virtue” is literally not
political, not “a part of the city.” Here, then, we are getting the other
conclusion from the pipe player analogy that Aristotle did not draw
when stressing the limited claims of various kinds of virtue to order the
political community. Although the diverse contributions in any given
political community cannot be ranked so as to establish an entitlement
to exclusive authority, some rare individuals possess a degree of virtue
so overwhelming that it cannot be included within this balancing and
blending of claims in the first place. This is the “best man” with that
rare kind of prudence that sets him apart from the rest.
Although Aristotle recognizes the force of this claim to rule, we
should note that he does not present superlative virtue as an exclusively
or self-evidently beneficent quality from the perspective of the political
community. Superlative virtue certainly can be taken to mean rule in
the “absolute” sense, rule according to reason by one who possesses
complete moral virtue, but even a reasonable or prudent ruler, Aristotle
implies here, could be partly motivated by an ambition for honor and

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perhaps even by desire, appearing to his subjects like a predatory lion

among the hares. We recall that the exemplars of prudence offered in
Book 3 and in the Nicomachean Ethics (Hercules, Jason, and Pericles)
were men scarcely devoid of grand ambition and accustomed to hav-
ing things done their way. They are easily classifiable within the tribe
of what the Athenian Stranger termed those with an erotic longing
for the city. Whether purely benevolent or willing to rule benevolently
in exchange for certain advantages, such a ruler will in any case be
hard for the “equals” making up a political community to bear, just
as the Argonauts found Hercules too heavy for their ship to stay afloat
(1284a15–25). For precisely the reason that Aristotle abandons the Pla-
tonic Socrates’ argument that, in principle, prudent statesmanship could
be directly derived from philosophical moderation, his “best man” is
not a philosopher or even the philosophical governor advising the young
tyrant envisioned in Book 4 of the Laws, but a man whose chief drive
is for supreme honor through a life of great action.
The questionable desirability of superlative virtue from the perspec-
tive of the political community – the question of whether such a ruler’s
talents and beneficence could ever outweigh the overbearing quality of
his authority – is emphasized by Aristotle’s initial discussion of it in the
context of ostracism. In Aristotle’s presentation, ostracism is a typically
democratic practice because the claim of superlative virtue to abso-
lute authority exists in a starker contradiction with democracy, whose
principle is absolute equality, than with any other regime. However,
the question of how to accommodate such a claim is a problem for
all regimes, according to Aristotle, the correct as well as the deviant.
Ostracism is in fact analogous to the practice of tyrants in “lopping
off,” like the tallest blades of grass, the leading citizens who might
rival them. Despite his usually strong condemnation of tyranny, in this
connection Aristotle does not consider the critics of tyranny to be “abso-
lutely correct” (1284a25–40). For the other regimes – “even the correct
ones” – must likewise lop off the outstandingly virtuous. (One is put
in mind of how Alcibiades was driven into exile by the democracy of
Athens, despite, according to Thucydides, his faultless conduct of the
Sicilian expedition.)13 Once again, any partial embodiment of justice
in a regime principle contains an element of coercion and exclusion.

13 Consider the discussion in Newell (2009) part 3.

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In this sense, he implies, all regimes contain an element of tyranny,

including an uncompromising suppression of the best title to rule, and
in this they are adhering to “a certain political justice,” although not to
“absolute justice.” The community as political community, as a differ-
entiated unity, cannot tolerate the unified authority of the “best man”
except at the price of its own being – any more than a painter can allow
one part of his painting to be disproportionately large, or a chorus-
master can allow a performer whose voice is “nobler and more power-
ful” than all the rest (1284b1–30).
However, when the constitution’s own principle of rule is “the best,”
there appears to be an insurmountable problem in principle. For neither
the deviant constitutions (which are nakedly based on the rulers’ self-
interest) nor polity (which aims at a blend of diverse interests and
contributions) espouse virtue as their exclusive and undiluted claim to
authority. Yet how can an aristocracy consistently reject the rule of one
who is “surpassingly virtuous”? For it to do this, Aristotle argues, would
be like “claiming to rule over Zeus.” In an important qualification of his
claim in Book 1 that statesmen need not “make” human beings because
nature will provide sufficient numbers of them capable of governing
themselves, Aristotle now adds that superlative virtue and its claim to
authority also flow from nature (1284b20–35). In the case of this one
constitution (that is, aristocracy) one-man rule over-rides “political”
rule strictly in keeping with a correct principle of “political” rule itself.
In other words, the aristocrats’ claim to authority over the political
community lays bare, in an especially revealing way, the inability of
“political justice” altogether to live up to the requirements of “absolute
justice.” Thus, while allowing that other constitutions may need to
ostracize individuals of superlative virtue, Aristotle depicts the claims
of the “best man” as being particularly embarrassing for an aristocracy.
Within the sixfold classification, aristocracy is a peculiar sort of halfway
house between the deservingness of superlative virtue and the necessity
for inclusiveness. On the one hand, aristocracy is likely to exclude too
many people in comparison with polity. On the other hand, because
aristocracy recognizes virtue as the only claim to rule, its failure to
embody the highest degree of virtue is more glaringly unjust than in the
case of constitutions which judge people’s contributions and interests
less rigorously and with a greater view to stability. Thus, Aristotle
concludes in what sounds almost like a quotation from Plato’ Republic

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(473d), “it remains for all to obey such a man gladly, so that men of
this sort are kings in the cities forever.”

monarchy, reason, and nature

The discussion of monarchy that completes Book 3 is a recapitulation
of the problem of how to reconcile competing claims for authority –
how to judge between the equal and the unequal – in light of the admit-
ted possibility of superlative virtue. Aristotle’s presentation of virtuous
monarchy as a regime principle recalls his discussion in Book 1 of rule in
the “absolute” sense, the “architectonic” rule of reason. For this monar-
chy of the “best man” is a form of household management (1285b20–
1286a). Moreover, alone of the correct constitutions, monarchy is in
principle lawless because knowledge always trumps convention or law
and because its ruler “acts in all things according to his own will”
(1287a1–10, 1287a30–40; Plato Statesman 292b–303c).
In presenting the case here for a regime that is beneficent but law-
less, Aristotle rather sharply qualifies his earlier-stated preference in
Book 2 for law over innovation. Stable laws, he there argues, are
the element of any regime hoping to promote virtue. Yet, Aristotle
concedes, many laws and conventions are silly or outmoded, whereas
improvements in the arts, such as medicine, have tangibly improved
the human condition. People naturally want the good, and prefer it
to convention if the two conflict. Mankind has evolved since its most
primitive beginnings in large part because of technical progress. In ear-
liest times, Aristotle observes, the entire human race was like the most
foolish individuals are today. Laws have to change, and statesmanship
must admit the possibility of progress. No set of laws can anticipate
everything – room must be left for modification. However, not imple-
menting a reform, especially if it is not momentous and clearly needed
(the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule), may well be preferable to
encouraging people to habitually question the law in their addiction to
innovation (1268b22–1269a29). Lawfulness requires habit, so there is
no easy harmony between law and technical advancement or between
political community and oikonomia. It must wait for modern thinkers
like Hegel to argue that human community and technique progress
harmoniously together. For Aristotle, they remain in a permanent
tension.

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Having earlier cautioned against technical innovation in favor of the

stability of law, Aristotle now, when turning to monarchy, concedes the
full weight of the opposite argument, also made in Plato’s Statesman
(which he had criticized by implication in the first lines of the Politics
for conflating royal rule with all other kinds), that the monarch strictly
speaking must rule without the constraints of law because he possesses
knowledge. It is an emphatically “unpolitical” form of rule, that is,
incompatible with any notion of civic community. Because the view of
justice it embodies – the outstanding merit of one person – can in no
way be shared or participated in by the members of a local commu-
nity, it is also universalistic in principle and so capable of swallowing
up whole cities and “nations,” a passage often linked with Aristotle’s
semilegendary tutorship of Alexander the Great but that could as read-
ily apply, as we will see in the next chapter, to Xenophon’s Cyrus the
Great.
Aristotle proceeds to raise some possible objections to virtuous
monarchy from the “constitutional” perspective on the city as an asso-
ciation “composed of many (people)” (1286a25–35). Thus, he suggests
that the “multitude,” by pooling its judgments, may frequently be a bet-
ter judge of public affairs than the expert, in the sense that a banquet
provided by many hands will be superior to one provided by a single
individual. Whereas one man – even, apparently, a virtuous ruler – can
be corrupted by “anger” or some “other such passion,” it is more diffi-
cult for everyone in a crowd to be led astray at once. If the “majority” –
relative to the monarch – are actually of “sound soul,” that is to say, an
aristocracy, then they will resist the tendency of a “multitude” to split
into factions and will therefore be altogether preferable to the rule of
one (1286a35–1286b10).
Some would argue, moreover, that it is simply “against nature” that
one man should rule because the city is composed of equals. Thus,
a community where law rules and offices are rotated is preferable to
monarchy. For although man is a political animal possessing reason
(1253a1–10), he is an animal nonetheless, and to allow even the “best
man” absolute power unconstrained by law may offer too much temp-
tation to the “wild beast” (therion) within him of desire and spirit-
edness (thumos; 1287a25–40). Thus, we are reminded again that – at
least from the perspective of the political community – the “best man”
may mix his benevolent expertise with the leonine qualities of a lord

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and master. We might add that the potentially overweening thumotic

qualities of the genius-statesman are all the more evident given Aristo-
tle’s unwillingness to concede Socrates’ argument that the philosophic
life is ultimately the source of the moderation needed in statesmen, if
only through the intermediary of civic education. By allowing politi-
cal ambition its freedom from contemplative virtue, Aristotle also risks
unleashing its innate aggressiveness, although to nothing like the degree
explored by Xenophon in the Education of Cyrus, let alone Machiavelli.
The rule of law, by contrast (he goes on), is like intelligence devoid of
such passions. Moreover, although experts admittedly must sometimes
override the law (just as a doctor must sometimes depart from pre-
scribed treatment), expertise can be used for unjust ends (just as a
doctor knows best how to kill a fit patient). Thus, the rule of law is
on the whole preferable to the rule of an expert, a “mean” between
(apparently) absolute monarchy and the spontaneous impulses of the
multitude (1287a40–1287b).
Still, it is important to note that these are not so much Aristotle’s own
arguments as hypothetical objections presented for our consideration.
He concludes by stating that, when men are equal, monarchy is neither
just nor advantageous, even if the monarch is (relatively) “superior in
virtue” – “except in a certain case.” This is the case, as at the outset, of
the man of “superlative” virtue who should not rule “in alternation”
like citizens but “absolutely.” For, having rehearsed the objections,
Aristotle does not find them sufficient. Although an absolute monarch
should not rule over equals, if he is “outstandingly” unequal, they are
plainly no longer (even relatively) equal (1288a1–30).
Aristotle brings us full circle to the problem of distinguishing equal-
ity from inequality and argues, somewhat startlingly, that this problem
is solved by the claim of superlative virtue to monarchical authority.
We are reminded that all the other constitutions, including aristoc-
racy, make claims to authority based on different kinds of inequality.
However, although they all urge the justice of these claims, only monar-
chy meets the requirements of “the whole of justice,” of justice in the
“absolute” sense. Whereas the partiality and exclusiveness of the other
claims led Aristotle earlier to back away from the sixfold classification
and to stress the need to blend as many competing claims as possible,
in the case of superlative virtue, he appears to regard the equal and
the unequal as reconcilable through the rule of the one best man. This

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claim is commensurable with all the others if only in the negative sense
that all the other claims are incommensurable with it. However, this
kind of monarchy, based on the principle of household management, is,
in accordance with the distinctions between kinds of rule made at the
beginning of the Politics, unpolitical. The one constitution that meets
the requirements of justice is not itself a political community. Thus,
although we are reminded in conclusion that to ostracize such a man
would never be in accordance with “absolute justice,” we remember
that it is in a sense “politically just” to do just that.

Although Aristotle continues to include monarchical rule among the

possible meanings of aristocracy (the “rule of the best”), throughout
the rest of the Politics aristocracy has mainly the meaning of a political
community of the virtuous (1289a26–38, 1293a35–1293b7, 1294a9–
29). In Books 7 and 8, where the “best constitution” is prescribed in
detail, it has exclusively this meaning. On the basis of the preceding
analysis, several reasons can be suggested for this ambiguity. First of
all, aristocracy in the latter sense, although extremely rare, is in Aris-
totle’s view relatively closer to practical possibilities, and thus more
easily emulated, than the rule of a “godlike” monarch. Oligarchies,
for instance, can sometimes qualify as “loose” aristocracies, a blend of
wealth and virtue (1249a9–29). Polity, the correct regime that Aristotle
believes has the best chance of setting a standard for actual practice, can
encourage the awarding of offices on the basis of virtue, the aristocratic
principle of distribution (1294a35–1294b14).
The other reason for Aristotle’s equivocal definition of aristocracy
(mostly as a republic, occasionally as a monarchy), I would suggest, lies
in the danger that he believes is posed to public life by the advance-
ment of a merely presumptive claim to superlative virtue. As we saw
in Book 1, Aristotle cautions against perverting the proper use of the
household or monarchical form of rule into a tyrannical exploitation of
the city. In real life, Aristotle later remarks, most people are not even
aware of the distinction between monarchy and tyranny but tend to
identify all government with “mastery” – the exploitation of the ruled
by the ruler (1324b22–41).14 Thus, the claim to possess superior virtue
could be used as a powerful rhetorical camouflage by those who aim at

14 See the discussion in Lord (1982) pp. 190–191.

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tyranny – the thin edge of the wedge for Hobbes’s critique of Aristo-
tle. As Aristotle concedes, even someone who really does possess the
knowledge to govern may also be prone to a desire for a monopoly on
all honor, excessive anger, and an intolerance for even a reasonable and
well-intentioned airing of views by others.
In this respect, we might defend the Platonic Socrates against Aris-
totle’s critique of him for conflating sophia with phronesis as follows:
the philosopher-king, at least in principle, removes the danger of an
excessively honor-seeking and anger-prone statesman of genius of the
kind explored by Aristotle, because those dangerous passions would be
absorbed by the eros for wisdom. So perhaps it was not so unreason-
able after all to hold the criterion for the proper exercise of the art of
ruling to such a high standard that even the genius-statesman (but also
imperialist) Pericles did not qualify, as Socrates argued in the Gorgias.
But, in defense of Aristotle, we might observe in turn that Plato, when
he has his Athenian Stranger entertain the possibility that just such a
genius-statesman, a young tyrant with an eros for the city, might found
a just regime, is so sensitive to the danger that this tyrant’s claim to serve
justice might only be putative, or might be mixed with a desire for limit-
less honor, or end up not being reined in by a philosophic advisor, as to
abandon the prospect after only a few pages and treat the just founding
as the object of a prayer. Given that danger, Aristotle might say, why
not cooperate with the ambition for supreme honor on its own terms,
appealing to the gentleman’s own innate preference for virtuous over
disgraceful conduct and sidelining the need for philosophical mentor-
ing? At any rate, while Aristotle arguably defines the phronimos more
realistically than does Plato, both their political philosophies are depen-
dent on the coinciding of supreme political virtue and actual power in
the same leader. As we saw in the last chapter, it is this dependence on
chance, on Fortuna, as Machiavelli will put it, that takes us to the heart
of Machiavelli’s critique of the classical orientation.
In this light, we can see Hobbes as arguing that Aristotle did not
go nearly far enough in his warning that a prospective ruler claim-
ing to possess superlative prudence could turn out to be a would-be
tyrant in disguise. Hobbes’s solution, ingeniously, is to dispense with
the distinction between superlative virtue and tyranny altogether while
maximizing the total authority of the “sovereign,” now liberated from
the opprobrious comparison to a tyrant. For Hobbes, admitting even

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the possibility of superlative virtue promotes political instability. For

the presumptive claim, once admitted as a possibility, is always open to
recognition and acceptance, meaning that the “vainglorious” (enflamed
by their reading of Aristotle and the other ancients who flatter them
into supposing themselves great men) have a convenient pretext for
their ambition. The solution to the threat to civil order posed by these
would-be tyrants camouflaged as men of superlative virtue is to con-
script one of their number, suitably disabused of the misunderstanding
of his own motivation as some kind of eros for an immortal reputation
for nobility and justice, to crush the others.
Hobbes’s presentation of the state of nature is meant to convince us
that no claim to superior virtue can outweigh our fundamental equality
in vulnerability to violent death. Paradoxically, this argument for a low
egalitarianism ends up entailing a sovereign with powers far outstrip-
ping any that Aristotle would have attributed to virtuous monarchy.
For Hobbes, even fear of violent death at the whim of the Sovereign, let
alone resentment at his failure to recognize merit or rule beneficently,
is preferable to a state of open contention for power based on com-
peting claims to virtue, the war of all against all that maximizes each
individual’s peril. If the protection of life, rather than the possession of
virtue, is the only admissible claim to absolute authority, the result is
a Sovereign who cannot, in practice or principle, be distinguished from
a tyrant. Hobbes’s frontal and parodistic assault in the Leviathan on
Aristotle’s argument for virtuous monarchy, which we return to in the
Conclusion, flows from his own adaptation of Machiavelli’s view that
man can stand outside of nature and reconstruct it through an act of
will, presupposing a view of nature as purposeless motion grounded
in the physics of Bacon, who in turn acknowledged the inspiration
of Machiavelli’s teaching about virtue and fortune. Viewed from this
perspective, Aristotle’s tortuous ambiguities about superlative virtue
vis-à-vis the political community are replaced by the application of the
correct method for the maximization of power, such that, as Machi-
avelli puts it in The Prince, a ruler can be the source of his own prudence
without recourse to such ambiguous and convoluted philosophical
guidance.
For the very reasons that Aristotle is willing to mute the claim of
superlative virtue, it might be asked whether we cannot push Aristotle
further in this direction by abandoning his concern with superlative

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virtue while exclusively retaining his endorsement of political comm-

unity. This is the brunt of the communitarian reading undertaken
by Arendt, Gadamer, and Beiner, among others. (I examine Arendt’s
momentarily.) However, a conception of political community that
excluded superlative virtue, whatever the merits of that conception
might be, would not be an Aristotelian conception of political commu-
nity. This is because Aristotle’s understanding of politics, while trying
to give inclusiveness and diversity their fair weight, is inegalitarian in
principle. According to Aristotle, man fulfills his nature in political life
by pursuing virtue. What Aristotle means by virtue, as we have seen,
is on a kind of sliding scale between monarchy and slavery. Between
these extremes of excellence and helplessness, the degree of virtue to be
expected from people will vary with the circumstances. The “constitu-
tional” politics of inclusiveness, and even an aristocratic community,
require only a degree of virtue as close to the monarchical end of the
scale as the differentiated unity of the city can withstand. The fact that
“constitutional” virtue does not measure up to the monarchical stan-
dard – the fact that citizens, for example, may only be able to understand
prudent judgments while not being able to make them for themselves –
does not rob it of its relative worth in Aristotle’s eyes. However, such
worth as it has derives from its ranking in comparison with that higher
standard. Thus, although Aristotle is tolerant of the looser approxi-
mations of virtue achieved by most political communities, he cannot
embrace the notion that there is no higher order of virtue in principle
than that of which every human being is capable. He does not regard
prudence, for example, as the faculty of man qua man but only of the
rarest statesmen. Aristotle’s endorsement of political community cannot
be severed from his concern with superlative virtue because superlative
virtue is the absolute standard from which the relative worth of political
community is derived.
For Aristotle, both the political community and monarchical rule are
sanctioned by nature. That is, both shared participation in ruling and
the exclusive rule of one are natural. The reasoning behind this under-
standing of the nature of political life is supplied by Aristotle’s Physics,
where nature is understood both in terms of spontaneous self-movement
and as being analogous to the rational precision by which an artisan
produces things. In other words, natural phenomena are a mixture of
the spontaneous and the rationally constructed. Nature is characterized

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not only by self-movement but by techne and poiesis. Extending this

understanding of nature to political life, the natural realm of politics is
accordingly a mixture of the self-government of political communities
and the skills of monarchical statecraft through which prudent rulers
“make people better.” I have suggested how Aristotle, in contrast to
Plato, resists the assimilation of political community to monarchical
rule. But although Aristotle’s argument cannot be driven to a purely
monarchical outcome, it cannot be driven to a purely communitarian
outcome either, because his conception of the naturalness of politics
requires a mixture of the spontaneous and the technical dimensions
(Physics 193a5–193b20).
Aristotle rejects the pre-Socratic understanding of nature as pure
spontaneity or chance becoming because it cannot account for the
forms and purposes of visible beings. Aristotle’s discussion of nature
tries to take account of both the rational causality typified by pro-
duction (poiesis) according to art (techne) and the self-movement of
living beings. He believes that a full account of nature must embrace
both aspects. The danger of separating them, according to Aristotle,
is illustrated by Sophists like Antiphon, who believe that nature (in
keeping with our discussion of the pre-Socratics in the last chapter) is
to be understood as the generative origin of visible beings. As Aris-
totle relates it, Antiphon illustrates the power and primacy of this
invisible substratum over the visible forms it generates by depicting
a bed left out of doors being overgrown by roots and ferns, back
into which it slowly dissolves. The illustration suggests that nature as
origination produces phenomena like artisans produce artifacts. Both
products are equally conventional, a form stamped temporarily on the
flux of becoming. Nature creates these forms like an artisan but also
reabsorbs them into the flux, whence new forms temporarily emerge.
The underlying irrationality of nature as becoming, extended to pol-
itics, encourages us to view statesmanship as the equally temporary
stamping of conventional forms on the underlying instability of natural
life.
Aristotle, by contrast, maintains that nature reveals itself in a way
that is analogous to the arts but not quite so precisely as the stages of
productive technique (Physics 199a10–20). For this reason, it is easier to
envision the four causes (efficient, material, formal, and final) as being
operative in, for example, carpentry, than in the growth of a flower.

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In strictly natural growth, efficient cause is harder to separate out,

and formal and final cause are harder to distinguish from each other.
Moreover, whereas art has a perhaps limitless freedom to create new
forms of production, nature is somehow held back from doing so. His
riposte to Antiphon’s bed being overgrown and reclaimed by the earth
is that trees do not transmute into entirely new flora or into animals
but recur permanently as trees; nor does a bed ever grow back from
the earth. Nature, in other words, is not reducible to sheer becoming
but is a blend of rest and motion, of body and form. So Aristotle resists
the pre-Socratics’ ontology of origination while at the same time he
resists the opposite extreme of making nature synonymous with the
rationally constructed. This latter point is perhaps less obvious because
of the influence of Christian Aristotelians led by Thomas Aquinas, who,
in Aristotle’s name but in a fundamental distortion of his philosophy,
erroneously assimilates final and formal cause to the efficient cause of
God, the master artificer,15 an assimilation of classical teleology to a
fabricating act of divine will that, as I have earlier suggested, is then
transferred by Machiavelli to the secular prince’s conquest of nature
and by Hobbes to the artificer of the social contract who remedies the
defects of human nature. Although Aristotle likens nature to art in some
respects in order to refute the pre-Socratics’ emphasis on becoming, his
analogy for nature in all respects, as I observed earlier, is that of a
“doctor who heals himself” – an irreducible equipoise of generational
substratum (the patient’s sick body with its potential for health) and
art (the doctor’s medical expertise; [Physics 199b27–35]). Exactly the
same equipoise informs his discussion of the comparative merits of
community and monarchy: nature provides the human material with
a sufficient capacity for virtue, while statecraft assists in its cultivation
and shaping.
Beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes, this Aristotelian equipoise
falls apart. In terms of the Physics, one might say that the Antiphonian
view of nature reemerges – and Antiphon also held a view of the city as
a social contract based on self-interest often invoked as a precursor of
Hobbes. In making this observation, of course, we must bear in mind
the arguments made in Chapter 2 to the effect that modern materialism
is not simply a revival of the pre-Socratics and Sophists, at least in terms

15 Thomas (1963) p. 124.

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of how Plato and Aristotle understood them. For the modern Baconian,
Hobbesian, and Newtonian conception of matter in motion cannot be
precisely mapped with the primordialist ontology of the pre-Socratics
and Sophists, where the “great motions” of nature’s originary upsurges
have the substantive content of a certain view of human excellence and
one’s natural entitlement to rule (the distinction made by the unnamed
pre-Socratics in Book 10 of the Laws, echoed by Callicles, between
what is just and noble by nature and what is just and noble merely by
convention). The pre-Socratics’ ontology also has direct implications
for the city itself as a hale outgrowth of this underlying matrix of
origination (echoed in Gorgias’ endorsement of the somatic virtues of
courage and manly prudence, as against the merely conventional virtues
of justice and moderation), and even for the content of the works of
the poets, led by Homer, whom Socrates regards as the founder of the
other “motion-men,” with his whole rich psychology of manly virtue,
tragic fate, and agonistic nobility.
This whole substantive alternative account of human excellence is
excluded from the modern physics of matter in motion, which reflects
the fact that the material world has already been drained of its sub-
stantive qualities of enchantment, nobility, and glory by Augustinian
Christianity’s reduction of nature to sheer fallen matter. To reiterate
an earlier observation: if there is a close precedent for the physics of
matter in motion among the ancients, it would be the stricter atom-
ism of Lucretius, in which there are no immanent qualities of grandeur
and heroism of the kind I have attributed to the pre-Socratics’ under-
standing of nature, and for whom the visible world is generated by the
sheer, accidental “swerve” of one contentless atom into another. For
Lucretius, the hedonism stemming from his materialistic view of life
meant that a man should cultivate his pleasures in private and avoid
the pain, violence, and stupidity of politics. The genius of liberalism
beginning with Hobbes might be characterized as erecting a new theory
of the just society on the very basis of this individuating ontology of
motion. For Hobbes, nature is now conceived of as a field of forces
whose accidental clashes generate visible phenomena. Human reason
has no immanent connection with nature so conceived; it is a uniquely
human tool whereby man can reconstruct his environment so as to
tame it and secure himself from its treacherous reverses. Precisely the
empty irrationality of nature makes it malleable to the structures that

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man’s will imposes on it. For Hobbesian man as homo faber, to make
something is to know it.16
Liberal political philosophers such as Hobbes upset the Aristotelian
equipoise by reducing the understanding of nature to spontaneous self-
movement alone and asserting man’s capacity, transferred from the
Abrahamic God, to turn against nature so conceived of and reconstruct
this purposeless flux. Rousseau reacts against this purely technical mode
of statecraft by evoking the spontaneous freedom and wholeness of the
natural life, in contrast with the artificiality and alienation brought
about by the modern bourgeois project with its burgeoning economic
and scientific apparatus. This return to nature from civilization is devel-
oped by Hegel and the historical school as the return from the state as an
artificially crafted contract to society as an underlying historical com-
munity. Now nature is seen as developing in history as the immanent
mores, traditions, and contexts of agreement that precede the artificial,
alienating, and atomizing imperatives of the bourgeois era with its social
contract. On the face of it, the return to nature launched by Rousseau
as the search for an individual and communal wholeness from which
we can resist the juggernaut of materialistic modernity bears a general
resemblance to Aristotle’s preference for political community over the
unrestrained productivity of the art of household management, and
serves to recall that dimension of nature that is simply given and self-
renewing and not reducible to mere material for human technique. By
the same token, however, this return bypasses the whole dimension of
Aristotle’s account of nature stressing its resemblance to the causality
most clearly exemplified by poiesis and techne, not only in physics but in
politics. The communitarian reading of Aristotle echoes the Rousseauan
conviction that, were man to be released from the bonds of the state
and the technical reasoning that upholds it, his happiness would be free
to flower. The point, however, is that not only the Hobbesian emphasis
on technique cut adrift from its natural mooring but the Rousseauan
emphasis on spontaneity bereft of rational construction are both dis-
tortions of what Aristotle meant by the naturalness of political life.17

16 Hobbes (1971) pp. 81–82, 115.

17 For attempts to adapt Aristotelianism to a broadened conception of contemporary
community, consider Beiner (1983) pp. xiv–xv, 72–101; Gadamer (1975, 1976, 1983);
Galstone (1980); and MacIntyre (1981). For a bracing dissent, see Yack (1984).

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In Aristotle’s view, although man inclines naturally toward virtue

and cooperation, he does not do so spontaneously or automatically, or
merely through the removal of external constraint. On the contrary,
laws and punishments are required to force recalcitrant people away
from their equivalently powerful inclination toward vice. Education is
also required, promoted by the regime, to further condition a receptive
human nature in the direction of virtue, analogous to how a sculptor
or a gardener both bring out the inner potential of the natural material
they work with. Virtuous statecraft is therefore a kind of “making”
or construction that fulfills human nature’s potential by enabling it to
resist its lower impulses and pursue its higher end. For Aristotle, then,
although politics cannot be assimilated to production and art, neither
are the latter simply alienating and restrictive. Politics are “natural” in
the Aristotelian sense because they are always moving, in response to cir-
cumstances prudently assessed, between the freedom of self-government
and the authority of statesmanship.

arendt on the household and the community

I am arguing in this book that modernity’s emphasis on individualism
and acquisition is not simply the reversal of the classical preference for
community and virtue or a return to the dissident ancient tradition of
Sophistry and materialism, but the regrounding of statecraft in a new
ontology. An example of this misunderstanding is Hannah Arendt’s
well-known argument in The Human Condition in which modernity as
typified by thinkers including Hobbes and Adam Smith is to be seen
as reversing Aristotle’s priority of the polis over the household – of
the community over economic productivity and private life – leading
to the replacement of the political by the social and the conversion of
government into economic management and the promotion of private
property.18 Although unexceptionable in broad outline, and only one
aspect of a book of considerable brilliance, her argument with respect
to Aristotle misses the nuances that go to the heart of what is distinctive
about the new science of politics.
In the first place, Arendt makes too sharp a distinction between the
polis as the source of all communality, deliberation, and civic virtue

18 Arendt (1996) pp. 32–33.

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and the oikos as the sole preserve of economic productivity and private
individualism.19 When Aristotle famously argues that man is by nature
a political animal who fulfills himself through deliberation about the
meaning of the just, the noble and the advantageous, he says that this
teleological activity takes place “in cities and households” (my empha-
sis), a detail often overlooked in the communitarian reading (1257a17–
18). As we earlier observed, only in Aristotle’s first presentation of the
household as one of the archaic and subpolitical associations that go
to make up the fully evolved polis is its role reduced to material and
reproductive necessity. Once the household is considered as a part of
the city, it too is ennobled. In the second presentation, the relationship
between father, mother, and children is based more on deliberation than
on compulsion or the mere assertion of patrimonial authority, and the
virtues of character that the family enshrines and cultivates in children
pass straight on to the role of family members as citizens deliberating
on the common good. To be sure, Aristotle does present the second
version of the family ennobled by its membership in the city as anal-
ogous to a small community that is a blend of the republican and the
monarchical. The husband is to persuade his wife as to the correctness
of his opinions, rather than simply force her obedience, and the same is
true of the relationship between parents and children. In both cases, the
subordinate partners only need to acquire correct opinion, not rigorous
knowledge (1259a37–1260b8). Nevertheless, the husband’s persuasion
of his wife and the parents’ persuasion of their children is an appeal
to their capacity for reasoned assent, not the simple exertion of force.
The family is like a political community in which the offices do not
rotate. However, this patriarchal monarchy of the household, based on
the capacity of women and children to actualize their own potentiality
for virtue, is diametrically opposed to the bad version of household
management that is tantamount to a master’s rule over the household’s
members as if they were mere slaves. The family has its own teleology.
It is not reducible to the realm of mere life – the life of material neces-
sity – as opposed to the good life of the polis unless it is perverted by
being given over to the aim of open-ended productivity and acquisi-
tion, although Aristotle is clear that a modicum of material wealth is

19 Arendt (1996) pp. 12–13, 24–29.

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necessary if citizens are to have the leisure for their two highest ends of
politics and philosophy.
In addition to overlooking the teleology of the oikos, Arendt also
overlooks Aristotle’s argument that oikonomia is not merely a subpo-
litical unit – our private bourgeois or nuclear family – but, more impor-
tant, a regime-level principle whose claim to teleological primacy over
the polis is, as we have seen, no simple matter to displace in unequivocal
favor of the koinonia politike. Finally, in her excessive dichotomization
of the household and the community, Arendt imports into her vision of
the ancient polis a Heideggerian existential stance of “risk.” For Aristo-
tle, however, politics is not about seeking authenticity through making
a resolute stand amidst Being. It is, at its best, a rational conversation
about how to make the proper choices among the ranked ends of the
moral and intellectual virtues. Its primary aim is not community for
its own sake, the prediscursive being-with-one-another-in-the-world of
Heidegger’s existential anthropology of Dasein that he locates in the
archaic, prephilosophic polis. On the contrary: for Aristotle, political
deliberation is inherently controversial, always potentially divisive, and
capable of boiling over from heated argument into violence and insur-
rection. Only gregarious animals like bees (1253a) have the kind of
sheer immanent communality romantically read back into the polis by
Arendt from Heidegger.
Hobbes does indeed, on a massive level, invert Aristotle’s priority
of the city over the household and apply the art of household man-
agement to society through the construction of the social contract and
the leeway that it grants to individual self-enrichment. However, it is
not Aristotle’s art of household management that Hobbes erects – not
even Aristotle’s view of the incorrect art of household management,
which he identifies with the excesses of hedonism and which can cul-
minate in tyranny, either within a city or by a city over other cities.
For Hobbes, by contrast, the art of economic productivity entailed by
a properly constructed social contract has been totally drained of Aris-
totelian teleological content. It is a contentless method, stemming from
the priority of efficient cause over all the other causes, for the imposition
of effectuating will on the purposeless fodder of nature, inherited from
Machiavelli by way of Bacon. As for the virtues Aristotle argues might
first be nurtured in family life, they are fine with Hobbes, but politi-
cally irrelevant, mere private avocations. People may enjoy private life

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and property however they wish in “recompense” for the Sovereign’s

absolute authority,20 as long as they do not presume to be entitled to a
role in public deliberation, the exclusive purview of the Sovereign, the
de-eroticized tyrant who methodically crushes the vainglorious.
Whereas Heidegger and Arendt romanticize “the Greeks” by con-
flating Aristotle’s view of the polis with sheer, spontaneous historical
communality, Hobbes knowingly and deliberately attributes to Aristo-
tle the view that Aristotle explicitly repudiates, that men are gregarious
animals like bees, so as to deny Aristotle’s frank recognition of the dan-
gers of political deliberation boiling over into violent strife and thereby
present him as naive, the better to arrogate to Hobbes’s own political
science the claim of unique insight into man’s natural contentiousness.
Aristotle wants to guide civic deliberation away from violence by the
promotion of reason as the arbiter of debate.21 Hobbes wants to crush
civic deliberation altogether on the grounds that in reality it always leads
to violence, especially when the ambitious can dress up their power seek-
ing in the meretricious garb of Aristotelian claims to superior prudence,
“wit,” and nobility of character.

the global household

Do Aristotle’s reflections on the tension between the monarchical prin-
ciple, including the art of household management, and the political
community resonate with us today? I would argue that the competi-
tion between them first explored by Aristotle has never vanished from
human affairs and lives on unabated or even intensifying in the twenty-
first century. The thinkers and statesmen of liberal democracy at its
inception – including Locke, Montesquieu, and the American founders –
tried to follow Aristotle’s prescription for a “mixed regime” steering a
middle way between the extremes of tyranny and mob rule, although
as we consider at length in Chapter 7, that classical republican pre-
scription was heavily filtrated and transformed through Machiavelli’s
new political science. At the same time, however, the age-old pattern
of patrimonial authority has remained vibrant in many regions of the
world. Its power has been compounded by the nondemocratic version

20 Hobbes (1971) p. 202.

21 I discuss Hobbes’s knowing distortion of Aristotle in detail in the Conclusion.

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of modernization launched by Hobbes, which harnesses Machiavelli’s

call for the conquest of nature to an authoritarian and rationalistic
monarchy that gives its subjects the right to acquire property and pros-
per through commerce in exchange for yielding all political authority
to the Sovereign, in effect a modernizing version of the art of household
management.
Although frequently endangered by war, civil strife, and economic
reversals, the Enlightenment’s best child, liberal democracy, inaugu-
rated by America and spreading throughout North America, the Old
World, and outposts beyond, has endured with impressive success.
Although it did not, strictly speaking, endorse Aristotle’s contention
that economic wealth should be employed wholly for the pursuit of the
highest human excellences (“politics and philosophy”), it did at least
agree that a virtuous character was required both for economic success
and sound democratic politics. In its noblest version, liberal democracy
never viewed the purpose of individual rights as the exclusive and lim-
itless pursuit of property. Instead, our natural freedom as individuals
was viewed as the basis for a number of rights and opportunities includ-
ing religious tolerance, liberal education, political participation, family
life, aesthetic cultivation, and freedom of speech. Property rights were
but one tangible dividend of this underlying emphasis on our natural
liberties as citizens of self-governing communities.
In the postcommunist and globalizing age through which we are
now living, however, the household pattern of authority appears to
have made a roaring comeback at the regime level. Large-scale multi-
national and geographic empires like China and Russia appear to be
employing the art of household management to create enormous cen-
tralized and repressive security regimes “owned” by dictatorial and
oligopolistic elites which at the same time generate open-ended eco-
nomic maximization that in some cases rivals the West. These emerging
world powers are surrounded by a constellation of more or less illiberal,
authoritarian oligarchies in which “sovereign wealth funds” comprise
one of the largest sources of capital in the global economy. The dis-
turbing implication, its final outcome too distant to forecast, is that it
may be possible to combine economic maximization with an illiberal
regime, or, what is saying the same thing, that the connection between
economic prosperity and the civic virtue of free self-governing peoples
may be tenuous, historically fragile, and only one possible combination

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among others.22 Perhaps now more than ever, therefore, Aristotle’s

warning that oikonomia and its hierarchical structure of despotic tech-
nical management might swallow up the political community should
engage our most sober reflection.

22 On this traditional connection, consider Newell (1994) and (2004).

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 IV

tyranny and the

science of ruling in
xenophon’s political
thought
Before properly entering into the complex relationship between Machi-
avelli’s modernism and a certain dimension of Christianity limned in
previous chapters, we need to complete our examination of his rela-
tionship to the classical tradition in its own right by turning to the one
classical thinker and Socratic who perhaps comes closest to anticipat-
ing the modern project launched by Machiavelli. This chapter exam-
ines Xenophon’s lengthy and explicit exploration of the possibility that
the best regime might be that of a monarch possessing what Aristo-
tle terms “superlative virtue,” undertaken through his pseudo-history
of Cyrus the Great.1 Whereas, as we have seen in the previous chap-
ters, this monarchical claim is muted by Plato and Aristotle for the
sake of the political community, Xenophon goes much further than
either of them in jettisoning the claims of republican self-government
in favor of an open endorsement of rational, benevolent absolutism.
Hence, Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus can be regarded as his monar-
chical utopia, a direct riposte (as noted by later Hellenistic, Roman, and
Renaissance commentators) to Plato’s republican utopia, the Republic.2
As I argue, the Education of Cyrus is the full elaboration, in the form of
a utopian historical narrative, of the prescription for reforming tyranny
into “leadership” set forth by Simonides as he is depicted by Xenophon
in the Hiero.

1 For a discussion of Xenophon’s pseudo-historical method, consider Tatum (1989); Bre-

itenbach (1966) pp. 1708–1718; Barker (1951) p. 99; Delebecque (1957) pp. 384–385;
Higgins (1977) p. 44.
2 See Athenaeus Deipnosophists 504F–505A; Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 14.3.2–4. See also
the discussion by J. S. Watson in his “Bibliographical Notice of Xenophon” prefacing his
translation of The Cyropaedia or Institution of Cyrus (1880) p. xvi.

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roads to the education of cyrus:

the distinctiveness of xenophon’s
political thought
It is a commonplace regarding ancient political philosophy that it has no
relevance for us today because the Greeks had no experience of large-
scale societies and governments like our own. According to this view,
because the ancient Greeks lived in small city-states, they idealized this
particular kind of government as the best one in principle for all places
and times.
A passing familiarity with ancient Greek philosophy and history
dispels this assumption. In the first place, even the smaller of the city-
states were probably too large to match the prescriptions for the best
regime elaborated by Plato or Aristotle – to say nothing of their political,
educational, economic, and religious practices. Plato’s and Aristotle’s
contemporaries in Athens generally thought pretty well of their city’s
military and cultural achievements past and present, but it is far from
clear that the philosophers shared this view. The Platonic Socrates rather
starchily refuses to concede that the great Pericles knew the art of ruling
as well as Socrates himself – a seeming absurdity that has his interlocutor
Callicles spluttering with incredulous indignation – while praise for
Athens is conspicuously absent from Aristotle’s Politics when it comes
to discussing even relatively virtuous regimes (as opposed to a segment
devoted to Sparta).3
Even more significant, however, is the fact that the ancient Greeks
were entirely familiar with large-scale alternatives to the polis. In Book 3
of the Politics, for instance, Aristotle mentions commercial leagues that
had been formed by various peoples for the purpose of promoting and
regulating trade. Aristotle’s rejection of such large-scale authorities as
a proper regime principle stems not from a lack of awareness that
they existed but from the fact that commerce is one of the concerns
of the household – the sphere of life including family relations and the

3 Although naming Pericles as an example of a prudent statesman in the Nicomachean

Ethics (1140b6–40), in general he views the Athenian democracy as a decline from the
laws framed by Solon. The Athenians’ empire, he writes, “gave them a great opinion of
themselves, and they chose inferior men as popular leaders when respectable men pursued
policies not to their liking” (Politics 1274a11–20). This assessment is rather close to that
of Thucydides, who viewed Pericles’ successors as placing their own self-interest ahead
of what was best for the city. See the discussion of Thucydides later in the chapter.

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production of material goods (hence our term “economics”). As we

considered in Chapter 3, however valuable and necessary, the concerns
of the household must be circumscribed by, and subordinate to, the
nobler and more important concerns of the political community. If
that is the case, then even the private relations within the household
itself will be raised and ennobled beyond mere material survival and
reproduction and act as an incubator for the virtues needed by citizens.
For Aristotle, therefore, a commercial league or trading alliance is not a
political authority, even if it is physically far larger and more populous
than any actual city-state, because its justice, being confined to acquiring
economic wealth, is merely contractual (Politics 1280a34–1280b29).
The Greeks were also aware of a far more imposing and successful
example of large-scale political authority, however, one that was no
mere trade association but had apparently worked out complex institu-
tional arrangements for every aspect of human association. This was the
Persian Empire, an enormous regime embracing millions of people from
dozens of different nationalities. The Greeks had fought off the Persian
kings’ attempts to add them to that empire, and this victory began the
Greeks’ own rise to the greatness of the classical era, but the thoughtful
among them were far from despising the Persian alternative. On the
contrary, they had frequent occasion to rue the comparison between
their own fractious, small, and unstable regimes and what struck them
as the awesome power and efficiency of the great multinational monar-
chy to the east. Xenophon begins the Education of Cyrus with this
reflection (1.1–5).
Indeed, both the Platonic and the Xenophontic Socrates point to the
Persian king as a kind of paradigm for what it would mean to know
the art of ruling. Yet whereas Plato ultimately prefers some form of
neighborly republic, Xenophon carries this exploration much further.
The Education of Cyrus is a utopianized version of the Persian monar-
chy. Its main purpose is not historical accuracy, but rather to use the
real-life example of an apparently successful large-scale political system
to flesh out the precepts of good government on the level of principle.
As presented by Xenophon, Cyrus takes the principle of the oikos –
the household with its private and economic concerns – and expands it
until it becomes the basis of the regime itself, swallowing up the polis.
His empire is a gigantic household ruled by him, embracing the millions
of households of his lieutenants and subjects.

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According to Castiglione, whereas Plato is the authority on the per-

fect republic and Cicero the authority on oratory, Xenophon is the
authority on the perfect monarch.4 What distinguishes Xenophon from
the other classical writers on government, and what Machiavelli (as I
argue) found so congenial about his writings, is his lengthy and can-
did exploration of princely ambition as the vehicle for founding stable
and prosperous political orders.5 Xenophon’s distinctive approach to
princely ambition and rule is clear in a general way from the divi-
sion between those of his works that focus on Socrates and those that
focus on Cyrus. For Xenophon, Socrates and Cyrus are the exemplars,
respectively, of the philosophic life and the excellence attainable by
statesmanship. This is not an absolute distinction. The Socratic writ-
ings certainly concern politics, and philosophy is not wholly absent
from the “princely” writings. However, the division can be made in the
following sense, and it is characteristic of Xenophon’s way of presenting
the relationship between politics and philosophy. In Plato’s dialogues,
the figure of Socrates dominates the investigation of the meaning and
satisfactions of political virtue. Whereas Socrates is most often depicted
conversing with well-born youths and political aspirants, even well-
known politicians like Critias and Alcibiades are shown that Socrates’
own way of life might clarify their yearnings and deficiencies. As we
observed in Chapter 2, in the Republic, Socrates never actually meets
Glaucon’s challenge to prove that justice pursued entirely for its own
sake is preferable to tyranny, but he does make a convincing case that
philosophy is. Because, according to Socrates, a devotion to philosophy
assimilates the passions leading to injustice, an education in philosophy
is thus shown to perform a signal service to civic virtue.
Xenophon, by contrast, wishes to allow political excellence – the
talent of extraordinary statesmen and generals – to unfold in its own
dimension, unencumbered by the philosophic alternative. An episode
from the Education of Cyrus illustrates this difference. There, the
archetypal ruler Cyrus encounters the archetypal philosopher Socrates
only by the shadow of the latter’s absence. Tigranes, a young Armenian
who had once been “intimate” with a Socrates-like “sophist,” transfers
his affections to the great conqueror Cyrus when Armenia falls to his

4 Castiglione (1959) p. xi.

5 Consider Wood (1964) pp. 42–47, 50–60.

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forces. Cyrus punishes the young man’s father, the king of Armenia,
who had executed this sophist for alienating his son’s affections from
their household, by stripping the father of his autonomous authority.
In this way, Cyrus’s monarchy effects a reform of the tyrannical kind of
politics that allows a philosopher to be put to death (3.1.14, 3.1.23–24,
3.1.39–43). (A tyrannical action of which democracy is also capable,
because the actual Socrates was also condemned in part for alienating
sons from their fathers.) We do not know from Xenophon’s narrative,
however, whom Tigranes would have preferred between Cyrus and the
sophist if the sophist had lived. Socrates and Cyrus and the ways of life
they embody touch. They never – like the two components of the Pla-
tonic philosopher-king – coincide. Nor is it obvious whom Xenophon
himself prefers between Socrates and Cyrus.
Indeed, if there is a single premise that explains the distinctiveness
of Xenophon’s political thought, it is his doubt whether the peaks of
human achievement can coexist in a single person. In other words, he
doubts the doctrine of the unity of virtue often associated with the
Platonic Socrates.6 Like Aristotle and in contrast to Plato, Xenophon
appears to believe that the virtues – particularly political excellence –
cannot be assimilated to philosophic virtue but should be explored
and accounted for in their heterogeneity. For Aristotle, however, and
notwithstanding his tortuous acknowledgment of the claims of superla-
tive virtue that we traced in the last chapter, the heterogeneity of the
virtues has the primary political consequence of bolstering the claims of
republican communities to be able to govern themselves and resist the
assimilation of citizen virtue to the Platonic science of monarchy. For
Xenophon, by contrast, the political virtues appear to reach their fullest
development in a supremely able – but honor-loving, nonphilosophic –
monarch. Monarchy without philosophy and heterogeneity without
republicanism: this, broadly formulated, is what makes Xenophon’s
point of departure for assessing the varieties of rule so distinctive,
although, as we will see, his assessments are not inflexible.
The Education of Cyrus is Xenophon’s most sustained investigation
of princely rule, a monarchical utopia as opposed to the republican
utopias of Plato and Aristotle. It can be situated within Xenophon’s
writings by considering two other works, each of which provides a sort

6 Irwin (1977) pp. 86–90.

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of prologomenon to it – the Hiero and the Oeconomicus. I will begin

with the Hiero. It depicts a dialogue between the “wise man” Simonides
and Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse. On the face of it, the Hiero provides a
more convincing critique of tyranny than Book 9 of the Republic (with
which it has a number of parallel passages). For although the Republic
presents a philosopher trying to persuade a politically inexperienced
young man of the evils of a life which the philosopher has never expe-
rienced, in the Hiero the tyrant himself tells a knowledgeable man of
the world – as it were, from the horse’s mouth – how wretched tyrants
are. As it transpires, however, Hiero begins by depicting a tyrant of
what I have earlier termed the garden variety – a devotee of bodily
hedonism (Hiero 1.10). Hiero believes this is how the average person
thinks of tyranny, and perhaps he thinks, therefore, that this rather
vulgar satisfaction can be made to seem unattractive to a sensible and
accomplished man like Simonides. For Hiero is wary of Simonides as
a critic or possibly even as a rival. He respects Simonides not only
for being wise but for being a “real man” (aner) – an honor seeker –
and suggests that Simonides may not remain in private life forever (1.3).
Hiero also believes that Simonides envies his ability to gratify his friends
and harm his enemies. In general, Hiero distrusts “the wise . . . lest they
plot something” threatening to his rule, a danger also noted by Machi-
avelli, as we saw in Chapter 2, in his discussion of the advisors to princes
with his suggestion that a prince who is dependent on a counsellor may
lose his throne to that advisor. Upon consideration, therefore, the Hiero
may prove to be less persuasive than the Republic about the undesir-
ability of tyranny, because Hiero is so unwilling to endanger or part
with it that he will mount an elaborate stratagem to conceal its full
satisfactions.
In characterizing the tyrant as a hedonist, Hiero aims to convince
Simonides that there is no pleasure the private citizen does not enjoy
more successfully than the tyrant. A private citizen, he argues, can
enjoy the pleasures of sight, sound, smell, and taste without the tyrant’s
burdens of ruling and the tyrant’s risk that overindulgence will dull
his future appetites. Simonides is skeptical of these arguments, but
Hiero more or less holds his own (1.11–12). However, when Hiero
tries to apply the latter argument to sexual pleasure – the tyrant gets so
much sexual satisfaction that he loses the keenness of erotic longing –
Simonides laughs in open mockery (1.27–31). For tyrants, Simonides

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retorts, have a manifest advantage over private citizens in “having inter-

course with the fairest they see” – their power to get their own way.
Now that the distinct advantages of tyranny are beginning to come to
light, Simonides reveals that he has known all along that tyrants do
not care much about bodily hedonism but do care about “honor” and
the capacity to execute “great enterprises.” It is these masterful quali-
ties that distinguish the few “real men” (andres) from the multitude of
“human beings” (anthropoi) who live like “beasts” for the satisfaction
of bodily desire (2.1, 7.3). Whereas Plato has the wise man Socrates
protect Glaucon from the allure of tyrannical “great enterprises” by
reducing the depiction of tyranny to a life of debauchery, Xenophon
has the wise man Simonides force the tyrant, who has adopted the same
depiction of the tyrant as we encounter in Book 9 of the Republic as
protective camouflage, to come clean about tyranny’s real allure.
Simonides’ accurate characterization of the tyrant’s motives forces
Hiero to be more candid about the truly troubling aspects of his life. His
omissions of the compensating advantages are correspondingly more
revealing. The most revealing thing Hiero does is to compare his erotic
relationships with his relationship to the city as a whole. Having failed
to convince Simonides that his passionate longing (eros) was dulled by
too much gratification, Hiero now says that what he really wants is
friendship (philia) from a “willing” partner. Put another way, he pur-
ports voluntarily to enlist in precisely that effort to moderate eros into
philia that the Platonic Socrates urges on the utterly skeptical Callicles.
Whereas the Gorgias depicts the wise man urging a therapy for moder-
ating eros to a skeptical proto-tyrant, the Hiero depicts a tyrant prone
to embrace this therapy before a skeptical wise man. Hiero claims that
he would like to be loved in return not only by his beloved but by his
subjects (1.33–38, 7.5–8, 8.1, 4.1). However, because they fear him or
want to curry favor, he can never trust their profession of friendship.
The tyrant can never know whether he is loved for himself and must
be ever on his guard against the flatterers and conspirators who sur-
round him. (Again, Hiero’s depiction of his own lot closely parallels
the Platonic Socrates’ depiction of the tyrant’s misery in the Republic.)
The life of “citizens” in “the cities” is thus far preferable, Hiero argues,
to tyranny. For “even the cities,” he observes, “do not fail to notice
that friendship is the greatest good.” What is more, the city’s laws pro-
vide every man with security – with a “bodyguard” of laws – because

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the laws forbid everyone equally from harming anyone else (3.3, 4.3,
6.10). As for the poor tyrant, unloved and unsafe, he might as well hang
himself.
As Simonides wryly notes, the fact that Hiero has achieved and main-
tained this, by his own argument, most dangerous of stations is con-
vincing evidence that he prizes the honor it bestows more than he fears
the dangers and difficulties it entails (7.1–2). Plainly Hiero has omitted
some compensating advantages likely to postpone his suicide indefi-
nitely. Hiero had remarked that taking something from an “unwilling”
enemy was to him “the most pleasant of all things.” Although he meant
to contrast this with the friendship of a “willing” partner, in the course
of describing the reciprocity of friendship, he admits that the “most
pleasant” moments of erotic pleasure come during the “fights and quar-
rels” on the beloved’s part (1.34–35). It is not so clear, therefore, that
Hiero would really prefer the reciprocity of friendship with his lovers
and subjects to the unqualified possession of them to do with as he
pleases or even to the struggle he may face in getting his way (1.32–33).
Moreover, the tyrant possesses additional advantages over the citizen
in pursuing erotic fulfillment. When Hiero says that “even the cities do
not fail to notice” the value of friendship, we sense that, in his view,
the life of citizenship is by no means more conductive to making friends
than the tyrant’s life, if as much so. There are two reasons for this.
First, even family ties, which Hiero considers to be the “firmest” friend-
ships, must, he says, be “compelled by law” to follow the “inclination
of nature” (3.7.9). For example, cities protect the right of husbands to
slay adulterers (3.3). If, as this suggests, even the strongest natural ties
require a degree of political – nay, tyrannical – enforcement, the tyrant
with his absolute authority is much better equipped than a private cit-
izen to keep his friends and relatives in line. The need to enforce even
private erotic and familial ties is illustrated in the Education of Cyrus
when Tigranes’ father, in justifying his execution of the Socrates-like
sophist for alienating his son’s affections, compares it to a husband
justly killing his wife’s seducer (3.1.39). If even ordinary family life in
a city where the laws provide all men with a “bodyguard” can only
be maintained through such draconian incursions, how much in accor-
dance with nature are civic and family life at all? Second and more
important, Hiero omits to mention the vastly superior resources that a
tyrant possesses compared with a citizen to gratify his friends and win

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their loyalty by benefits and honors. After all, his rule can draw on the
resources of an entire city to maintain his personal household. Socrates
argues in the Republic that the tyrant’s limitless power to reward his
friends and harm his enemies irrespective of their virtue, extolled by
Glaucon in his evocation of the perfectly unjust man, is one of his cen-
tral character flaws. The Education of Cyrus, however, shows that this
tyrannical power might also be used to reward merit. Cyrus’s grandfa-
ther Astyages, although the king of Media by hereditary descent, rules
as a tyrant and “master” without legal restrictions (1.3.18). He is thus
able to lavish gifts and honors on his grandson and, in his affection
for Cyrus and recognition of his talents, raises Cyrus above his own
son and legitimate heir (1.3.13–14). In this way, it would seem that
not only a political community but a tyrant can rise above the love of
one’s own – in the case of Astyages, a father’s ordinary attachment to his
son – fuelled by an appreciation of the superior merit of a youth he loves
more. Capricious? Yes. Unjust? Not necessarily. Cyrus learns from this
egregious favoritism, which would have been promptly suppressed in
his Persian homeland with its strict code of republican equality, how
to win his subjects’ friendship with a skillful mixture of a “master’s”
generosity and recognition of merit with his capacity to inspire fear.
It is not that Hiero is lying, then, when he enumerates the drawbacks
of tyranny. They certainly exist. However, in omitting the compen-
sations of tyranny and the drawbacks of citizenship, he gives a very
one-sided diagnosis. Hiero’s belief that Simonides is “jealous” specifi-
cally of his “supreme power” to benefit his friends and crush his enemies
confirms our impression of Hiero’s reluctance to expound fully these
advantages of tyranny to a potential critic or competitor (Hiero 6.12).
Notwithstanding these omissions, Simonides gives Hiero some advice
on how he “might” convert his unwilling subjects into “willing” ones
and “friends.” To clarify this advice, we should pause to note the dis-
tinctions between kinds of rule that Socrates makes in the Memora-
bilia. Monarchy is rule over willing subjects according to law, whereas
tyranny is lawless rule over unwilling subjects (Memorabilia 4.6.12–13).
However, when Socrates considers whether “knowledge” (episteme)
might not be a more efficient and beneficent title to authority than con-
formity to law, an extra category is introduced – rule over willing sub-
jects transcending the law. As Socrates presents it, knowledgeable rule
pulls away from the republican standard of a community of shared rule

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under law and points instead toward a “household” where the monarch
rules according to his own will over a ranked division of labor, every
class doing the jobs for which its members are naturally best suited.
This is the model of rule which Simonides recommends to Hiero.7 If
Hiero follows his advice, Simonides argues, his subjects will become
loyal and happy members of a good master’s household. Relieved of
any need to concern themselves with public affairs, cared for, protected,
and rewarded by the “leader” (Simonides delicately avoids conferring
on this reformed tyrant the fully legitimate title of king [basileus]), they
will be productive workers increasing their own wealth and the city’s
(Hiero 9.6.7,8; 10.3; 11.4,11,12,14). Whereas, as we saw in the pre-
vious chapter, Aristotle oscillates between the claims of law and the
claims of knowledge because of his reluctance to endorse the monarchi-
cal art unreservedly, Xenophon has his Simonides prescribe it without
reservation.
The dialogue ends, however, with no evident success on Simonides’
part in persuading Hiero to undertake this reform. Although Hiero can
doubtless see the advantages of a plan that would bolster his authority
without constraining him with laws, we have the feeling that he does not
quite want to renounce his unqualified possession of the city even if he
would be better off doing so. Hiero’s revelation of his own psychology
and motives as a ruler suggest two explanations for this reluctance.
Hiero may enjoy his recurrent triumph over the “fights and quarrels”
of his subjects too much to allow their discontent to evaporate. He may
prefer the recurrent sensations of risk and victory to the tranquillity of
efficient political management. In this sense, his eros and thumos may
enjoy their vital bellicosity too much to curtail themselves even for the
sake of more secure power. (In a similar mood, Callicles tells Socrates
that only a corpse would be content with being moderate [Gorgias
492].) Moreover, Simonides did not claim that the “real men” would
be reconciled to the tyrant’s rule by his advice, only the “human beings”
(11.8,11,14). Since the “real men” are likely to provide, because of their
ambition, the greatest threat to Hiero’s power and, because of their
love of honor, the kind of friends he would deem most worth having,

7 Thus, as Luccioni remarks, the Hiero is Xenophon’s “development of an idea dear to

Socrates” – that rule in the optimal sense should be based on knowledge, not law or
custom (1947) p. 77. See also Strauss (1968) pp. 70, 75–79, and Wood (1964) p. 63.

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Hiero may have concluded that Simonides’ omission of them vitiates

the rest of his advice. What honor or safety comes from dominating a
herd?
The other route to the Education of Cyrus is provided by the Oeco-
nomicus, which investigates the correct art of household management.
Broadly cognate with Aristotle’s discussion of the art of household
management, the conclusions are rather different. How a gentleman –
a “beautiful and good” man (kalos kagathos) – ought to manage his
household is Xenophon’s way of investigating the question: What is
a gentleman? His life includes the responsibilities and honors of cit-
izenship, and the responsibilities and pleasures of private or family
life. Is one of these pursuits more important, or do they have a com-
mon aim? The perfection of the art of household management points
to the example of Cyrus, who ruled a vast empire like a household
divided into classes of farmers, artisans, and soldiers (Oeconomicus
4.4–16). Because of his extraordinary talent, courage, and splendor,
Cyrus appears to be the exemplar not only of the life according to the
good (in this context, the useful and pleasant) but of the beautiful or
noble. Socrates, however, casts some doubt on identifying Cyrus with
the perfection of gentlemanliness by recalling a visit to Cyrus made by
the Spartan gentleman Lysander, who praised Cyrus as a “good” man
(particularly with respect to his talents as a farmer) while omitting any
comment on his nobility (4.17–25). The dialogue raises the question, in
other words, whether the art of household management – employed in
private life or as a monarchical replacement for the political commu-
nity – can achieve the nobility of citizen life. This may help to explain
why Kritoboulos seems initially surprised by Socrates’ suggestion that
so great a man as the king of Persia concerns himself with farming as
opposed to an exclusive focus on the art of war. It suggests a lack of
manly nobility (4.4).
But what exactly is the nobility of the life of citizenship? This side
of the problem is taken up in Socrates’ recounting of his conversa-
tion with the Athenian gentleman Ischomachus. Socrates appeared to
have acquired from Ischomachus his interest in the art of farming as
a guide for understanding gentlemanliness (7.2–3, 15.2–4). However,
Ischomachus is also strongly attracted to the life of royal authority over
“willing” subjects that Cyrus exemplifies (21.12). It is not clear, how-
ever, what the “noble” part of gentlemanliness would consist of either

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in monarchy or in a private household. For instance, Ischomachus com-

pares his wife’s supervisory position over his household with that of the
“queen bee,” apparently without reflecting that this suggests he has no
specific function there himself and may, in effect, be a drone (7.32–
40).8 Moreover, Ischomachus describes his housekeeper in a way
strongly reminiscent of Cyrus’s characteristics in the Education of
Cyrus. Like the housekeeper, Cyrus is continent about food, drink, and
sex and aims at gratifying the rest of the household to win their honor
(Education of Cyrus 1.3.9–14). Unlike the caricature of the tyrant in
the Republic as a monster of Neronian excess, and much more like the
disciplined and methodical prince Machiavelli will extol, Cyrus has a
straitlaced aversion to overeating, drunkenness, and sexual passion. His
eagerness to win people’s honor by ministering to pleasures he himself
does not share is prefigured in the Education of Cyrus when, as a pre-
cocious boy visiting his grandfather’s court in Media, he cheekily takes
over the duties of Astyages’ steward at table, thrusting out the servant
so that he can serve his grandfather himself (1.2.1, 1.3.4–5, 1.3.10,
1.4.1, 5.2.5–6,14, 5.1.12). Is the greatest king then nothing more than
a kind of glorified housekeeper? Ischomachus resists this conclusion
when he amends the view stated by Socrates in the Memorabilia that
royal rule is indeed simply the extension of household management
to larger numbers. Although he agrees with Socrates that ruling is the
architectonic art – the knowledge “common to all actions” – he claims
that to be a royal ruler requires in addition “education” and a “good
nature” (Oeconomicus 21.2,5,8,11–12). The king cannot learn how to
rule solely through instruction from an expert – as is the case with
arts such as farming and smithing – but must possess a good natural
character that has been well educated from early life. Royal rule, in
other words, cannot entirely be assimilated to rule according to knowl-
edge but requires an ethics of character development. Ischomachus’
resistance to the complete identification of royal rule with household
management throws his perplexity about the meaning of gentleman-
liness into sharper relief: the gentleman is drawn to being something
more than a citizen or the head of a private household, but the knowl-
edgeable monarch toward whom his aspirations are drawn may not be
a gentleman.

8 See Strauss (1970) p. 139.

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The Education of Cyrus brings together and further develops the

approaches to princely government explored by the Hiero and Oeco-
nomicus. It uses an idealized, pseudo-historical account of the great
Persian monarch to depict ad seriatem the formation and education of
the perfect king’s character, his rise to imperial power, and his adminis-
tration of an empire that is a gigantic household embracing the millions
of individual households of its subjects. As a king who transcends the
law and rules according to “knowledge” (1.1.3), Cyrus perfects the
model of rule that Simonides recommended to Hiero.
In this work, Xenophon also endorses the view he attributes to
Ischomachus in the Oeconomicus that the monarch cannot learn how to
rule through expert instruction alone but must also possess a good char-
acter and education. The meticulous education in civic virtue that the
Persian youths receive under the republic enables Cyrus’s natural love of
honor and learning to flourish. At the same time, however, Xenophon
confirms the low opinion of the republican way of life he attributes to
Hiero by showing that even the best republic imaginable fails to satisfy
the natures of its most talented and energetic citizens. Unlike “most
cities” (1.2.2–3) – including even the comparatively virtuous example
of Sparta – the Persian republic tries to supplement the protection pro-
vided for every citizen by the laws and the courage inculcated in the
citizens to make them able to defend their country with a feeling of
genuine friendship (philia) developed by their deliberations on and par-
ticipation in public affairs. In Xenophon’s pseudo-historical narrative,
accordingly, the Persians have long ago abandoned the Spartan practices
of teaching the boys to steal and discouraging them from conversing
or expressing their opinions, lest these severities prevent a sentiment of
civic friendship from taking root in their characters (1.6.27–34). The
Persian Republic is Xenophon’s rendition of the neighborly homoge-
neous republic recommended by Plato and Aristotle. It is ruled by a
small, self-governing aristocracy whose citizens are rigorously educated
to place the common good above the private, and it discourages eco-
nomic productivity. On Cyrus’s return from Media, however, where he
spent his adolescence at the luxurious court of his grandfather, Cyrus
subverts the Persian education by convincing his own generation of
young citizens to cease pursuing virtue as an end in itself and instead
use it as a means of acquisition through imperial expansion. Cyrus blasts
the virtuous republic apart by throwing open the opportunity to rise

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in life to all its inhabitants, eventually even including the large mass of
toiling commoners hitherto excluded from any kind of civic education
or citizen participation (rather as if the Auxiliaries in Plato’s Republic
invited the Artisans to join them as comrades in the common cause of
empire). In this way, Xenophon explores the possibility that an imperial
monarchy could democratize opportunity and allow individual merit to
override any injunctions to prefer the common good to one’s own. The
lesson Cyrus has learned in Media is that the individualism characteris-
tic of the Median king and his privatized subjects can, by employing the
skill and courage of the Persian education, acquire for each Persian of all
classes “great wealth, happiness and honor” that they would otherwise
never experience (1.5.8–12). We can already anticipate Machiavelli’s
partiality toward Xenophon among the ancients: an alliance between a
prince and the common people based on material self-interest, a project
for turning republican virtue outward as the fuel for imperial expansion
and prosperity – these, as we will see, are hallmarks of The Prince and
the Discourses, and references to “Xenophon’s Cyrus” are woven by
Machiavelli throughout his exploration of them.

cyrus’s imperialistic revolution

The action of the Education of Cyrus expands dramatically as foreign
policy comes to the fore. Upon returning to Persia from his visit to his
grandfather’s court, Cyrus resumes the regular curriculum and reaches
the age of military service. Years pass, and the Assyrian king forms a
coalition of nations for war against Media. The Medes call on Persia
to help defend their common region and, remembering Cyrus’s preco-
cious talents at his grandfather’s court, ask to have him command the
Persian army. The need for a strong commander to organize Persia’s
defenses enables Cyrus to assume a personal authority over the peers
that would never be permitted during peacetime. For a decade, Cyrus
has patiently resubmitted himself to the civic education, quietly waiting
for just such an opportunity for his ambition. He seizes it to convince
the other young men in the citizen class of the deficiencies he discov-
ered in the Persian regime during his formative years at a tyrant’s court
(1.5.7–14).
Like Plato and Aristotle, Xenophon connects the transition from an
inward-looking political community to an expansionist foreign policy

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with the stimulation of unbounded personal ambition at home, includ-

ing the danger of tyranny. As Thucydides relates it in The Peloponnesian
War, Athenian imperialism provided ambitious young men, above all
Alcibiades, with the opportunity to thrust themselves to the forefront
of democratic politics as the proponents of imperial expansion. Plato
and Aristotle respond to this dilemma by prescribing a regime that
forestalls such thrusting ambition by forestalling imperial expansion.
Xenophon, by contrast, is posing the question: Instead of repressing
the longing for mastery at home through an isolationist foreign policy,
why not, on the contrary, discipline that tyrannical longing precisely
by turning it outward, where it can seek a release through empire,
enriching everyone back home regardless of class? In this sense, Cyrus
is like an Alcibiades who receives a proper education from his earliest
youth in republican virtue before embarking on the quest for empire,
whereas the Platonic Socrates was compelled to work with the real
Alcibiades’ already corrupted longings and try to redirect them toward
moderation of the kind one would find in a well-ordered regime other
than Athens. In Plato’s Republic, the transition from the moderation
of the “city of sows” to the “feverish city” of imperialism is sparked
by Glaucon’s eros for glory and pleasure, an eros that is crushed in
the imaginary best city by the thumotic education of the Auxiliaries
and an inward-looking common good that avoids foreign entangle-
ments. Xenophon is arguing, by contrast, that the rebellion of the
timocratic Auxiliaries that in Plato’s presentation eventually undoes
the best regime might be forestalled by turning it outward; that their
virtue might be disciplined and enriched by the project of imperial
expansion.
Calling the peers together for an address, Cyrus tells them that virtue
should not be practiced for its own sake but as a means for getting good
things – “great wealth, honor and happiness.” He compares virtue to
an art or technique whose reward lies in its result. Hitherto, he says, the
Persians have trained in virtue without applying it, “growing old and
feeble” before they can taste its benefits. This makes no more sense than
for a farmer to sow and tend his crop but never reap it. Cyrus remembers
how the Medes used their arts to cultivate prosperity. He now wants
the Persians to focus their military prowess on this Median goal, cul-
tivating wealth through conquest and thereby living more pleasurably
(1.5.8–10).

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There is a problem, however. If the peers are wholeheartedly con-

vinced that virtue is merely a means to pleasure, they might abandon
their painful discipline at once, preferring this immediate gain in com-
fort to the merely presumptive future pleasure attending successful con-
quest. Cyrus realizes that the peers must retain their austere virtue if
they are to succeed in winning wealth and glory abroad, but that the
explicit conversion of virtue into an acquisitive technique might sap
their will to practice it. (It is as if the Auxiliaries of Plato’s Republic
were immediately freed to enjoy the fleshpots of the Artisans’ prosper-
ous free enterprise zone. Why go to war when wine, partners, and song
await downtown?) Cyrus resolves this dilemma by deemphasizing the
Median goal of wealth facilitating pleasure in favor of the more Per-
sian goal of glory – a glory to be achieved in the dangerous exploits
of conquest leading up to the acquisition of wealth (1.5.12). Cyrus
had learned as his grandfather’s favorite to look on self-exertion and
self-discipline as means to preeminent personal prestige, whereas the
Persian peers have been educated to believe that their honor is inherent
in conforming to the laws and serving the common good. Encouraging
the peers to become “lovers of praise,” to have an eros for praise, Cyrus
now instills them with some of his own open-ended ambition. In this
way, he hopes to dull the peers’ perception of the contradiction between
present pain and distant pleasure, giving them a motive for continuing
hardihood.
This speech represents the first phase of Cyrus’s revolution. The
threat of war would in any event have brought about a temporary
priority of the military aim of the Persian education over its domestic
aim. Cyrus uses the paramountcy of war to lay bare the contradiction
between these aims. Applying to virtue the criterion of means-end ratio-
nality, he liberates the young Persians’ hardy competitiveness from the
peacetime constraints of Persian law, directing these energies outward
toward the goals of acquisition and prestige. In the Education of Cyrus,
the success of the traditional Persian education, with its resultant sta-
ble self-government, stands or falls by the correctness of the regime’s
assumption that its austere public-spiritedness is truly naturally more
rewarding than the selfish passions that Cyrus has now summoned
forth – the core teaching of classical republicanism altogether, includ-
ing that of Plato and Aristotle. In other words, the regime assumes that
its education does not merely coerce but rather guides human nature

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toward its own fullest satisfaction. The young peers shatter this assump-
tion by unhesitatingly accepting Cyrus’s proposals, overturning their
years of painstaking civic education in a trice. That Cyrus can subvert
the republican ethos with a fifteen-minute speech is Xenophon’s tacit
speculation about just how naturally choice-worthy the common good
is for its own sake.

Although Cyrus in one sense corrupts the Persian education by argu-

ing that virtue is not its own reward, in another sense he fulfills the
aims of that education to produce citizens of “surpassing nobility”
more successfully than the republic had ever been able to. We recall
from Chapter 3 that at just the point where he fully and explicitly
defines true monarchy as the multinational empire of a man of supreme
prudence governing according to the architectonic art, Aristotle draws
back from this claim so as to endorse instead a self-governing aristo-
cratic republic. Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus fills that lacuna, taking
off from precisely where Aristotle ends, tracing what would happen if a
man of Alcibiadean ambition but properly trained in civic virtue were
to burst the boundaries of the aristocratic republic precisely by acting
on its claim to favor meritocracy. If Hegel is correct that the univer-
salism of Socratic philosophy spelled the death of the polis by making
a cosmopolitan state inevitable, the Education of Cyrus would seem
to provide the speculative blueprint. With Xenophon’s opening lament
of the Greek city-states’ ills and his idealization of Cyrus’s world state,
political philosophy and history come close to touching. For what begins
as a monarchical utopia in the Education of Cyrus becomes reality as
Alexander of Macedon leads his fellow youths out of their backward
polis to conquer Persia, assuming the Cyrean role of universal monarch,
just as Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar will do later in subverting
the Roman polis – charismatic imperialists and populists who, like
Xenophon’s Cyrus, clad themselves in the outward form of republican
legitimacy as its restorer and rejuvenator.
To reiterate: the Cyrean revolution encourages the “career open to
talent” (to use Napoleon’s famous phrase) that the old republican edu-
cation had always claimed to be based on because it claimed to breed
the rule of the best. First as imperial commanders and later as heads of
splendid households encompassing the provinces and fiefs of the empire,
Cyrus’s comrades excel at the noble and good in ways that were not

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possible under the republican rule of law with its restrictions on out-
standing personal achievement. The Education of Cyrus may also be
taken as Xenophon’s critique of the view he attributes to Simonides that
a tyrant can convert, well along in his career, to a more efficient and
beneficent method of governing. The influence of Cyrus’s education on
his character remedies the crucial defect in Hiero that may have pre-
vented him from profiting from Simonides’ advice. Cyrus learned about
the household form of rule in Media without losing the immunity from
hedonism acquired during his austere Persian education. As a ruler,
consequently, Cyrus has no erotic passion for the literal possession and
consumption of his household and subjects. His relations with his sub-
ordinates are untinged with the jealousy or suspicion that arise from the
competition for pleasures. Cyrus can be ruthless, as we consider more
closely in our examination of Machiavelli’s reading of him. However,
he takes no pleasure (as does Hiero) in “fights and quarrels” with his
subordinates for their own sake apart from the cold-blooded goal of
expanding his power. He is more Oliver Cromwell than Caligula.
By resisting the conflation of political authority with a lover’s jeal-
ous possessiveness, the perfect monarch is, in Xenophon’s presentation,
psychologically distinct from tyrants as we usually encounter them and
bears little if any resemblance to the tyrant excoriated in Book 9 of
the Republic. Whether he is truly a king, however, or a new kind of
tyrant cloaked as or merged with a monarch remains an open question.
Whereas Socrates says in the Republic that, in the tyrant’s disrupted
soul, eros usurps the role of reason and becomes the “factional leader”
of the desires by enflaming them (572e–573e), Xenophon presents Cyrus
as a man whose eros for limitless honor, thoroughly drained of other
erotic desires, conquers others by helping them to gratify their plea-
sures, guided by the art of architectonic management. Whereas for
Plato, reason should govern eros and thumos, in Cyrus, an eros for
honor employs both “knowledge” (the science of ruling) and thumos in
its service. Cyrus might be likened to the “noble nature” described in
Book 6 of the Republic, capable of the best and worst actions. His edu-
cation through an exposure to both Persia and Media parallels the royal
myth in Plato’s Alcibiades I, in which Socrates exposes the young man
to the two mother regimes of republic and monarchy. The difference
is that the Platonic Socrates hoped philosophy would assimilate Alcibi-
ades’ ambition. He begins by stimulating Alcibiades with the vision of

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world rule, then brings him back to the polis now seen in light of the
universal. By contrast, the young Cyrus receives a quasi-theological edu-
cation from his father Cambyses that is partly Socratic but not explicitly
philosophic. Meant primarily to instill political moderation, it does not
stimulate an openness to the contemplative life. In founding his world
order, Cyrus eschews philosophy per se in order to actualize a Socrati-
cally rational politics in which the execution of a “Socrates in Armenia”
is avenged.
Is Cyrus, then, an unequivocally successful example in Xenophon’s
eyes of the perfection of the gentlemanly life that citizenship under law
may reach for but cannot fully attain? Is his career meant to show a way
of transcending the perplexities of Ischomachus? It might well seem so.
Ischomachus had said that royal rule was a “divine” life (Oeconomi-
cus 21.5.11–12). At the penultimate stage of his conquests, Cyrus’s
allies present him with a captive queen as his war prize (4.6.11, 5.1.6).
Reputed to be the most beautiful woman in Asia, her name – Pantheia –
means, literally, the “wholly divine.” Her award to Cyrus thus seems to
symbolize his crowning achievement.
Yet as Xenophon presents it, the cumulative answer to these ques-
tions remains tentative. This can be illustrated with several further
observations from the Education of Cyrus. Cyrus’s rule is likened by
one of his lieutenants to that of a “king-bee” (5.1.24). We recall that
Ischomachus’ praise of his wife as the “queen-bee” raised the possibility
that the gentleman is useless to his own household. The merging of king
and queen-bee in Cyrus suggests this problem could be avoided by the
extension of household management to kingship, which requires the
exercise of political and military as well as economic skills. It requires
the hardy virtues of the “real men” to bring about a world of pleasure
and safety for the “human beings.” This remedy does not dispose alto-
gether of the possibility that royal authority is still comparable to the
rather mundane managerial skills of a housekeeper, however – espe-
cially after the period of conquests is over and there is no more glory
to be won. The air of hedonistic dissipation and laxness that overtakes
Cyrus’s government in his waning years points to this difficulty. More-
over, while a republic can replicate its way of life through its institutions,
Cyrus, being a perfect monarch, could not be replicated – his sons were
mediocre. As the Education of Cyrus draws to a close, the crisis of
the succession throws the virtuous small republic with its emphasis on

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a high average level of virtue among all citizens into a retrospectively

better light.
Furthermore, Cyrus’s means of acquiring power may be hard to rec-
oncile with “beautiful and good” conduct. He “is said,” as Xenophon
equivocally puts it (1.2.1), to have been heir to the Persian throne. As
we will see in the next chapter, Machiavelli sets aside this more seemly
account of Cyrus’s royal birth in favor of Herodotus’ depiction of Cyrus
as a semibarbarized usurper who rose from “base origins.” Yet even
if Cyrus’s royal lineage was not in doubt, this did not entitle him to
subvert the laws of Persia or to usurp the authority of Astyages’ heir
Cyaxares. Cyrus is practiced in many deceptions unknown to earlier
generations of Persian gentlemen. Although he initially tells the Persian
peers, for example, that he is only interested in a defensive war against
the Assyrian empire, he continues his conquests long after Persia’s secu-
rity from external aggression has been guaranteed. Publicly, Cyrus tells
the peers that justice will be on their side in the coming war because
they are defenders rather than aggressors (1.5.1). Immediately after
this, however, in private conversation with his father, Cyrus expresses
his contempt not only for the Assyrians but for his supposed allies the
Medes and for other peoples poorly governed in comparison with Per-
sia. It would be a “disgrace,” he says, not to fight them all and reform
their slothful, inefficient governments (1.6.8–9). Persia’s institutions had
been designed to make its citizens content with internal self-government
and serving the common good. For Cyrus, they have become a stan-
dard for reform that he wants to make his banner for imperial conquest.
There is something of (again) a Cromwell or Napoleon in his zealotry,
his conviction that his glory will also serve the triumph of righteousness
and reason among all nations. It is as if, instead of the timocrats collec-
tively overthrowing the rule of the philosopher-kings in the Republic,
one of the timocrats arose and made the rule of reason the basis for
revolutionary reform and imperial expansion. The Education of Cyrus
is a ten-book elaboration on that logical lacuna in Plato’s best regime
that we discussed in Chapter 2, the Platonic Socrates’ exclusion of the
possibility of an honor-loving tyrant arising directly from timocracy in
the typology of regimes in Book 8.
In Xenophon’s presentation of Cyrus’s charismatic rise, numerous
threats, half-truths, executions, and transportations take place in the
background of Cyrus’s marvelous rhetoric of peaceful reconciliation

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and his magnanimity toward those ready to surrender without a fight

(4.4.5–6). Eventually the “real men” making up Cyrus’s top command
are as much in terror of him as the “human beings” whom they have
conquered. Xenophon’s use of accounts of Cyrus that clearly came after
his rise to greatness and his success in inspiring millions with “fear” of
him (1.1.5) must cause us to wonder to what degree an extraordinary
conqueror can influence the reputation he leaves behind. Who knows
what other crimes and usurpations formed the basis for the immense
prestige of Cyrus in the mature stage of his life, when the accounts
Xenophon drew on were presumably gaining wide currency? Machi-
avelli states the implication openly in chapter 6 of The Prince when,
partly in reference to Cyrus as a rare example of an “outstanding”
prince, he says that a ruler who uses enough force in the beginning of
founding a “new order” will silence his enemies, dazzle the half-hearted,
and shape a glowing account of himself for posterity.
Finally, it is doubtful whether the distance between Cyrus and his
lieutenants permits the reciprocity between them necessary for genuine
friendship based on a shared dedication to virtue, a hallmark of the gen-
tleman’s code. Xenophon vividly illustrates this problem when Cyrus’s
friend from boyhood and high lieutenant Araspas falls passionately in
love with Pantheia, Cyrus’s prize of war, to whom Araspas has been
assigned as protector. In a dialogue with Araspas inspired by the beauty
of the captive queen, Cyrus reveals the motive for his coldness by liken-
ing eros to an enslavement that makes us neglect our practical interests.
After assuring Cyrus in their dialogue about the pitfalls of eros that
he will not succumb to Pantheia’s beauty, Araspas makes a play for
the captive queen, who, repulsing him and highly indignant over this
disrespectful treatment, complains to his master. Although Cyrus is not
possessed by an erotic longing for Pantheia himself and behaves with
perfect chastity toward her, as a political matter, he must treat Araspas’
passion for the captive queen as a threat to the external majesty of his
authority, reducing this once proud associate to a paroxysm of fear
(6.1.31–41). As we see in the next chapter, when guided in our reading
of this episode by Machiavelli, particularly enigmatic is the “disappear-
ance,” under several layers of murky intrigue worthy of Smiley’s People,
of Cyrus’s former favorite.
A number of parallels with the episode of Cyrus, Araspas, and Pan-
theia suggest themselves. As we discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, Plato’s

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Socrates, in turning away from natural philosophy and the direct speech
about being, is inspired by what he depicts as Diotima’s teaching about
eros, and he hopes that Alcibiades’ natural eros for the beautiful and
good will lead him to philosophy by way of civic virtue. However,
Alcibiades’ late and disruptive entrance in the Symposium at the height
of his political preeminence blocks that ascent and calls it into ques-
tion through his rivalry with Socrates for the possession of Agathon
(“[the] Good” [to agathon]), symbolic of a rivalry between wisdom
and power. In this case, the beauty of Pantheia (the “wholly divine”)
inspires an erotic longing for the beautiful in a young man. But it
is Cyrus himself, a ruler rather than a philosopher, who blocks the
erotic ascent in the name of a prudence guided by the art of ruling,
a prudence that disavows a love of the beautiful. The Xenophontic
debate about eros also recalls Homer’s Iliad. There, Agamemnon and
his ally Achilles vie over a captive woman, the flashpoint for Achilles’
wounded honor and insubordination toward the king who has slighted
him by seizing his war prize. In the Education of Cyrus, by contrast, a
self-controlled monarch resists the erotic battle for prestige over a cap-
tive woman with an Achillean subordinate, instead crushing his eros
through fear. Whereas for Plato the prospect for curing the Achillean
man lies in philosophically grounded eros, for Xenophon it lies in effi-
cient rule by a ruler whose eros for honor is undistracted by a love of the
beautiful.
Especially when considered in the light of his coldness and his friend-
lessness, there is something indiscriminate and egotistical about Cyrus’s
“thirst” for the gratitude and honor of millions of people whom he
never lays eyes on and not one of whom is in a position to earn his
gratitude or respect in return (5.1.1). Cyrus’s coldness (noted jokingly
by his innermost circle) toward any particular erotic attachment is not,
after all, the moderation of a citizen subordinating his desires to the
common good, but the psychological means he has devised in him-
self to devote his talents undistractedly to what could be characterized
as shameless pandering to the material needs of the “human beings.”
Whereas for the Platonic Socrates, lower erotic passions are assimilated
by an eros for the Good, for Xenophon’s Cyrus, they are assimilated
by an eros for the universal and demotic love of “all men.” As we see
in the next chapter, Machiavelli makes use of the Pantheia episode, in
ways both approving and disapproving, to develop his argument that a

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prince must resist the allure of eros – not only as it relates to his own
passions, but in the broader sense of longing for the love of his subjects
by believing that his eros for supreme honor is compatible with the
service of the common good. Machiavelli weaves a dense layering of
associations in which Scipio Africanus the Elder, the greatest Roman
admirer of Xenophon’s Cyrus, becomes, through his desire to enact the
erotic ascent up Diotima’s Ladder, the corrupter of the Roman repub-
lic and a wholly negative standard for either princely or republican
government, a tableau we explore in detail in Chapters 5 and 6.
Cyrus’s lack of restraint with respect to his eros for universal honor
is prefigured by his obliviousness as a young man to any sense of awe
or shame before the gods. As he tells his father Cambyses, he cheer-
fully regards the gods as “friends” who unfailingly reward ambitious
effort like his own with commensurate success (1.6.6–36, 2.3.4). By
contrast, Cambyses tries to moderate his son’s ambitions by stressing
that there is an inscrutable disjunction between human virtue and the
gods’ favor that a prudent ruler should bear in mind before undertak-
ing too ambitious an enterprise (1.6.18,23–24,26,44–46). Cambyses’
exchanges have parallels in Xenophon’s depiction of Socrates, and his
stress on the role of chance in the prospects for the success of virtue and
wise rule is, as we have seen in previous chapters, in keeping with Plato’s
presentation of Socrates as well. This private conversation between the
constitutional monarch and his son might suggest that, behind the insis-
tence of the regime on conformity to the law, there is a deeper theolog-
ical justification for the moderation it instills, one that reaches beyond
what service to the common good requires and says something about
the world at large. Cyrus, however, is confident that techne can over-
come tuche. He compares an energetic general to a productive farmer,
as if every human virtue were a means to human procurement, and as if
a general’s marshalling of force to destroy a foe were comparable to a
farmer’s cultivation of nature to yield produce while caring for the soil
(1.6.18, 2.2.24–26). Cambyses observes in reply that even an energetic
general may be thwarted by “a god,” while he greets the comparison of
generalship to farming with silence. It is as if, in Cambyses’ view, the
relation between man and the earth illustrates the disjunction between
the cultivation of virtue and the nonhuman order especially clearly, an
irreducible complex of art, nature’s potential, and the cultivation of an

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outcome beneficial to humans but leaving the fecundity of nature unex-

hausted. Despite his admiration for royal rule, Ischomachus likewise
remarks in the Oeconomicus that the gods do not unfailingly reward the
diligence that prudent human beings display through farming and the
other branches of household management (11.8). Ischomachus’ doubts
about the power of human skill over nature are of a piece with his doubts
that possessing the nature of a ruler is synonymous with acquiring a
skill, without the supplement of education and a good nature. Some-
thing about nature – be it chance, necessity, or the gods’ inscrutable
will – eludes the human capacity for planning and control. A prudent
or even pious regard for this disjunction appears to be one of the traits
that, in Xenophon’s treatment, distinguishes a gentleman from a ruler
like Cyrus. Xenophon reinforces these reservations about Cyrus’s gen-
tlemanliness by frequently likening his knowledge of ruling to feeding
pigs, gelding horses, and other aspects of the herdsman’s art (Education
of Cyrus 1.1.2, 2.1.28–29, 7.5.62–65).
As the preceding reveals, Xenophon’s exploration of the advantages
of an imperial monarchy through his pseudo-history of Cyrus the Great
has mixed results from his own viewpoint. On the one hand, he allows
the ambition for limitless rule to unfold in all its grandeur, appearing
to overshadow republican virtue with its severe restrictions on personal
achievement. When allowed to run its course, however, the pseudo-
history of Cyrus’s rational and benevolent despotism does not prove, in
spite of its manifest advantages, to be preferable in every respect to the
life of citizen virtue. Initially glorious and optimistic, the Education of
Cyrus ends, as is widely noted, in a depressing atmosphere of corruption
stemming from the avarice, dissipation, and self-absorption of Cyrus’s
subjects and lieutenants.9 In this way, the imperial monarchy pays a
price in the long run for its freedom from republican or philosophical
moderation. Xenophon wishes to elaborate the optimal potentiality of
princely virtue for stable and prosperous rule, but also its drawbacks. As
we see in the next chapter, this open-minded but ambivalent assessment
is what makes Xenophon both a suitable precedent and a suitable foil
for Machiavelli’s diagnosis of princely rule.

9 See the detailed discussion in Nadon (2001) as well as Breebart (1983) p. 126 and Higgins
(1977) pp. 57–59.

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the peloponnesian war and the thucydidean

context
Before turning to Machiavelli and the beginning of the modern transval-
uation of tyranny and statecraft, let us recall the central problem,
according to the classics, of civic pedagogy as we have explored it in
our consideration of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon: How is the poten-
tial tyrant to be converted to an ally of justice and good government?
How do we make a clear distinction between encouraging a construc-
tive ambition to serve the common good and giving leeway to tyrants
to emerge, perhaps disguised in the first instance as benefactors? How
might we find a middle ground whereby a man’s belligerent impulses
and love of fame might be educated, sublimated, and directed away
from tyranny and unprovoked aggression into the honor that comes
from serving one’s fellow citizens in a republic of laws or as a virtuous
monarch?
As we began to consider in Chapter 1, the Platonic and Aristotelian
way of engaging this dilemma begins with – but also marks a consider-
able modification of and departure from – the poetic tradition, which
was ambivalent about this very issue. For example, Homer in a sense
holds out Achilles as the eternal model for Greek youth. However,
Achilles was deeply insubordinate, withdrawing his services from his
allies during the Trojan War out of a purely personal vendetta against
their leader Agamemnon based on a fight over a woman and other
perceived slights and insults. On the other hand, when Achilles does
return to the fray, motivated by yet another personal bond, his desire
to avenge the death of his best friend Patroclus, he is indispensable to
the Trojans’ defeat. Whether disloyal or loyal to his allies, his incen-
tive is always a personal erotic tie and wounded pride (Homer Iliad
1.120–285; 18.20–30, 85–125, 145–154; 22.260–272, 244–360).10
Homer and the other poets take the view that, although tyranny and
insubordinate ambition are dangerous, they cannot simply be dispensed
with or in all cases disparaged. The problem with consistently denounc-
ing tyrannical aggressiveness is that the tyrant and the leading citizen
might, at bottom, share some of the same darkly hubristic, combative
qualities. The chorus in Sophocles’ play Oedipus the Tyrant give vent

10 For further discussion, see Newell (2003) pp. 63–69.

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to this quandary when they pray that (the) God will protect them from
tyrants while at the same time helping the man ambitious to serve his
country. A part of the tragedy of the play is that, in their subconscious
anxiety, the Thebans are not sure which category Oedipus himself falls
into, tyrant or statesman – and neither is he. They begin:

Insolence breeds the tyrant, insolence

if it is glutted with a surfeit, unseasonable, unprofitable,
climbs to the roof-top and plunges
sheer down to the ruin that must be,
and there its feet are no service.

They then, however, qualify their condemnation of such vaunting

excess:

But I pray that the God may never

abolish the eager ambition that profits the state.
For I shall never cease to hold the God as our protector (870–885).

Sophocles is suggesting that the difficulty of distinguishing between

the self-professed protector of the state and its would-be tyrant is a
permanent quandary of civic life, while hinting between the lines that
his fellow Athenians face this same riddle with their own leaders right
now. For although the drama concerns eternal themes, it is also first
presented in the very midst of the cauldron of the Peloponnesian War,
and has not implausibly been taken as an attempt to moderate Athe-
nian imperialistic hubris through the cautionary tale of the rise, nemesis,
and downfall of the tyrant Oedipus, perhaps a personification of Athe-
nian imperialism or a stand-in for the great war-time Athenian leader
Pericles.11 If this is so, then just as the lesson of the tragedy is, as the
blind wise man Teresias sums it up, to lie low and avoid tempting
the gods’ wrath through overweening ambition (Oedipus the Tyrant
315–360), the lesson for Athens would be that she should clip her own
imperialistic wings and return to a more traditional conception of mod-
erate, inward-looking politics (perhaps paralleling Thucydides’ praise
of the oligarchical regime of the Five Thousand that took power in
the aftermath of Sparta’s rise and Athens’ decline following the Sicilian

11 See, for instance, Foster (2010) p. 133.

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expedition, a moderate regime interested more in stability than expan-

sion [Peloponnesian War 8.26.97]).
Oedipus’ initial arrogant confidence in his intellectual power to rea-
son his way out of the plague besetting Thebes and the mystery of the
murder of Laius might also be taken to parallel the arrogance of the
Athenian generals on Melos as Thucydides depicts them in a celebrated
classic of Realpolitik, the so-called Melian Dialogue (5.17.84–116).
Common to both is an excessive reliance on reason and its power to
unlock the truth about nature. The generals on Melos echo the view
held by a number of Sophists that the distinction between nature and
convention establishes that “getting the better” of others wherever and
whenever one can is the most natural and most reasonable way of life
for any individual or city possessing the power to do so (5.17.105). Just
as Oedipus’ hubristic faith in his capacity to unriddle nature brought
him down, so, in one interpretation of Thucydides, the arrogance of
the generals in the Melian dialogue is met by the nemesis of the Sicilian
expedition. As we recall from our discussion of the pre-Socratics and
Sophists in the Laws, they believed that nature sprang from “chance”
in alternation with “necessity.” At one point in the play, when Oedipus
comes to believe (mistakenly) that he is illegitimate, he revels (somewhat
like Edmund in King Lear) in the fact that he is the “child of chance,”
a man who stands outside the conventions of legitimacy and lineage,
the more effectively able to assert himself through his ambition and
power of mind (Oedipus the Tyrant 1075–1090). In the denouement,
however, he is ground down and brought low by necessity, becoming a
Dionysian blood sacrifice to the regeneration of Apollonian order.
In Thucydides, we possess a real-life historical narrative of the strug-
gle allegorized by Sophocles. An ancient tradition credits Xenophon
with the discovery and safe-guarding of Thucydides’ unknown
manuscript about the Peloponnesian War and it is instructive, in con-
cluding our first consideration of Xenophon’s monarchical utopia, to
view it in the context of Thucydides’ account of the crisis of war and
imperialism faced by Athens during the lifetimes of Socrates and his
school. When Socrates in the Republic traces the development from
the simple archaic and bucolic ways of the City of Sows to the erotic
refinements, luxury, and imperialism of the “feverish city,” on one level
he is making a theoretical transition from simple desire (epithumia)
organized by the division of labor to the erotic longing for honor and

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pleasure (including the pleasure of philosophy) and therewith to the

need for thumos in a class of soldiers. On another level, he is telescop-
ing Athens’ own transition from its old-fashioned austerity and piety,
flowering at Marathon and Salamis in the defeat of the hated Persian
oppressor, to its newfound imperialism, sophistication, and hubris in
which Athens, as Sparta and her other critics frequently charged, tries
to take the place of the King of Kings – whom they had all fought to
defeat – over the rest of Greece (Peloponnesian War 1.3.68–69, 1.4.97–
100, 1.5.117–122, 124). This transition from the old-fashioned virtues
that predated the war against Persia and enabled the Greeks to win
it to the imperial pretensions of Athens herself is also paralleled in
Aristophanes’ depiction in the Clouds of the Just and Unjust Speeches
(Clouds 889–1104). The Just Speech pines nostalgically over “the good
old days” – a code of reverence for the ancestors, for modesty and piety,
to some extent preserved by Sparta but, many felt, almost vanished in
Athens. The Unjust Speech, by contrast, offers a brazen, flashy and
shameless defense of unbridled hedonism, moral relativism, and mate-
rialism at home enabled by conquest abroad. Generally speaking, the
City of Sows is to the Feverish City as the Just Speech is to the Unjust
Speech.12 This latter speech is the one that is embraced by Pheidippides,
the stand-in for Alcibiades in the Clouds.
As we discussed in Chapter 1, the connection of Alcibiades with
Socrates, on the one hand, and (as chronicled by Thucydides) with
Athenian imperial expansion on the other is intimate and troubling.
In the Alcibiades I, we observe Socrates enflaming the young Alcibi-
ades’ eros for honor (the key to understanding human nature, as he
later claims Diotima had taught him in turning him away from natu-
ral to political philosophy [Symposium 208c–d]), by suggesting that he

12 See the discussion of the Clouds in Nicholls (1983a) pp. 35 ff. As Athenian power
rose and waned during the Peloponnesian War, there was a widespread feeling that
the old religious and moral codes were melting away, leaving a vacuum filled by the
Sophists’ morality of “getting the better.” See Dodds in Plato (1979) p. 292, and Guthrie
(1983) pp. 106–107. Shorey describes Callicles, whose defense of the natural master
closely parallels that of the generals on Melos, as “the embodiment of the immoralist
tendencies of the age” (1968) pp. 141, 146–147. Friedlander sees a connection between
the debate over the two ways of life – tyranny and philosophy – in the Gorgias, Republic,
and other dialogues and this surrounding climate of moral anxiety and further observes
that Socrates’ discussion with Callicles revolves around three intertwined issues: justice
versus injustice, philosophy versus politics, and Socrates versus imperial Athens (1973)
p. 261.

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wants to rule the whole world (Alcibiades I 105c). The ambition to

transcend Athens, kindled or at least crystallized by Socrates, in the
scope of his honor-seeking is pedagogically employed by Socrates to
provoke Alcibiades to transcend the limitations of Athenian education
in political prudence – left largely to private instruction in rhetoric –
and to think about statesmanship in terms of the two paradigmatically
well-ordered regimes of Sparta and Persia. In the sequel, however, it
might appear that, although Socrates did help Alcibiades crystallize the
scope of his ambition onto a worldwide stage anticipating Alexander
the Great (as Thucydides reports, in whipping up the Athenian demos to
conquer Sicily, Alcibiades remarks that Carthage is next, and that there
is no predictable limit to the future Athenian empire [6.18.19]), the
transition from the universality of his ambition to the universality of
philosophical transcendence is flawed or stillborn, to use the midwife
imagery from the Theatetus (150B–151D). Torn between his love of
Socrates and his love of the Demos, the mature Alcibiades’ imperialism
as it is depicted in the Symposium is indeed limitless but tinged with
a bitter undertone of alienation and lost innocence, as if Socrates had
spoiled political honor for him in contrast with philosophy while at
the same time leaving him unable or unwilling to enter into philosophy
wholeheartedly.
According to Thucydides, whereas the initial wartime leader of the
democracy, Pericles, identified his own honor with what was best for
Athens as a whole, his successors pursued their own self-interest at
the expense of what was best for the city (2.7.65–67). Having always
advised the city to match its foreign conquests to its real resources,
he might well have opposed the Sicilian expedition as imprudent. It
is important to note, however, that this would have been a utilitarian
objection, not an ethical one. Pericles was wholeheartedly in favor of
empire, only counseling a prudent scheduling of expansion. In this,
he was in harmony with the more level-headed of the Sophists, who,
although they counseled “getting the better” (pleonexia) as the most
natural way to live for individuals and cities, would certainly have been
against suicidal boldness and in favor of the proper amassing of military
and economic strength to guarantee success. We recall from Chapter 2
that one of Gorgias’ fragments maintains that courage and phronesis (in
this utilitarian sense of how to get the better) are the two main virtues
of the city (omitting any mention of justice and moderation). Pericles

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differed from more aggressive imperialists like his successors Cleon and
Alcibiades only about the means to empire, not the end itself. Therefore,
from Socrates’ viewpoint in the Gorgias, he is not fit for inclusion in the
ranks of truly prudent statesmen who would understand the need for
the city’s internal moderation to be matched by an external avoidance
of the temptations to tyrannize over other cities abroad.
Although the Athenians did foolishly underestimate the size, wealth,
and resources of Sicily before undertaking the invasion (6.18.1–3),
Thucydides observes that the main reason for its failure stemmed from
Athenian internal politics after Pericles’ death. Alcibiades began as the
leader of the invasion force, and his conduct “was as good as could
be desired.” It was his recall and replacement by Nicias that doomed
the invasion (6.18.16, 2.7.65–67, 6.19.61–62).13 Thucydides is a unique
figure in the intellectual context surrounding the emergence of the
Socratic school. He appears to share the Sophists’ view of politics as
a ceaseless struggle for individual and collective aggrandizement; that
motion is the natural condition of politics rather than rest. At the same
time, he keenly appreciates the perils that expansionism poses to the
freedom and internal ordering of regimes that are embroiled in it. In the
long run, the superpower conflict between Athens and Sparta, in part
based on self-interest (Athens’ desire for glory and wealth and Sparta’s
fear that Athens’ rising power must be nipped in the bud before it
becomes overwhelming) but also on what we might term an ideological
struggle between two different regime principles, democracy and a tim-
ocratic oligarchy, reaches into and subverts the internal politics of all the

13 For a longer discussion of the Peloponnesian War and its significance for political
philosophy, see Newell (2009), Orwin (1994), and Palmer (1992). On the relationship
between political philosophy and the historical context of Athens’ rise to empire, see
the fine study by Balot (2001), a deft and sure-footed interdisciplinary cross-hatching
of intellectual, political, and cultural history. It is part of a distinguished school of
classical and historical scholarship including Kagan (2003), Ober (1998), and Strauss
(2004) from which political theorists can learn much. On the pivotal role of Alcibiades
in Thucydides’ history, Balot writes: “Once Alcibiades is removed from a position of
leadership, the centrifugal tendencies of the democracy spiral outward in an increasing
display of civic mistrust and divisiveness. The democratic process can no longer coalesce
successfully around Alcibiades’ compelling personality and vision” (2001) p. 178. If I
am warranted in describing Thucydides’ history as a secular tragedy, Herodotus’ history
is arguably even more sui generis with a less clear connection to the pre-Socratics and
Sophists. See Thompson (1996), who argues that, for Herodotus, the transmission of
stories is crucial for the identity of a political community.

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city-states, kindling domestic strife between partisans of the conflicting

regime principles (3.81.2–84). The rise and fall of Athens through the
overreaching ambition of the Sicilian expedition does savor of a tragic
nemesis. Yet, as Thucydides relates it, the war is a real-world histor-
ical cycle, not a mythic one (1.1.6–11, 21–24), and, as distinct from
the viewpoint of some of its actors (like the pious Spartans and their
counterparts in Athens who hold to the old ways of the Just Speech
[1.2.80–85]), Thucydides himself appears to assign no divine prove-
nance to these events. If he is a tragedian, he is a secular or empirical
tragedian.
As Thucydides sums up his career, Pericles was mistaken to think
or hope that his successors would, like him, find more glory in serving
Athens as a whole, especially through a prudential middle ground of
expansion in keeping with resources, than in dominating the demos to
pursue their private interests. Neither Alcibiades nor Nicias, the leaders
of the war and peace parties respectively in the post-Periclean period,
found that his personal interest coincided with that of the city as a
whole. Alcibiades and Nicias, however, were more typical of Athens
than was Pericles, who, as Hobbes concluded from his study of Thucy-
dides, was a happy accident, a monarch in all but name masquerad-
ing as leading citizen, whose successors fragmented what he had held
together. Alcibiades embodied youth, daring, hedonism, and a love of
innovation and was tainted by the reputation for impiety (6.18.14–
16, 27–30). He was the avatar of Athens’ most sophisticated side, both
culturally and in the more literal philosophical sense, paralleling Aristo-
phanes’ depiction of the Unjust Speech (sometimes and understandably
translated as “Sophistry”) in the Clouds and parodied there as the arro-
gant wastrel Pheidippides. The older Nicias, by contrast, wanted peace
with Sparta and no further expansion of the empire. He was admired
for his moderation, piety, and caution, paralleling the Just Speech in
the Clouds (6.23.9–14, 21–24; 7.21.8–10; 7.22,48; 7.23.51–52, 86–
87). The bifurcation of Athenian politics into these two representative
figures reveals that, beneath the unity crafted by Pericles through his
matchless rhetoric, a “silent majority” (as we might put it) of Athenians
remained attached to “the good old days” extolled by the Just Speech.
Less flashy than the imperialists and their foreign Sophist friends (Peri-
cles was a friend of Protagoras, and Alcibiades, as we know, frequented
Socrates’ circle through which passed itinerant teachers of rhetoric),

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these people were shocked by the Plague into thinking the gods were
punishing them for unjustly provoking war with Sparta and appalled
by the desecration of their ancestral villages and tombs when the rural
population was brought within the Long Walls to protect them from
the invading Spartans.
Absent an accidental monarch in disguise like Pericles, Thucydides
implies, the public and private interest in an imperialistic democracy
may be irreconcilable. This is what led to the war expanding beyond
the bounds set by Pericles . Alcibiades wanted glory and needed money
to float his many extravagances. Leading the city to fresh conquests
and plunder was the surest route. It also led to the failure of the Sicilian
expedition and Sparta’s subsequent rise to predominance, for Nicias
was not the right kind of man to place in charge of carrying out so
bold a scheme. After the death of Cleon, another bellicose leader of the
war party who had dominated Athenian politics following the demise
of Pericles’ centrist policy, the way was open for Nicias to conclude
a peace treaty with Sparta (5.15.17). Many were in favor, but others,
whipped up by Alcibiades, felt themselves taken advantage of – the war
was ending before they had a crack at the riches to come from further
expansion (5.16.43,45–46; 6.18.1,8–9).
Nicias tries to dissuade the assembly from undertaking the new war
against Sicily by detailing the enormous preparations they will have
to make to carry it off (6.18.9–15). But his very assiduousness in list-
ing these preparations convinces the demos that they have the prudent
advice they need to make the invasion a success. Alcibiades seizes the
moment to advance himself as Nicias’ junior partner – he, the young
and daring son, will carry out the invasion guided by his elder’s sober
logistical advice. In this way, he concludes, he and Nicias together, bold-
ness tempered by prudence, will make success inevitable (6.18.15–20).
Whereas Alcibiades believes in daring, innovation, and improvisation,
Nicias (broadly speaking, more like Cambyses, cautious father of the
daring Cyrus in the Education of Cyrus) relies on fortune and the ulti-
mate wisdom of the gods, who discourage overweening human ambi-
tion. In contrast with the Athenian generals on Melos, Nicias believes
that we must behave justly because the gods uphold justice. He repre-
sents a side of Athens that is attracted to the more traditional culture of
their Spartan adversaries, who live archaically as if nothing had changed
since the defeat of Persia and the rise of Athens. If one viewed the

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Athenian common good as coeval with imperial expansion, then Nicias

did not serve it. If one viewed the Athenian common good as peace-
ful and nonexpansionist, then Alcibiades did not serve it. Athens by
this point, however, could not clearly embrace one alternative or the
other. Although Pericles advised against overexpansion, he also told
the Athenians they could not simply let their empire go. Their so-called
allies regarded them as a “tyrant city” and would exact revenge if
Athens’ power slipped (2.7.64–65). The Athenians had a tiger by the
tail.
Bearing in mind these different leaders and social strata in Athens
after the death of Pericles, let us examine the famous “staged” dia-
logue between unnamed Athenian generals and the leaders of the small
island city of Melos, whom the Athenians want to switch sides from the
Spartans. The generals argue that the Melians, confronted by Athens’
overwhelming strength, should put aside the issue of the justice of Athe-
nian conquests and consult only their own self-interest and survival,
thereby surrendering. Thucydides makes the Athenian generals express
a compendium of views that we attribute to the Sophists, views par-
alleled in many Platonic depictions of them through Socrates’ debates
with Thrasymachus, Polus, Callicles, and Glaucon and also available
from their surviving fragments. To the extent that the Melian dialogue
is based on the real climate of opinion in Athens at the time, it sug-
gests rather remarkably the extent to which this intellectual culture of
Sophistry and pleonexia has permeated the upper strata of political
actors bent on public fame and empire, providing their spontaneous
desire for power, wealth, and glory with a philosophically derived
rhetorical platform, the ontology of the “motion-men.” The possibil-
ity that Athenian imperialism was already thoroughly interwoven with
the primordialist view of nature adds a degree of clarity to our ear-
lier suggestion that Socrates himself, in the Gorgias and Symposium,
was looking for poetic, theoretical, and rhetorical intermediaries who
might help shape his contrary message in favor of moderation and
the eschewal of empire. It also sheds light on the Athenian Stranger’s
remark to Kleinias that, living off the beaten track in Crete, he does
not understand that moral vice today is buttressed by philosophical
arguments about the cosmos. Although writing for the ages, Plato also
depicts Socrates as being, as he claims in the Gorgias, the only man
truly practicing statecraft in the Athens of his day (521), interweaving

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his defense of moderation with his repudiation of the Heracleitean view

of nature.14
The core of the generals’ view is this: “Of gods we believe, of men
we know, that by a necessary law of nature they rule wherever they
can” (5.17.104–108). Their view has three elements. The first element
echoes the skepticism expressed by Adeimantus in the Republic and by
unnamed thumotic and gloomy young men in the Laws about the gods:
they are either indifferent to human affairs and justice or side outright
with the unjust who can give them greater honors. As tyrants themselves
on a superhuman level, the gods do not condemn human tyranny or
care about human virtue. The second element echoes the ontological
premise of the pre-Socratics and Sophists summarized by the Athenian
Stranger in Book 10 of the Laws. The city and its conventions issue
unfathomably out of nature’s “great motions” according to necessity
and chance, achieving a completely time-bound and transitory authority
for as long as they last. The city’s conventions, although put forth as a
defense of justice, piety, and decency, in reality serve only the desire of
the ruling element to “get the better” of the ruled. One rules either by
rhetorical stealth and wrapped in the garb of conventional morality or
by open force, but everyone who understands the distinction between
nature and convention, and has the guts and brains to do so, seeks
rule (Laws 888–890). Finally, the generals’ maxim is cast in the form
of a universally valid anthropology similar to Thrasymachus’ maxim
that “justice is the advantage of the stronger” (Republic 338d) and
that every regime, regardless of its professed principle of justice and
its ruling element, is the same in pursuing its rulers’ advantage. Again
we recognize the connection between the pragmatic political teaching
advanced by the Sophists and their underlying connection to the natural
philosophy of the pre-Socratics: if nature is taken universally to be
motion and genesis, then the universal human counterpart of nature

14 See the fine reading of the Gorgias by Ranasinghe (2009). He explores Socrates’ claim
that it is better to suffer evil than to do it, juxtaposed against the violent backdrop
of the Peloponnesian War and its incitement to demagogic violence, calling into ques-
tion the famous Socratic proposition that no one can willingly choose to do evil if he
knows what virtue is. Arguing that the rhetorical arguments of the Sophists encoun-
tered by Socrates in the Gorgias are baser and more nihilistic than those treated in the
Republic, Ranasinghe underscores the urgent need addressed by Socrates to find a noble
rhetoric of justice to defeat the interweaving of the Sophists’ and Athenian imperialism’s
demagoguery.

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are those “motions” that upsurge into human beings as the impulse
to master and exploit others. Regimes are local, happenstantial modal
variants of this underlying universal urge.
The Sicilian expedition and its disastrous denouement, the destruc-
tion of the fleet and of the flower of the Athenian forces, dying slowly
of starvation and exposure trapped in a marble quarry in Syracuse, fol-
lows closely on the Melian dialogue, suggesting in a massive way that
it is a deserved comeuppance for the Athenian generals’ position that
men by nature “rule wherever they can” (Peloponnesian War 7.23).
Appealing as we might find this interpretation of a historical drama
echoing the tragedic structure of hubris followed by nemesis, we should
bear in mind that the Athenian “few” – the generals on Melos – may
well not have spoken this way to the Athenian “many” back home.
(The entire dialogue takes place behind closed doors between the elites
of both sides.) Counseled by the Sophists, they likely concealed their
unvarnished impiety and pleonexia behind a more seemly deference to
convention. For, as Thucydides relates, the Athenian “silent majority”
(as we have put it) are deeply concerned at this time over a defilement of
the Hermes, a god dear to the common folk, widely suspected to have
been carried out by Alcibiades on one of his drunken carouses (6.18.28–
30). (Is it too much to wonder whether the defilement took place just
before, and making him late for, his boozy arrival in the Symposium?)
Still plagued by guilt over starting the war, these conservative Athe-
nians have been consulting oracles about the gods’ judgment (2.6.54).
The generals, on the other hand, who believe the gods, if they exist at
all (they say they “know” the truth about men but merely “believe”
it about gods), are indifferent to justice either in their own sphere or
the human sphere, represent the new Athens at its most extreme, the
side that Alcibiades belongs to as well. The generals on Melos, how-
ever, have not as yet thought through or carried out the consequences
for Athenian domestic politics of what they propose for foreign affairs:
if, as a necessary law of nature, you must “have more” wherever you
can, why not achieve this tyrannical power over your own people? The
Athenian silent majority instinctively fear that Alcibiades, on the eve of
being placed in command of an enormous armada and army, is on the
verge of connecting these dots.
The Athenians continue to want power over others and the prosper-
ity it brings. They continue to heed Pericles’ advice, in his waning days,

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that their empire is a tiger by the tail and that, if they let it go, the peo-
ples they have oppressed will turn on them savagely. Yet although the
essence of Pericles’ utilitarian moderation was that the empire should
neither expand beyond its resources nor be abandoned, the majority
of Athenians, whatever their misgivings, cannot resist the lure of fur-
ther expansion and so launch the Sicilian expedition. At the same time,
however, they are afraid that to give the man with enough daring to
bring the invasion off the military power to do so – Alcibiades – will
simultaneously allow him to have power over them. They want to tyran-
nize over others without being tyrannized over. This is why they recall
Alcibiades from the expedition after it has embarked and place their
confidence in Nicias, even though Nicias lacks the daring to carry it off
and opposed it categorically as madly imprudent for opening another
war front when the contest with Sparta was far from resolved (6.18.9–
13). The demand for freedom from tyranny in democratic domestic
politics, Thucydides teaches, contradicts the measures that need to be
taken to achieve tyranny abroad. The expedition is a disaster because
of the nature of democratic politics in particular and of the political
community in general. Imperialistic democracy gives full flower to indi-
vidual ambition, freedom, prosperity, innovation, public magnificence,
and open-mindedness – all the things Pericles praised about Athens in
his famous funeral oration at the outset of the conflict with Sparta
(2.6.34–47). Imperialistic democracy also subverts the common good,
however, creating an irreparable tension between the individual and the
city, and gives those inclined to or tempted by the prospect of tyranny
a licit scope for their ambition.
Although Plato’s dialogues are of permanent significance, rising from
the particular context of ancient Athens to elucidate truths that are uni-
versal and lasting, they do unfold quite explicitly against the backdrop
of Athens’ extraordinary rise and fall as narrated by Thucydides, and
many events and characters from Thucydides’ narrative (Alcibiades,
Nicias, Laches) appear in Plato’s dialogues. Moreover, the Alcibiades
of history and of the Platonic dialogues do closely converge. For it was
Alcibiades, the leader of the war party in Athens, who most certainly
did think through the unspecified ramifications for internal Athenian
politics of the thesis advanced by the generals on Melos that one rules
wherever one can. He did connect the dots between empire abroad and
tyranny at home. He was impious and recognized no legal or moral

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restraints on his ambition. After Sicily, he planned to go on to take

Carthage (6.18.5–16). He was also the beloved of Socrates. It is clear
from the Platonic dialogues that Socrates encouraged all of his inter-
locutors to distinguish between happiness by nature and happiness by
convention, not in order to encourage them to identify the natural life
with pleonexia but, on the contrary, to enable them to grasp that mas-
tery was itself the aim of most conventional accounts of the good life,
to be contrasted with the naturally superior happiness of philosophiz-
ing. In other words, contrary to the Sophists’ depiction of a naturally
enlightened few who pursued mastery and a pusillanimous majority
who clung to conventional equality and safety, in Socrates’ diagnosis of
the ills of the cities, most people were conflicted about these aims. The
desire for mastery was itself in a way vulgar and demotic. Hence, the
inevitable dissatisfaction of Callicles who, as a prospective “best man,”
can in Socrates’ judgment only assert his natural excellence by pander-
ing to that same pusillanimous majority (Gorgias 513, 521). Socrates
presents philosophy as a way of life that, in the devotion of all its pas-
sions to the love of wisdom, thereby sluicing eros and thumos off from
the temptations of tyranny and pleonexia, entails the civic virtues of
justice and moderation as well. In this way, he can plausibly present
the philosophic life as the best guardian of justice, protecting it from
the assaults of the Sophists and the “motion-men,” as well as the best
curative therapy for the proto-tyrant (Republic 485d–486b).
Nevertheless, the Platonic Socrates’ defense of justice on philosophi-
cal grounds is not the same thing as believing in it out of custom, habit,
and veneration for tradition, like the Just Argument in the Clouds.
Before Socrates can defend justice as natural, he must concede, even
stimulate, an awareness of the distinction between true justice or happi-
ness and their merely conventional versions. However, while calling the
desirability of tyranny into question, that probing into the difference
between natural and conventional happiness also calls into question
ordinary morality, patriotism, the love of family, and piety. As we ear-
lier observed, the opening move in the Republic to examine justice on
the analogy of an art subverts property rights almost instantly (includ-
ing the usefulness of wealth in propitiating the gods through sacrifice).
By the time the best regime is set in place, every source of ordinary
human decency flowing from family affection and respect for tradition
has been abolished (Republic 449c–d, 472c–e, 462c–d). Socrates must

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tempt the young to abandon conventional justice to a degree, so as to

ground natural justice more firmly in their characters through a vision
of the soul and of the whole that connects it to the transcendent truth.
This means that, in some way, he is subverting the conventional decen-
cies, just as a great teacher whom a student ends up loving more than
his own father (like Xenophon’s story of Tigranes and the “Armenian
Socrates”) is in some sense a corrupter of the youth.
Hence the dilemma of Callicles, who can readily join Socrates in criti-
cizing Pericles’ successors as unworthy for not knowing the art of ruling
but who is genuinely shocked when Socrates defines Pericles himself out
of the equation (Gorgias 503). Callicles wants someone to restore the
manly and imperial expediential prudence of the great Pericles so as to
restore the city to its former grandeur. Socrates, by contrast, identifies
prudence with the reining in of eros by reason in the soul, both within
each citizen and within the city collectively (504–508): It is a little as
if Socrates dismissed any distinction between Winston Churchill and
Jimmy Carter as leaders because neither of them truly understood the
geometrical proportionality of the cosmos. And so, at the end of every
corridor in the world of the dialogues, we encounter the remaining mys-
tery of Socrates’ influence on Alcibiades: Did he have to corrupt him
a little further in order to salvage what was still incorruptible? Is the
selfish, thoughtless wastrel who enters Socrates’ phrontisterion in the
Clouds – to emerge, after his unseen and unheard instruction, equipped
with the theoretical distinction between nature and convention to justify
his vices – better or worse off than he was before?15
The central dilemma of the Peloponnesian War, then, was the contra-
diction between democratic self-government at home and imperialism
abroad. The Athenian demos feared the rule of a tyrant over them-
selves, but happily acted as a tyrant city over others. The transition
from the archaic city to the feverish city opened up an avenue of ambi-
tion for the young that the old ways would have thoroughly suppressed,
as do the Spartans still in their preference for collective discipline and
ingrained custom over individual brilliance and innovation (Pelopon-
nesian War 1.3.80–86). A psychological type like Alcibiades is solicited
by the aggressive aims of empire, simultaneously opening up the danger
of tyranny at home.

15 Consider also Newell (2000) pp. 185–195.

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 tyranny

Viewed against the backdrop of this long imperial struggle, its zenith
and denouement in Athenian defeat, the backlash at home of fear
(8.24.1) and suspicion of would-be tyrants and their cronies and men-
tors (Socrates was eventually swept up in this post-Alcibiadean atmo-
sphere of populist paranoia), the classics offer two solutions for resolv-
ing the contradiction between democracy and empire. They shared
common ground with the poets in that they did not dispute the fact that
exceptional ambition is a naturally recurrent and spontaneous variation
in human psychology; that it could not be extirpated or entirely fore-
stalled, and was sometimes necessary to aid the city. But, whereas the
poets were resigned to ambition periodically arising and periodically
being crushed by an inscrutable divine necessity, the classical politi-
cal philosophers believed that this potentially tyrannical soul could be
rehabilitated into the consistent service of justice. On the other hand, in
contrast with modern Hobbesian statecraft, the aim was not to re-wire
Alcibiades through behavior modification into a clockwork orange (like
Anthony Burgess’ character Alex), but to turn him into a steadfast and
self-controlled Stoic warrior like (to take one important version) the
Auxillaries in the Republic.
The mainstream classical tradition embodied by Plato and Aristo-
tle tries as much as possible to insulate a self-governing republic from
foreign entanglements, which involves discrediting democracy itself –
with its licentiousness, individualism, love of variety, luxury and for-
eign fashion, and proneness to demagogues – in favor of an austere,
inward-looking, aristocratic republic of the best men. A concentration
on internal self-government and an avoidance of imperial ambition
through a purely defensive foreign policy, according to the classical
prescription, will prevent politics from soliciting the supremely ambi-
tious proto-tyrant who can court the many and mask his rise as the
indispensable servant of imperial expansion bringing the common peo-
ple greater riches (Republic 422a–423b; Politics 1333b26–40; 1330b-
1331a; 1324b22–41; 1325b23–33). These potential tyrants, the Alcibi-
adean men, must be forestalled from developing the erotic disorder that
is the psychological root of their tyrannical longing by an education in
civic virtue governed by philosophy. Alcibiades might have proven to
be a magnificent half-birth, but if the “pattern in the sky” (Republic
592b) of the best regime is transmitted to posterity, it may re-shape the
characters of future such men. Alcibiades will become Cicero’s Scipio,

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subordinating the licit honor that comes from serving a republic of laws
to his higher admiration for the life of the mind, thus submitting to the
hierarchy of reason over honor in Diotima’s Ladder in a way that the
actual Alcibiades, beginning with his ribald and swaggering entrance
to the dialogue and his semi-comic, semi-serious battle with Socrates to
woo Agathon, refused to do (Symposium 212d–213e).
Thus, in the main, for Plato and Aristotle the rule of reason, to what-
ever degree practicably possible, aided by an education that sublimates
and re-directs tyrannical eros and thumos toward serving the common
good, is at its best co-terminous with republican self-government. Even
so, as we have seen at some length, Plato and Aristotle do admit the
possibility of a tyranically founded just regime and a rational monar-
chy absolute in authority and multi-national in scope. In Xenophon,
we find the fullest exploration of this alternative, whereby reason is
co-terminous with the multi-national art of household management.
It is hard not to see in Xenophon’s re-creation of the young Cyrus
a version of what Alcibiades might have become if a philosophically
grounded education had taken hold in his character from early on,
converting him, not into the citizen of a republic friendly to philosophy
envisioned by Plato and Aristotle, but into a benign, efficient, moderate,
and self-controlled universal ruler extending the pattern of the Good to
all peoples under his sway while at the same time gratifying his eros for
limitless prestige. In other words, instead of, as the Platonic Socrates
does, leading Alcibiades to the universality of thought by way of his
universal ambition so as to deliver him back to his city better equipped
to govern in it, Xenophon in effect takes him from the universality of
thought to the actualization of a universalistic government. Whereas
Plato and Aristotle try to resolve the contradiction between democracy
and empire by excluding empire and extolling the reform of republi-
can self-government in accordance with reason, Xenophon resolves it
(at least speculatively) by forsaking the polis and extolling the reform
of empire in accordance with reason. My suggested identification of
Xenophon’s Cyrus with an Alcibiades transformed into an architec-
tonically guided imperial statesman of genius is hinted at in Cyrus’s
indirect encounter with the “Armenian Socrates” whose unjust execu-
tion for allegedly alienating the sons from the fathers he posthumously
avenges. This identification is even more strikingly evoked by Cyrus’s
dialogue with his father Cambyses, a republican limited monarch

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who apparently is guided privately, beyond the sphere of the Persian

laws, by an understanding of the Good with many parallels to the
Xenophontic Socrates.16 It is as if, while by convention, Socrates can-
not take the place of the biological father of Alcibiades, in a regime
like the Persian Republic where the cultivation of justice and the rest of
virtue in the soul is more natural than the accidents of birth, he could be
Alcibiades’ father by nature in the highest and fullest meaning of what
is natural.
In this fictional makeover of Alcibiades, the flawed yet brilliant and
preeminent democratic leader of his generation, Xenophon seems to
take the tumultuous career of Alcibiades’ friendship with Socrates and
graft it onto a naturally virtuous political order, reimagining a world
in which Socrates (Cambyses) could govern and in which Alcibiades
(Cyrus) could be a good citizen and, later, a benevolent king. In this fan-
tasy, Socrates goes from being the older man who seduced the younger
man so as to draw him into philosophy – and thereby arguably under-
mined his attachment to conventional mores by enflaming his ambition
as a propaedeutic to greater philosophical openness – to being the wise,
grave, and responsible father of a brilliant boy, the intersection of whose
naturally great intellect, bravery, and eros for honor with an education
in republican moderation and justice flowers in a perfect ruler for all
mankind. Socrates, the lover of Alcibiades in the wide-open democ-
racy of Athens, becomes, through Xenophon’s philosophical fantasy,
his father as the king of a virtuous republic. In this sense, Xenophon’s
monarchical utopia, often hailed as the first mirror of princes, the viade
mecum of Scipio the Elder, enabled Socrates, as it were, to father many
ambitious young men posthumously and lead them from the tempta-
tions of tyranny toward excellence of soul, perhaps succeeding with
them where he had failed with Alcibiades himself.
Indispensable to the rearing of this improved Alcibiades would be
his initial exposure to the rigors and habituation of that republican
education with which the life of Cyrus begins, a partial concession by
Xenophon to the Platonic and Aristotelian understanding of the best
regime. A tall order, one might think – rational and benevolent impe-
rial authority rooted in republican virtue of character. Yet as we have
already noted, as a first installment in the historical influence of this

16 See the very able discussion of “Cyrus’ Socratic education” in Rasmussen (2009) ch. 5.

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prescription, we might look to Alexander the Great, whose upbringing

in a semi-Greek backwater of martial prowess led him eventually to
take the real King of Kings’ throne, aided by an education in Greek
philosophy, perhaps even by Aristotle. That is to say, a crude and mini-
malist version of Plato’s and Aristotle’s republican prescription, of their
preference for the neighborly and austere small polis over empire and
even over the feverish polis Athens, yields at length the Xenophontic
pambasileus in historical reality. As we see in the chapters to come, this
derivation of successful imperialism from republican virtue is precisely
Machiavelli’s understanding of the success of the greatest empire ever
known in reality, that vastly more stable and long-lived successor to
the Alexandrian empire, “the Senate and People of Rome.” Although
in almost all respects Machiavelli must forsake the Platonic and Aris-
totelian accounts of virtue and the art of ruling, in Xenophon he finds
a common stalk.

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 V

machiavelli,
xenophon, and
xenophon’s cyrus

Readers of Machiavelli might well be struck by the prominent place

occupied in his works by Xenophon. To be sure, this is more puz-
zling to present-day readers than it would have been to Machiavelli’s
contemporaries. Castiglione and other contributors to the “mirror of
princes” genre typically linked Xenophon with Plato, Aristotle, and
Cicero as being among the chief ancient authorities on good govern-
ment. Humanists including Poggio, Bruno, and Pontano – often dis-
cussed as components of the Renaissance context surrounding Machi-
avelli – were admirers of Xenophon’s writings and influenced by them.
As a successful general and arbiter of the affairs of Persia, Xenophon
was particularly admired during classical antiquity and again during
the Renaissance for his balance of active and contemplative virtues, of
particular concern to the Renaissance humanists’ wish to free a sphere
for pragmatic statesmanship from the excessive restrictions of Chris-
tian otherworldliness.1 Still, given the paucity of Machiavelli’s explicit

1 There is a distinguished strain of French classical scholarship on Xenophon’s political

thought. See especially Delebecque (1957), Luccioni (1947), and Hemardinquer (1872).
Cicero described the Education of Cyrus as the “model of the just empire” and the
constant guide of Scipio the Elder (Tusculan Disputations 2.26.62), descriptions that
were echoed many times in humanist literature (see, e.g., Gallet-Guerne [1974] pp. 182–
184]). Munscher provides a detailed summary of Xenophon’s influence on Greek and
Roman literature (1920) pp. 70–75. For the Renaissance and Enlightenment reception
of Xenophon, see Anderson (1974) pp. 1–8. The Education of Cyrus, the Hiero and the
Oeconomicus, all of which deal with princely rule, were among the first classical treatises
to be translated when the knowledge of Greek was reintroduced to the West. Bruni trans-
lated the Hiero into Latin in 1400–1404 (Gallet-Guerne [1974] pp. 58–59; Baron [1955]
pp. 117). Cardinal Tomaso Parentucelli, the future Pope Nicholas V and founder the
Vatican Library, asked Poggio in 1403 to translate the Education of Cyrus. The Cardi-
nal’s other translation assignments included Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Polybius,

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references to other classical authors in contrast with his contemporaries

among the humanists, his emphasis on Xenophon stands out, especially
in contexts in which Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero seem especially con-
spicuous by their absence. For example, Machiavelli’s famous complaint
in chapter 15 of The Prince that “many have imagined republics and
principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality”
would seem especially to evoke the Republic of Plato, a “nowhere” and
“pattern in the sky” that St. Augustine had adapted to Christianity as
the otherworldly City of God. This statement occurs, moreover, in the
midst of Machiavelli’s refutation of the traditional catalogue of virtues
including liberality, compassion, and honesty, a refutation aimed at
both their original classical sources and their adaptation by Christian
and humanist authors. Here, of all places, one would expect Machi-
avelli to criticize Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics explicitly. Yet it
is Xenophon whom Machiavelli offers as his sole example of traditional
“writers” about the virtues.
Why, then, should Machiavelli have chosen as the chief representa-
tive of classical thought a figure who, although esteemed by his con-
temporaries, would probably not have been chosen as the one name
most worth mentioning, to the exclusion of all the others, among
the ancient authorities on good government? In this chapter, I argue
that the explanation lies in Machiavelli’s paradoxical need to refute, at
what for him is exceptional length, the classical author whose views of
politics most resembled his own prescription for princely government
that encourages material prosperity through imperial expansion. In this
chapter, Machiavelli’s partiality toward Xenophon will be substanti-
ated through a close reading of every reference to Xenophon in The
Prince and Discourses. On the basis of those readings, we also consider
why, at the end of the day, Machiavelli must part ways with even this
most congenial of classical antecedents. The reason centers on what

Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Gallet-Guerne

[1974] pp. 60–63). According to Gilbert, Aristotle’s Politics and Xenophon’s Educa-
tion of Cyrus were the main classical authorities for Bernaldus, Pontanus, Erasmus, and
Pigua. Gilbert (1938) pp. 12–13, 236. See also Butterfield (1940) p. 56. Thus, Erasmus’s
Education of a Christian Prince was written with the Education of Cyrus in mind. In
1470, Vasco Fernandez translated Poggio’s Latin Education of Cyrus for the young Duke
of Burgundy, making it one of the first transmissions of Italian humanism to Burgun-
dian humanism (Gallet-Guerne [1974] pp. xi–xvi, 27–32). Poggio’s Latin version was
translated into Italian by his son Iacoppo di Messer Poggio in 1521.

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I am arguing throughout this book is the crucial distinction between

classical and modern theories of statecraft altogether. For Xenophon,
Cyrus’s excellence unfolds within the natural order as the fulfillment
of a human potentiality for virtue. For Machiavelli, by contrast, state-
craft is a project for the external mastery of nature and human nature,
including the prince’s own inner psyche. Ultimately, as we consider
here, Machiavelli is therefore critical of Xenophon for – like Plato –
understanding the prince’s longings in erotic terms. Although as we
saw in Chapter 4, Cyrus is cold toward personal erotic attachments,
he is consumed by an eros for the admiration of “all men” and eager
to be their beloved without loving them in return. For Machiavelli, by
contrast, these varieties of eros amount to a specious criterion of nat-
ural satisfaction that, especially as evidenced by Xenophon’s influence
on Scipio, can only lead to failure and the undermining of manly repub-
lican vigor. Along with my discussion of Machiavelli’s deeroticization
of princely psychology, in order to bring into relief what is new about
Machiavelli’s teaching, I also argue that Machiavelli’s prescription for
the mastery of Fortuna is at bottom and somewhat unexpectedly linked
to a post-Augustinian understanding of nature and will and is there-
fore impossible without the precedent of the Abrahamic God’s rela-
tionship to nature. This means that his new science of politics cannot
be understood solely within the context of a debate with the classi-
cal teachings. A part of what is distinctively modern about Machi-
avelli, I try to show, is dependent on a variant of Christian ontology –
albeit entirely secularized and desacralized – not found in any classical
source.
“The life of Cyrus written by Xenophon,” as we will see, is at the
heart of Machiavelli’s hermeneutical encounter with the ancients. As
we have observed in previous chapters, Cyrus the Great haunted the
imagination of the ancient Greeks not only because he was the founder
of the empire that almost overwhelmed them, but – more intriguingly –
as a model for their own statecraft. It is well known that the classi-
cal philosophers, chiefly represented by Plato and Aristotle, endorsed
the neighborly small republic as their main prescription for virtuous
government. Nevertheless, they also display considerable approbation
for monarchy, particularly the kind represented by Cyrus. The Platonic
Socrates uses the Great King as a paradigm for clear thinking about the

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art of ruling, and the Athenian Stranger in the Laws considers Cyrus’s
type of monarchy to be one of the two mother regime principles along
with democracy (Plato Laws 694–697). As we saw in Chapter 3, Aris-
totle in his Politics defines virtuous kingship as the exercise of the art
of household management over “cities and peoples” (Aristotle Politics
1285b20). Although this passage from Aristotle is sometimes taken to
allude to Alexander the Great, we have observed that it could also serve
as a brief summary of Xenophon’s monarchical utopia, the Education
of Cyrus. Among the classical writers on statecraft, Xenophon stands
out for his interest in the model provided by Cyrus’s monarchy, which
he explores in greater depth and to a far greater extent than any of
the others. As we noted earlier, according to an ancient tradition, the
Education of Cyrus was widely regarded as Xenophon’s central treatise
on politics, a multinational monarchical ideal paralleling (and perhaps
intended to rival) Plato’s idealized polis in the Republic.2
Just as the interpretation of Cyrus teaches us something about how
the Greeks evolved their own conceptions of monarchy, the way in
which that classical complex of ideas was interpreted by Machiavelli
can teach us something about how the modern conception of monarchy
and of statecraft in general differs from its classical antecedents. As we
saw in the last chapter, among the ancient thinkers, Xenophon gives
considerably more latitude, through his reflections in the Education of
Cyrus, to a rationally organized, expansionist, multinational monarchy
premised on the glory seeking and material enrichment of its individual
subjects, and correspondingly downplays the appeal of the small
homogeneous republic with its nonexpansionist foreign policy and
economic austerity. Xenophon’s idealization of Cyrus’s monarchy,
in other words, is congenial with one major rubric of Machiavelli’s
own recommendations for a more realistic art of ruling expressly
aimed at the maximization of power and economic well-being. Because
Xenophon was widely admired during classical antiquity and the
Renaissance as one of the best writers on monarchy, it is, I suggest,
rhetorically convenient for Machiavelli to wrap himself in the venerable

2 See, for example, Xenophon (1880) p. xvi. I have described these prescriptions as “ideal”
because that term is immediately accessible. However, I remind the reader to bear in mind
my earlier remarks on why the classical prescriptions for the best regime cannot strictly
speaking be considered “ideals” in the modern Kantian sense.

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Socratic’s authority while otherwise undermining the overall classical

preference for the nonexpansionist small republic.3 At the same time,
by carefully comparing what Machiavelli terms “the life of Cyrus
written by Xenophon” in contradistinction to what Machiavelli would
have us understand about the real Cyrus and how he rose to power,
we will understand what is distinctively modern about Machiavelli’s
conception of monarchy, such that he must at the end of the day part
ways with even this most congenial of classical precedents.

virtue defined as the mastery of fortuna

In chapter 6 of Machiavelli’s Prince, virtue is defined as the capacity
not to rely on Fortuna but to assert one’s mastery over it. In contrast
with the ancients, who believed that we achieve virtue to the extent that
we can reconcile ourselves to nature’s patterns, virtue is now equated
with the strength of will to oppose nature out and out. The traditional
distinction between virtue and vice is therefore replaced by Machiavelli’s
distinction between relying on virtue and relying on fortune. As we will
see, however, it is still useful for a ruler to appear virtuous in the
traditional sense – that, too, is a source of power.
In his use of the word virtu, Machiavelli plays upon an ambiguity
central to the concept of virtue. The Greek word for virtue, arete, meant
more generally “excellence” in many different areas. It could possess
the connotation that later came to predominate, through the influence
of Stoicism and Christianity, of self-abnegation on behalf of the morally
good, but it was originally far more elastic, extending to excellence in
areas – for instance, the art of war – to which we would not ordi-
narily apply the term “virtue” in its more spiritualized version. More-
over, even when a thinker like Aristotle uses the term to connote the

3 Most humanists read the Education of Cyrus as presenting a paragon of kingly goodness,
although this was not always thought to be incompatible with martial prowess. See,
for example, Poggio’s dedication of his translation to Alphonso of Aragon (quoted in
Gilbert [1938] p. 131) and Vasco Fernandez’s preface to his translation (Gallet-Guerne
[1974] pp. 182–184). Montaigne, although admiring the work, was “astonished” by “the
great liberty allowed by Xenophon” in “his complete emperor” for deception. Montaigne
(1952) p. 13. Sometimes we find Xenophon being read in a more starkly Machiavellian
manner, as when, for example, James I in the Basilikon Doron refers to the Education of
Cyrus to establish the maxim that a prince needs to begin his reign by being deliberately
cruel so that he can then afford to be merciful. Gilbert (1938) p. 101.

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proper balance of the intellect and the passions in pursuit of the good, a
meaning of virtue that we would readily recognize, he does not exclude
the possibility that excellence in civic life could encompass a longing for
preeminence bordering on arrogance and a disregard for the views of
others – such that his term “superlative virtue,” which describes those
few who possess prudence and are therefore best suited to govern, has a
connotation of “overbearing” or “excessive” (huperbole) talent, when
we would not ordinarily think it possible to have too much goodness of
character. These ambiguities are heightened by the Latin translation of
arete by the much narrower and specific term virtus, the root of which
means a manly man, analogous to the term aner in Greek, such that
virtus is very nearly synonymous with manly courage, especially in war.
Hence, moral thinkers such as Cicero, and later Christian theologians
such as St. Augustine, must continue to use this word originally connot-
ing martial prowess as they transpose to it gentler virtues of moderation
and an openness to philosophical or divine transcendence. While virtus
comes to include these more sublime connotations, it never loses its
original connotation of manly courage and honor in ordinary usage.
Hence, when Machiavelli discusses the “virtues” of the prince and of
statesmen, he can play upon this full range of meanings by pushing
what he means by virtu back in the pagan direction of manly honor
and victory as the basis for his even more radical assimilation of virtue
to the will to master nature. Even the morally inclined reader finds it
difficult to resist being drawn in, because even from the Christian per-
spective, it would not have been claimed that virtue had no connotation
at all of political and military strength or of civic-spiritedness, even if
faith ranked much higher. This is the thin edge of the wedge for Machi-
avelli slowly but surely divesting his use of virtu of any otherworldly
or transcendental associations at all. Among the ancients, Xenophon is
his closest ally in doing so, which is why it is so useful for Machiavelli,
writing in an atmosphere of intense respect for classical antiquity, to
invoke his venerable precedent.
Cyrus the Great is listed, along with Moses, Romulus, and The-
seus, as princes of “outstanding virtue” because of their capacity to
master fortune. Here the classical and Abrahamic codes of rule begin
to be conflated, for not only is a prophet (Moses) equated with secu-
lar rulers (Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus), thus anticipating Spinoza’s
presentation of him as creating Judaism to achieve social cohesion

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among the Hebrews, but the reverse is also true – extraordinarily

successful secular rulers are implicitly equated with prophets. Such
“princes,” Machiavelli writes, receive nothing from fortune but “the
opportunity, which gave them the matter enabling them to introduce
any form they pleased.” As we observed in Chapter 2, the capacity of
God as chief artisan of the universe to introduce form into matter is
a recognizable scholastic formulation. Through his use of this scholas-
tic terminology, Machiavelli speculatively transfers this divine capacity
to reshape nature to human princely agency, a stark repudiation of
both the classical and Christian traditions. For Aristotle, we recall from
Chapter 3, statesmanship should rely as much as possible on the breed-
ing of character through education and on a favorable environment. As
we saw, the recrafting of nature through economic productivity and of
human nature through despotic reforms is severely discouraged (Politics
1258a). For St. Augustine, whatever degree of virtue humans are capa-
ble of achieving can come only through submission to God’s grace –
man’s will can achieve nothing on its own ([1958] p. 116]).
Machiavelli’s redefinition of virtue as antinatural willpower is
squarely aimed at both traditions. To recall an argument from Chap-
ter 2, for the classics generally – and on this point Christian theology
would have been at one with them – the only way in which a man can
decrease the influence of fortune over his life is to decrease his reliance
on the external and perishable goods required to gratify his excessive
pleasures. The mastery of fortune, to the extent that it is possible, comes
through the transcendence of aberrant passion and the reform of the
soul through its realignment with the moderation and orderliness that
are superordinate over chance and impulse in the cosmos. For Machi-
avelli, by contrast, as we consider at length in this chapter and the next,
the effective channeling of the passions into the maximization of power
and wealth empowers the will to conquer the limiting conditions placed
on us by nature; above all to conquer the delusion of that harmonious
view of the cosmos that, in Machiavelli’s view, retards honor seeking
and vigorous princely action. The methodical or dispassionate harness-
ing of passion to energize the will – not the harmony of mind, soul,
and passions prescribed by the classics and, suitably modified for reli-
gious purposes, by Christian theology – is the paradox at the core of
Machiavelli’s new prince.

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 machiavelli, xenophon, and xenophon’s cyrus

Whereas both the classical and Christian authorities encourage us

to rely on the beneficence of fortune (be it nature or providence), for
Machiavelli, bad fortune is actually preferable to good fortune because
it compels us to struggle and fight back:

It was necessary then for Moses to find the people of Israel in Egypt, enslaved
by the Egyptians, so that they would be disposed to follow him in order to
get out of their servitude. It was fitting that Romulus not be received in Alba,
that he should have been exposed at birth, if he was to become king of Rome
and founder of that fatherland. Cyrus needed to find the Persians malcontent
with the empire of the Medes, and the Medes soft and effeminate because of
a long peace.

This account of Cyrus as an adventurer of obscure origins who ral-

lies a Persian people already under the yoke of the Medes clearly does
not correspond with that of Xenophon but more closely resembles that
of Herodotus. Why? Because in Xenophon’s account, Cyrus relies on
many gifts from fortune – the fact that he is born the son of the Per-
sian king and grandson of the neighboring, largely benevolent tyrant
of Media, who recognizes his merit and elevates him among the Medes
at the expense of his own son and heir, and above all the superb educa-
tion the young Cyrus receives from the Persian Republic, an idealization
of the Spartan republic. In Xenophon’s account, far from being unruly
vassals of the Medes as Machiavelli presents them, the Persians have
their own self-sufficient regime rigorously devoted to a civic education
in serving the common good. As we saw in the last chapter, Xenophon’s
Cyrus sparks Persia’s rise from republic to empire by appealing to the
ambitions of the other young aristocrats for wider horizons for glory
and wealth. It transpires that they are not content with the regime’s aus-
tere internal paidea. Machiavelli, however, thrusts all of these nuances
aside – Xenophon’s complex interconnections between Cyrus’s natural
disposition, his educational character formation, and his inherited cir-
cumstances – and instead gives us Herodotus’s unvarnished account of
an obscure adventurer who leads a rebellion by a downtrodden peo-
ple into ever expanding conquests. In the starkest imaginable contrast
with Xenophon’s portrayal of Cyrus’s Median grandfather as a benign
benefactor, Herodotus relates that he tried to have his infant grandson
killed (Histories 1.102–130).

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The main lesson of the chapter, according to Machiavelli, is that

“armed prophets” succeed and “unarmed prophets” fail. Still, arms
alone are not enough. A prince of truly outstanding virtue must also
be perceived by the people as a prophet and “held in veneration.”
Both secular and religious rulers (for Machiavelli, a distinction without
a difference) use their limitless power at the height of their achieve-
ments to shape the history of their own rise retroactively and leave
behind an account that to the degree possible omits the bloodshed and
illegitimacy of their origins and burnishes the ruler for posterity with
the conventionally acclaimed moral virtues. Machiavelli’s implication
is that Moses decisively shaped the account we receive of him from
the Torah, while Theseus and Romulus also enter received history as
divinely inspired and mandated.4 In a similar vein, we can envision the
real Cyrus – the “armed prophet” who rose from nothing – passing
himself off to posterity as the ennobling and edifying account we find
of him in the Education of Cyrus.

cyrus the great in machiavelli’s discourses

The forgoing considerations will help us understand Machiavelli’s fur-
ther account of Cyrus in the Discourses, which will in turn prepare us
for the extended critique of classical statecraft undertaken through the
treatment of the traditional catalogue of the virtues in chapters 15 to
18 of The Prince, where both the real Cyrus uncovered by Machiavelli
and Xenophon’s Cyrus form a major leitmotif.
The first cluster of references to Cyrus is in Book 2, chapters 11 to
13, of the Discourses. The general theme of these chapters is the com-
parative merits of the use of force and fraud and how they contribute to
the reputation of a prince. Chapter 11 argues that one should not make
alliances with leaders who have a great reputation but lack the force to
back it up. This is the transition to chapter 12, where Machiavelli con-
siders the maxim that if you fear a potential enemy, you should go and
assault him where he lives rather than wait to be attacked. If you wait to
be attacked, even if you defeat the enemy inside your own borders, he
will retain his kingdom intact to threaten you another day. If you strike
him at home and win, the threat is removed. Referring to Herodotus’s

4 Still fascinating in this regard is the interpretation of Moses by Wildavsky (2005).

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account of Cyrus, Machiavelli says that Croesus gave this advice to

Cyrus with respect to attacking Queen Tamyris of the Massageti.
Others, Machiavelli continues, say that Hannibal gave Antiochus the
same advice – attack the Romans in their own Italian homeland. This
pairing is probably deliberate, for, as we will consider, in chapter 17
of The Prince, Machiavelli again links Hannibal with the real Cyrus as
opposed to Xenophon’s Cyrus.
In chapter 13 of Book 2, Machiavelli proposes that “one comes from
base to great fortune more through fraud than through force.” Men of
lowly and obscure origins can only come to greatness through force or
fraud or a combination of the two, albeit with an emphasis on fraud.
Left aside altogether from consideration are those whose “rank . . . may
be given or left by inheritance to them.” These latter are, in other
words, favored by fortune by being born to their princely status, and
so not compelled to rely sheerly on their virtue as defined in chapter 6
of The Prince. Xenophon’s Cyrus, born the son of the Persian king
Cambyses, firmly conforms to this latter pattern, whereas Herodotus’s
Cyrus, an adventurer of obscure origins, does not. Machiavelli’s first
line of argument is that one can rise from “obscure or base fortune” to
empire through fraud alone but not through “open force alone.” This
would appear to imply that he could also rise to great fortune through
a combination of force and fraud, or through the indirect (as opposed
to “open”) use of force. To illustrate the point, Machiavelli provides
the longest discussion of Xenophon’s Cyrus so far in the Discourses:

Xenophon in his life of Cyrus shows this necessity to deceive, considering

that the first expedition that he has Cyrus make against the king of Armenia
is full of fraud, and that he makes him seize his kingdom through deception
and not through force. And he does not conclude otherwise from this action
than that it is necessary for a prince who wishes to do great things to learn to
deceive. Besides this, he makes him deceive Cyaxares, king of the Medes, his
maternal uncle, in several modes; without which fraud he shows that Cyrus
could not have attained that greatness he came to.

The reader must wonder just how apt this illustration is for Machi-
avelli’s own theme of rising from base to great fortune. For Xenophon’s
Cyrus was, to reiterate, never a man of base or obscure origins. In fact, as
the son of the Persian king and grandson of the Median king, he would
appear to be squarely in the category that Machiavelli has excluded

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from consideration: “rank that another has attained may be given or

left by inheritance to them.” I suggest that what Machiavelli is doing
here is to accept Xenophon’s foreground account of Cyrus, but supple-
menting it with his own more realistic account of Cyrus’s base origins
(closer to the Herodotean version) in order to let the reader know how
the real Cyrus might eventually have been in a position to leave to
posterity Xenophon’s account of him as a legitimate prince marked for
great fortune from the very outset. To some extent, then, he relies on
Xenophon’s account for important evidence of Cyrus’s statecraft but
will not limit himself to a reliance on it. As a prince of thought, so to
speak, Machiavelli’s own virtue, the root of his own ability not to rely
on fortune, emerges from his will not to rely on the classical political
philosophers, enabling him to encourage princes and potential princes
not to rely on their advice regarding practical statecraft.
As described here by Machiavelli, Xenophon clearly shows an under-
standing of the need for fraud: his Cyrus subverts and seizes the king-
dom of Armenia through fraud and not through “open” force. Yet in
the full account of Cyrus’s conquest of Armenia in the Education of
Cyrus, Cyrus’s massing of forces on the Armenian border on the eve
of the invasion under the pretense of a hunt is also a kind of force or
at least a threat of force. The feigned hunt evolves seamlessly into war;
fraud evolves seamlessly into force. In Book 3, chapter 39, the maxim
of which is “that a Captain ought to be a knower of sites,” Machi-
avelli further blurs the distinction between force and fraud in his final
reference to Cyrus:

In the life of Cyrus, Xenophon shows that when Cyrus was going to assault
the king of Armenia, in devising that struggle he reminded his men that this
was none other than one of those hunts that they had often undertaken with
him. He reminded those whom he sent in ambush on top of mountains that
they were like those who went to hold the nets on the ridges, and those who
rode the plains that they were like those who went to flush the beast from the
cover so that when hunted it would trip into the nets.

Returning to Book 2, chapter 13, of the Discourses, Machiavelli,

as we have seen, states rather bluntly that Xenophon “makes” Cyrus
deceive his uncle Cyaxares repeatedly. However, this might not be so
clear to someone reading the Education of Cyrus unaware of Machi-
avelli’s interpretation. It is not so much that Cyrus ruthlessly deceives

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Cyaxares, heir to the throne of Media, as that Cyrus’s grandfather,

the benign tyrant Astyages, is hugely taken with his grandson’s talents
and gradually allows the boy to displace his own hapless son and heir.
Cyaxares reacts to his displacement more with resignation than with
anger, and, later on, Cyrus reconciles him to his figurehead role by
surrounding him with luxury. As Cyaxares says resignedly when Cyrus
outshines him even as a young boy by being too daring on the hunt, “Do
as you wish, for now it looks as if it were you who are our king” (1.4.9).
In the Education of Cyrus, the principal cause of Cyrus’s elevation to
being the most prominent man in Media is not relentless deception,
although deception is certainly involved, but his grandfather’s natural
affection and discernment of his grandson’s natural merit. That is to
say, Xenophon’s Cyrus rises principally through reliance on the good
fortune of his birth, his circumstances, and the capacity of an affection-
ate older patron to recognize his merits. On all of this, Machiavelli is
completely silent.
Now we see more precisely the relationship of the Education of
Cyrus to Machiavelli’s overall conclusion that you cannot rise from
“base fortune . . . to attain great empire” through “open” force alone,
as opposed to a combination of fraud and force, indirect force, or
the exercise of fraud as disguised force or the threat of force. Machi-
avelli’s implication is that if we read Xenophon properly, guided
by Machiavelli, we will find evidence for this maxim. This is true
either because Machiavelli has interpreted the evidence about Cyrus
presented by Xenophon more insightfully than Xenophon himself or
because Xenophon consciously provides the reader with evidence of
what he “makes” Cyrus do (for example, deceive Cyaxares repeat-
edly) beneath the generally more seemly surface of this first mirror of
princes. Indeed, it is even possible, reading the Education of Cyrus
from Machiavelli’s perspective, that Xenophon stresses Cyrus’s use of
deception so as to bury more deeply his use of force. That is to say,
the seemliest and surface level of Xenophon’s account, where Cyrus
is the paragon of the traditional virtues and the protégé of a patron
who recognizes his merit, may on closer inspection yield a deeper stra-
tum revealing his extensive use of fraud, itself concealing until thought
through on the basis of Machiavelli’s new conception of virtue as the
mastery of Fortuna an even deeper stratum of outright violence and
usurpation.

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When Machiavelli says that Xenophon “makes” Cyrus perform

certain actions, I detect an echo of what he says about princes of
“outstanding virtue” in chapter 6 of The Prince – that they are free
to introduce into matter “any form they pleased.” Perhaps the real
Cyrus re-created his origins, refashioned the account of his own life
retroactively, so as to hand down to writers on statesmanship like
Xenophon the materials for composing the seemlier account. Or per-
haps Xenophon was a kind of prince himself, a prince of speculation
like Machiavelli, a shaper of “new modes and orders” through his
power to “make” Cyrus into a model for future statesmen. However
this may be, in Machiavelli’s presentation, the sober grounding for
properly interpreting Xenophon’s more seemly account of Cyrus as the
paragon of monarchical virtue is Herodotus’s unvarnished account of
a ferociously ambitious and criminal usurper who rises from obscure
fortune to imperial might through his relentless willpower.
To the extent that Machiavelli is persuasive, one might reread the
Education of Cyrus with a more jaundiced, suspicious, and Realpolitik
cast of mind. Let us take an example that Machiavelli does not raise
(although, as I suggest later, he does allude to it), the famous episode
discussed in the last chapter in which Cyrus assigns the captive queen
Pantheia to the care of his trusted subordinate and friend since boyhood
Araspas. We recall that, after claiming in a dialogue with Cyrus that
he is capable of gazing upon the queen’s beauty while firmly reining
in his erotic longing in order to perform his duty as her guardian,
Araspas in fact proves he cannot when he tries to violate her. After she
throws herself on the protection of Cyrus, who is resolutely chaste and
moderate toward her, the erotic young lieutenant Araspas falls from
power and, shortly thereafter, is heard from no more. Does he simply
exit the narrative when his role in the story ends? Or, looking at it in
a Machiavellian frame of mind, is there something more sinister about
his “disappearance” after failing in his duty to his master, like a former
paladin of Stalin vanishing and being “airbrushed” from subsequent
history?
Machiavelli points us toward some dark reaches in Xenophon’s life
of Cyrus. In a plot so devious that Machiavelli himself, not to mention
John le Carré, could only relish it, Cyrus ostensibly forgives Araspas,
who is terrified of his master’s wrath. However, news of his fall spreads
throughout the army just as if it were real and he had not been forgiven

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in private. Cyrus then gives Araspas a secret mission. He is to defect –

ostensibly – to the Assyrian side, pretending to fear Cyrus’s wrath while
knowing secretly that he has been forgiven, and, while playing the role
of defector, to spy on the disposition of the Assyrian forces and report
back to Cyrus. His reduction from a proud lieutenant of Cyrus’s inner
circle to a spy in seeming disgrace at home, although ostensibly only a
deception concealing his secret rehabilitation, does strike one as a kind
of punishment and humiliation for failing in his commission to guard
Pantheia: under any interpretation, his life as a double agent is a lie.
After giving his report on the Assyrian forces to Cyrus and his inner
circle (Cyrus pointedly discourages them from showing Araspas too
much affection when, to their surprise, he returns ostensibly forgiven
and still trusted by Cyrus), Araspas simply vanishes from the narrative,
on the eve of the greatest battle of all, the victory over the Assyrian tyrant
that will secure the empire (Education of Cyrus 6.3.15–18). Given that,
in the eyes of the world at large, Araspas really is a traitor and a defector,
his disappearance would not have been hard to arrange and would not
have caused widespread shock or dissatisfaction. Indeed, Cyrus’s odd
warning to his circle just before Araspas returns that they should avoid
showing him too much affection might be taken as a tacit warning
that his rehabilitation was not a sure thing. Had Cyrus ever intended
genuinely to forgive him? Or, having disgraced him, did he simply use
the fallen paladin like a tool, making practical good use of his disgrace
in the interval before his final fate by holding out the false hope of
his rehabilitation by sending him on the spy mission, pretending to
Araspas that he was merely pretending to disgrace him so as to deceive
the Assyrian, all the while deceiving both the Assyrian and his former
lieutenant (who, in the eyes of the world, confirmed his disloyalty to
Cyrus beyond any doubt by defecting)? Did Cyrus perhaps deliberately
expose Araspas to Pantheia in the first place, knowing this top paladin
would likely succumb to her beauty, giving Cyrus the opportunity to
exploit him as a tool before getting rid of him? These are the depths of
intrigue to which a Machiavellian reading of the Education of Cyrus
can take one. As Machiavelli says of the prince: “All see you, few touch
what you are.”
Showing, as this episode does, how chaste and self-controlled Cyrus
was in erotic matters in contrast to a subordinate who fails this test and
subsequently falls from power and vanishes might indicate how a prince

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like Cyrus could shape posterity’s view of him by the choice of materials
he passes down about his exploits. It might also demonstrate the power
that a writer about princes like Xenophon has in shaping those same
materials. The reader would be left to ponder whether the seemlier
foreground account is likelier to be true – where Araspas simply exits
the narrative when his role in the story ends – or the darker version
implied by a Machiavellian reading of his fate. It is unclear whether
Machiavelli is attributing this darker sensibility to Xenophon himself
or merely inviting us to read in a darker perspective evidence amassed
by Xenophon more benignly or innocently, a perspective grounded in
Herodotus’s more realistic view of Cyrus as a man who owed nothing
to fortune or his obscure origins and had to fight for it all.

The next group of chapters dealing with Cyrus in the Discourses is in

Book 3, chapters 20 to 23. The overarching theme here is the compara-
tive benefits of a ruler displaying, on the one hand, clemency and human-
ity or, on the other, harshness and severity. These chapters include a
comparison of Cyrus, Hannibal, and Scipio, thus more directly paral-
leling chapters 15 to 18 of The Prince, which we consider more closely
in the next section of this chapter.
Machiavelli begins chapter 20 of Book 3 of the Discourses by offer-
ing for our consideration the observation “how much more a humane
act full of charity is sometimes able to do in the spirits of men than
a ferocious and violent act.” We immediately note the qualification:
sometimes – not always. His proof that humane behavior is sometimes
more effective than ferocity is that Scipio’s fame came less from con-
quering Carthage than from his chastity in having returned a wife to her
husband unmolested, “which made all Spain friendly to him.” Readers
of the Education of Cyrus will likely recall here how Cyrus returned the
captive queen Pantheia unmolested to her husband, reminding us again
how Scipio modeled himself on his viade mecum.5
Machiavelli observes how greatly “peoples” desire this kind of mod-
eration and capacity to refrain from tyranny in “great men,” and how
much it is “praised by writers, and by those who describe the life of
princes, and by those who order how they ought to live.” Given what
we have seen of his own views, perhaps Machiavelli is suggesting that

5 See, for example, Xenophon (1968a) introduction.

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“the writers” of traditional political and moral philosophy side with

the delusions and unwarranted hopes of the common people for ethical
purity in their outstanding princes, or pander to their illusions so as
to enhance their own safety and stature. Xenophon, he goes on, “toils
very much to demonstrate how many honors, how many victories, how
much good fame being humane and affable brought to Cyrus, and not
giving any example of himself either as proud, or as cruel, or as lustful,
or as having any other vice that stains the life of men.” (The reference to
Xenophon’s Cyrus not being lustful suggests that Machiavelli is aware
that Scipio’s chastity toward the captive wife in Spain parallels, and was
likely imitating, Cyrus’s chastity toward Pantheia.)
For Machiavelli, such edifying accounts of a great prince as a
paragon of moderation may be a screen inserted by “the writers”
between the harsh reality of such men and what the common people
long for in them. For, as he immediately observes, “Hannibal attained
great fame and great victories with modes contrary to these.” Just as in
chapter 6 of The Prince, here, too, princes of outstanding “virtue” in
the Machiavellian sense, and in contrast with what “the writers” claim,
can impose their will through violence and deceit, and, having attained
godlike positions of venerability, rewrite their own past to hand down
to their future biographers. Hannibal, to be sure, is not to be compared
with the greatest of the “armed prophets” like Moses. Yet in both The
Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli uses lower-level exemplars of
open violence, treachery, and mass slaughter among second-tier princes
such as Hiero and Agatholces of Syracuse to imply what he wants us
to understand about the greatest princes as well, shrouded as they are
in impenetrable sanctity. If you understand Machiavelli, you might be
able to combine Moses’ stature with Hannibal’s methods. Machiavelli’s
Hannibal contradicts at every point what traditional sources such as
Xenophon say about outstanding monarchs, but Hannibal may be far
closer to the reality of Cyrus than the Cyrus of the Education of Cyrus.
Of course, from Machiavelli’s perspective, the Education of Cyrus might
well be a useful model of how a prince should rewrite his history for
posterity, useful as a model for propaganda as long as one does not take
it literally. Whereas Xenophon writes as if Cyrus possessed the moral
virtues suitable to a benign monarch from the outset, and as if they were
the source of his success, Machiavelli is suggesting that he displayed
the very opposite qualities, ones that would traditionally be considered

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vices, and thereby rose to a position of power that left him free to
remake himself and endow himself retroactively with the traditional
virtues.
Hannibal, then, is contrasted not with the real Cyrus – whom he
resembles – but with Xenophon’s Cyrus, a paragon of humanity and
kindness that is “the very opposite” course. Scipio, on the other hand,
we are told, practiced only the virtues of “humanity and benevolence”
that he had learned from the Education of Cyrus. Either Hannibal’s or
Scipio’s method is capable of success or failure, Machiavelli concedes,
depending on the “virtue” of the one who employs it, but he definitely
leans toward Hannibal’s method as the more reliable. Scipio’s generosity
to his troops, Machiavelli maintains, inflamed their desires to the point
where he could no longer satisfy them or maintain discipline. Hannibal,
however, with his “inhuman cruelty and infinite virtue” terrified his sol-
diers into reconciliation to his rule and gratitude for whatever positive
favors he chose to bestow (The Prince chapter 17). In other words, it is
not enough for a prince to rely on his subjects’ own assessment of their
self-interest. By contrasting Scipio’s failure at ruling with Hannibal’s
success, Machiavelli suggests that the imitator of the real Cyrus would
inspire fear in his subjects so as to make it always in their minimal self-
interest to obey him and to inspire their deeper gratitude for benefits
beyond the minimum of survival – an anticipatory job description for
Hobbes’s Sovereign.
Chapter 22 again stresses Xenophon’s importance in the history of
the mirror of princes. For, as Machiavelli observes, the humanity of
Cyrus praised by Xenophon “conforms very much with what Titus Livy
says of Valerius.” Nevertheless, according to Machiavelli, Livy himself
is of two minds about whether humanity or hardness is the better way,
for he “speaks honorably in the same way of Manlius, showing that his
severity in the death of his son made the army so obedient to the consul
that it was the cause of the victory that the Roman people had against
the Latins.” So, as Machiavelli concludes, “it would be difficult to
judge” which course is better. But he does offer a judgment: the severity
of Manlius is better for a republic of laws because it is impartial. As
he explains: “By showing oneself always harsh to everyone and loving
only the common good, one cannot acquire partisans; for whoever
does this does not acquire particular friends for himself, which we
call . . . partisans.” By contrast, the humane approach of Valerius,

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although it may produce some of the same benefits for a republic in

its foreign policy, creates a “particular goodwill” among the soldiers,
turning them into his personal adherents, and may thereby lead to
“bad effects on freedom” in the long run. Machiavelli inclines toward
Manlius on the grounds that his cruelty prevented him from becoming
popular, which helped preserve the rule of law as opposed to parties
loyal to the leading men. Machiavelli approves of more gentle rule and
the qualities Xenophon attributes to Cyrus – or at least the appearance
of them – when it comes to monarchies strictly speaking, as opposed
to republics in which leading citizens like Scipio are tempted to imitate
monarchical qualities and so undermine the republic’s collective vigor.
(Machiavelli’s endorsement of Xenophon in this context is presumably
the Xenophon whom he has told us earlier shows Cyrus to be a
master of deception.) Interestingly, Manlius executed his son for
killing an enemy in single combat, violating the orders of the consuls –
in other words, he executed his son for seeking individual glory at the
expense of the whole army. We might therefore note that Manlius’s
willingness to kill his own son to preserve the laws shows that such
harshness and moral zealotry might be a more certain way of overcom-
ing the love of one’s own than the Platonic prescription in which our
eros for honor overcomes base passions by transcending itself in the
direction of the Idea of the Good. Perhaps the thumotic enforcers of
honor are more reliable guardians of justice than the philosophically
inclined.
To sum up Machiavelli’s maxims in these chapters: humane behav-
ior in a leader is conducive to his private ambition because it creates
a client group that is personally loyal to that man. By contrast, uni-
formly exercised severity is disinterested and idealistic, serving only the
common good. Even more significantly, each approach is appropriate
to a specific regime, and those regimes are mutually exclusive. Humane
leadership fits a monarchy like that of Cyrus, who is the source of every-
one’s happiness and the cynosure of all men’s admiration, whereas a
republic of equality under the laws must discourage the emergence
of such leaders, who can only subvert its austere collective freedom.
This crucial distinction prepares us for the thematic consideration of
the traditional catalogue of civic virtues in The Prince. We now see
more clearly why Machiavelli believes that the classical “writers” on
statecraft can have a harmful, even subversive, influence on republican

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mores. The danger in republican leaders such as Scipio and Valerius

using “Xenophon’s Cyrus” as their guide is that it improperly encour-
ages proto-monarchical behavior in the servants of a republic:

(I)f we have to consider a prince, as Xenophon is considering, we shall take

the side altogether of Valerius, and leave Manlius, for a prince ought to seek
obedience and love in soldiers and in subjects. Being an observer of the orders
and being held virtuous give him obedience; affability, humanity, mercy and
the other parts that were in Valerius – and that, Xenophon writes, were in
Cyrus – give him love. For being a prince particularly well wished for and
having the army as his partisan conform with all the other parts of his state.
But in a citizen who has the army as his partisan, this part already does not
conform with his other parts, which have to make him live under the laws
and obey the magistrates.

Machiavelli’s summation of this group of chapters parallels and pre-

pares us for the discussion in chapter 17 of The Prince, to which we
now turn, on whether it is better to be feared or loved, and here, too, we
are offered a comparison of Cyrus, Xenophon’s Cyrus, Scipio, and Han-
nibal. Here, too, the lesson is that the love that a monarch or aspiring
monarch can obtain from the common people by making Xenophon’s
Cyrus his model will, if practiced by the servant of a republic, subvert
its harsh equality and, by creating a faction loyal to that one man, court
the dangers of demagoguery and tyranny.

subverting the traditional catalogue of

the virtues
The textual relationship between Machiavelli and Xenophon is evi-
dent from the opening pages of The Prince. Whereas Plato has his
Socrates discourage young men from becoming tyrants in the Repub-
lic and elsewhere, and Aristotle advises tyrants in Book 5 of the
Politics to reform themselves as rapidly as possible into monarchs,
Machiavelli openly advises princes and potential princes on how to
acquire and maintain power regardless of whether they employ ethi-
cal means or not. He does not distinguish, as does Aristotle in Book
3 of the Politics, between the correct regime of monarchy and the
defective regime of tyranny, but blurs them into the value-neutral term
“princes.”

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Xenophon is Machiavelli’s closest precedent among the ancient

thinkers for this more pragmatic approach to the statecraft of one-man
rule. Machiavelli adopts the same stance toward the advisee addressed
by The Prince as Xenophon has Simonides adopt toward his potential
advisee, the tyrant Hiero in the work of the same name. Moreover, there
is a direct gloss on the Hiero at the end of chapter 21 of The Prince.
Here, closely paralleling Xenophon’s presentation of Simonides’ advice
to Hiero for transforming himself from an opprobrious tyrant into a
benevolent “leader” (if not truly a “king”), Machiavelli advises the
prince to encourage his subjects to prosper economically, to reward
them for any technical innovations they contribute to the state’s econ-
omy, to make sure they know their earnings are protected from arbitrary
seizure, and to entertain the people with feasts and spectacles (Hiero
9.5–10, 10.5, 11.4).
We have already seen in our consideration of chapter 6 of The Prince
how Cyrus the Great is an example of the rare princes of “outstanding
virtue,” but we also saw how the model provided by Cyrus there is not
necessarily Xenophon’s Cyrus, a distinction further confirmed by our
subsequent examination of all the references to Cyrus in the Discourses.
Fundamentally, Machiavelli invites us to reread the Education of Cyrus
in a more jaundiced light, treating it as an account that can be grafted
onto the far more realistic explanation of Cyrus as a self-made man
who rose from base origins to high fortune through acts often crim-
inal and bloody, but who was then able to rewrite history to leave a
glowing account for posterity in which he is retroactively endowed with
all the ethical virtues extolled by philosophers. This edifying account
is summed up by the Education of Cyrus. The real Cyrus, Machiavelli
leads us to envision, prepared the ennobled version of himself found in
Xenophon’s writings just as, by implication, Moses was able to trans-
form himself through the Torah. Remaking themselves in this way for
posterity is one of the chief ways in which princes of “outstanding
virtue” can “introduce into matter whatever form they please.” Machi-
avelli wants to unlock this secret of empire by provoking us to ground
the surface, edifying Xenophontic Cyrus in the subterranean, darker
account more accurately revealed by Herodotus.
The most serious discussion of Xenophon’s Cyrus in contrast with
the real Cyrus comes in the group of chapters in The Prince, 15 to 18,
that deals with “those things for which men, and especially princes,

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are praised or blamed.” Here we get a catalogue of the virtues and

their corresponding vices from both classical and Christian sources: lib-
erality versus parsimony, cruelty versus pity, being loved versus being
feared. This theme is announced at the end of chapter 14, where Machi-
avelli tells us that a prince should study the exploits and actions of
past great leaders, “as they say Alexander the Great imitated Achilles;
Caesar [imitated] Alexander; Scipio [imitated] Cyrus.” He continues:
“And whoever reads the life of Cyrus written by Xenophon will then
recognize in the life of Scipio how much glory that imitation brought
him, how much in chastity, affability, humanity and liberality Scipio
conformed to what had been written of Cyrus by Xenophon.” In other
words, whereas Alexander the Great imitated Achilles directly, and Cae-
sar imitated Alexander directly, Scipio did not imitate Cyrus directly,
but only Xenophon’s Cyrus, an indirect imitation with which Machi-
avelli fairly clubs us over the head by twice mentioning Xenophon’s
authorship of the Education of Cyrus in the same sentence.
Let us note that when offering Achilles, Alexander, and Caesar as
examples of princes who imitated other princes directly, as opposed to
Scipio’s reliance on Xenophon’s account of Cyrus, Machiavelli omits
the rather obvious detail that Alexander could arguably only have imi-
tated the Achilles created by Homer, a “writer,” since Homer’s account
of Achilles is certainly the fullest. It would seem as if Machiavelli
exempts the ancient poet from the criticism he makes of the ancient
philosophers, perhaps because Homer depicted Achilles in such a
way as to minimize his own moral interference and so enable his dar-
ing hero to be directly imitated by real-life princes. Whereas Alexan-
der could imitate Achilles directly because Homer does not intervene,
Machiavelli is silent about the equally obvious tradition holding that
Alexander was tutored by Aristotle, and, in creating his multinational
empire, was arguably at least as much influenced by the cosmopoli-
tanism of Greek philosophy (nowhere politically more explicit than
in Xenophon’s monarchical utopia) as by the tragic hero of the Tro-
jan War. Machiavelli’s silence about Homer’s shaping of the model of
Achilles for Alexander is a compliment to the poet’s silent presence as
its creator, while his omission of Aristotle is due to the screen of mor-
alizing distortion the classical thinker interposes between princes and
the “effectual truth” about statecraft, the reverse of Aristotle’s entire
political theory.

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Machiavelli’s partiality toward the ancient poets over the philoso-

phers is evident elsewhere, as when, for example, he cites approvingly
the fable of Chiron, the half-human, half-animal teacher of Achilles
and other ancient princes for communicating the maxim that a prince
must be able to use the bestial as well as the human side of his nature
(The Prince chapter 18). Perhaps Machiavelli even prefers that Achilles
be identified with this myth rather than explicitly with Homer, whose
poetry was, after all, thought capable of a degree of moral rehabil-
itation by Plato. The semianimalized Chiron is the transition to the
fully animalized psyche of what Machiavelli calls the lion and fox. The
Chiron model (since it is not entirely somatic) is still too reliant on a
transcendental conception of the soul, but less wholly given over to the
transcendental than Aristotle’s concept of the soul, which is virtually
drained of anything somatic and makes no mention of moral virtues
such as courage and prudence that are conducive to political success.6
Machiavelli’s preference for poetry in general over traditional philos-
ophy with its transcendental metaphysics can further be seen in his
invocation of Petrarch at the end of The Prince for stirring the patriot’s
love of the fatherland. Finally, there is the gloss on Xenophon’s Hiero
in The Prince. We observed in Chapter 2 that Xenophon distinguishes
both himself as author and Socrates as a philosopher from the depic-
tion of Simonides, a poet, giving the tyrant advice on how to reform,
on the grounds that poets dwell in the realm of becoming and mutabil-
ity, whereas philosophers are oriented to the eternal truth. By contrast,
Machiavelli, in addressing the prince, merges himself with the roles of
both author and advisor, a mutability that is also more in keeping with
poetic “making” (poiesis) than with a love of the eternal and unchang-
ing truth. (Homer also merges himself with his narrative as the silent
conduit for the Muse [Iliad 1.1–5; Odyssey 1.1–10].)
These observations are of a piece with my earlier argument that
Machiavelli is in part returning to the dissident strain of ancient thought,
that of the pre-Socratics and Sophists, especially if we accept the Pla-
tonic Socrates’ contention that the poets, led by Homer, already express

6 See, for example, Aristotle On the Soul 414a30–b15, where thumos, for Plato the seat
of courage in the soul and distinct from mere bodily desire (epithumia), is demoted to
merely one variety of desire along with epithumia, and where intellect (nous) is discussed
without any reference to phronesis, the highest virtue of the statesman in the Politics and
Nicomachean Ethics.

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through image, myth, and allegory the ontological argument made

by their more prosaic successors, that nature is motion whose human
upsurge is the life of mastery. Now as earlier, however, we must beware
of taking this too far and depicting Machiavelli as a simple return to
ancient materialism and hedonism. He is after much bigger game, as
exemplified by the redefinition of virtue as the project for overcom-
ing nature and chance. Socrates’ inclusion of Homer – in his view the
greatest tragedian – and the other poets among the motion-men reminds
us that, far from believing that nature could be mastered from without,
the core of tragedy was the need for man to reconcile himself to the
reversals caused by the awesome alternation between chance and neces-
sity (Republic 595b–c; Theatetus 152d–e). Even Zeus cannot overrule
the Fates. Those who, like Achilles, aim high must expect to be brought
down and can only look their doom in the face with noble resigna-
tion (Aeschylus Prometheus Bound 515–518; Homer Iliad 1.350–355,
510–530; Plato Republic 379b–380a). Even without Plato’s censorship
of Homer to make him more plainly into an advocate of justice, the
Iliad itself is not uncritically enthusiastic about Achilles’ violent pas-
sions and insubordination. A price will be paid, as Zeus warns Achilles’
mother when acceding to her request to help Achilles show up Agamem-
non by making his withdrawal from combat result in a Trojan victory.
Zeus issues another warning to Thetis when her son exceeds the wrath
appropriate to mere men and exacts a god’s revenge on the corpse of
Hector (Iliad 24.125–135). Machiavelli might well provisionally prefer
the open ambition and dominating qualities of Achilles to the “effemi-
nated” rulers of his own Christian era, but that is as far as it could go.
He certainly could not approve of Achilles’ overwhelming erotic attach-
ments to Briseis and Patroclus, which robbed him of all judgment, just as
he could not approve of that side of Alexander’s imitation of Achilles
that fueled his love of Hephaisteon and his unfortunate tendency to
place that love above the demands of cool calculation as a commander.
For Machiavelli, Achilles would know too much about the lion and not
enough about the fox. Insofar as Machiavelli is arguing for the exertion
of rational control over nature, first and foremost by the prince over
his own nature, he is to this extent in the camp of reason rather than
poetic and tragic revelation.
Machiavelli’s fundamental argument in this group of chapters is that
the traditional virtues should not be practiced for their own sake. For,

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although ancient writers such as Aristotle say we will be happy if we

practice virtue for its own sake, how could a prince be happy if by
doing so he loses his state? According to The Prince, the problem with
the traditional-minded “writers” whom Machiavelli uses Xenophon
to exemplify is that they misinterpret the virtues that people attribute
after the fact to princes who have succeeded in bringing them peace
and prosperity as the prior causes of their success. In other words, they
“effeminate” virtue by trying to ground it in an “imagined” realm of
eternal, preexistent ends of peace and justice. However, appearing to
have the virtues can be a useful source of power in itself. Here, then,
the intrinsic pursuit of virtue for its own sake recommended by both
classical and Christian authorities is replaced by the manipulation of the
appearance of virtue as propaganda to embellish a leader’s reputation.
At a phenomenological level, the virtues do contrast with the vices –
they produce a different psychological impact on the ruled. However,
both virtues and vices, traditionally regarded, can be either useful or
harmful depending on how they are employed: “For if one considers
everything well, one will find something appears to be a virtue which, if
pursued, would be one’s ruin, and something else appears to be a vice,
which if pursued results in one’s security and well-being” (The Prince
chapter 15). Rather than being pursued or avoided for their own sake,
the virtues and vices are now alike subjected to the common underlying
aim of maximizing the security and well-being of both the prince and
his subjects.
The really interesting twist in Machiavelli’s discussion is that when
the virtues are practiced for their own sake, not only do they fail to
avoid their corresponding vices; they guarantee to bring them about.
Liberality causes parismony; pity leads to cruelty. If a prince is liberal
toward the meritorious, as Aristotle recommends, he will, Machiavelli
reasons, have to overtax his subjects to get the wherewithal, making
him hateful to the majority. If he then makes economies, they will hate
him for being stingy. People do not really admire a ruler’s generosity
because of the qualities it reveals in him but because of the benefits they
derive from it. Hence it follows that, faced with the choice between
impoverishing his subjects in order to have the wherewithal to practice
generosity for its own sake and being stingy, the prince should choose
stinginess as the course of action least likely to enrage his subjects by
violating their interests. The best solution of all, however, is like “Cyrus,

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Caesar, or Alexander,” to despoil other peoples in order to be able to

practice generosity toward one’s own people at no cost to oneself or
them: “Either the prince spends from what is his own and his subjects’ or
from what belongs to someone else. In the first case he should be sparing;
in the other, he should not leave out any part of liberality.” Whereas
Aristotle argued that liberality could be practiced by citizens within a
self-governing republic, in reality, Machiavelli argues, it can only be
practiced by the monarch of a prosperous empire like that of Cyrus.
The citizen of a republic who is liberal toward those he deems deserving
will, as we saw in Machiavelli’s discussion of the humane Valerius in
the Discourses, in fact be creating a faction of clients personally loyal
to him, undermining republican equality and courting the rise of a
demagogue or tyrant.7
Machiavelli’s examples here in chapter 16 of The Prince of the real-
istic practice of liberality through imperialism are “Cyrus, Caesar, and
Alexander.” The observant reader will note a change from the list of
famous predecessors at the end of chapter 14. There, Machiavelli had
Alexander directly imitating Achilles, Caesar directly imitating Alexan-
der, but Scipio only indirectly imitating Cyrus through “the life of Cyrus
written by Xenophon.” At the end of chapter 16, by contrast, Machi-
avelli urges a prince to imitate “Cyrus, Caesar, and Alexander,” tacitly
moving Cyrus over to the list of princes who imitated the reality of their
forbears, not a version filtered by the classical writers. Generosity on
the basis of imperialism was the basis of the real Cyrus’s success, which
should be directly imitated, as opposed to Xenophon’s interpretation,
which Scipio imitated. Machiavelli’s implication, I think, is that study-
ing Xenophon’s Cyrus would not make you sufficiently keenly aware
that the only basis for liberality toward one’s subjects is imperial con-
quest involving massive bloodshed and destruction. For it is true that,
in the Education of Cyrus, we see relatively little of these darker dimen-
sions of empire. Aside from a few major battles like the one against
the Assyrian empire, most of Cyrus’s subjects come to him voluntarily,
and the peace and prosperity with which he reconciles his millions of

7 For an interesting discussion of Hume’s interpretation of Machiavelli’s understanding

of the virtues (including liberality), how Hume traced their practice through the careers
of English monarchs including Elizabeth, and how he drew on Machiavelli’s criticism of
the Aristotelian account of liberality to elaborate his own economic theory, see Whelan
(2004).

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subjects to his absolute authority seem to flow effortlessly from the fact
that “all men were willing to obey him.”
In chapter 17, Machiavelli debates whether a prince should practice
pity or cruelty. Pity evokes both the classical virtue of clemency toward
defeated foes practiced by great rulers like Cyrus, Alexander, and Cae-
sar and the cardinal Christian virtue of compassion. As Machiavelli
observes, it is traditionally held that a ruler who practices the virtue of
compassion will be loved by his subjects, whereas the cruel ruler will
be feared and hated. Hence, in the traditional view, compassion is both
good for its own sake and contributes to a ruler’s security. In stark con-
trast, Machiavelli argues that a ruler who is excessively compassionate
will allow civil strife and foreign foes to gain the upper hand, leading
to an increase in the violence and disorder suffered by the majority of
his subjects, which is tantamount to subjecting them to enormous cru-
elty. Again, practicing the virtue for its own sake is guaranteed to bring
about its opposite vice. Instead, Machiavelli argues, the judicious use of
force to suppress incipient insurrection or preemptively knock out a for-
eign foe will, through a short and efficiently targeted interval of cruelty,
guarantee long-term peace and prosperity for the people. Moreover, he
maintains, it is quite possible in reality to be cruel in this efficient and
utilitarian way without being hated, although one will be feared. So in
this way, too, a prince’s authority and hold on power will be more sta-
ble through his being cruel rather than compassionate. This is so long
as the cruelty is, as he puts it in chapter 8, “well-used,” which means
for the sake of maximizing security and well-being for both princes and
peoples, and not prompted by some spasm of personal lust or fury. He
concludes: “A prince . . . so as to keep his subjects united and faithful
should not care about the infamy of cruelty, because with very few
examples he will be more merciful than those who for the sake of too
much mercy allow disorders to continue” (The Prince chapter 17).8

8 See the fine exegesis by Orwin (1978), especially his emphasis on how Machiavelli lib-
erates pity from piety, and argues that “well-used” cruelty, applied judiciously and all
at once, is in the long run more compassionate than abstaining from violence, because
it saves everyone from the far worse cruelty of unrestrained civil strife, a point of con-
tact between Machiavelli and Hobbes’s unvarnished remark that the worst conceivable
tyrant, if he maintains order, is preferable to relapsing into the state of nature and the
war of all against all. On the need to use force methodically, see Wolin’s discussion of
how, for Machiavelli, politics is a “science of the controlled application of force” (2006)
p. 221.

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How can a prince manage to be feared without being hated? Here,

in my view, we reach the core of Machiavelli’s critique of the tradition:
his preference for fear over eros as the psychological orientation for the
relationship between princes and peoples. A prince may be able to gain
the love of his subjects through treating them with compassion, but that
love cannot be relied on, because love is a voluntary emotion and can be
withdrawn on a whim: “For love is maintained by a chain of obligation
which, because of men’s wickedness, is broken on every occasion of
their own utility.” Fear, on the other hand, “is maintained by a dread
of punishment which never abandons you.” It is a more reliable basis
for authority because, unlike love, it is involuntary: no one can not be
afraid of punishment or death. However, as Machiavelli goes on, fear
need not be accompanied by hatred if (in advice paralleling the gloss
on the Hiero in chapter 21) a prince does not arbitrarily plunder or
otherwise violate the families or possessions of his subjects: “Above all
he must abstain from the property of others, because men forget the
death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony.” They
will put up with their fear of the prince in exchange for the tangible
benefits of a peaceful economy and personal security. In return, all they
need do is never contest the absolute political predominance of their
ruler.
In this chapter, every traditional teaching about the preferability of
either republican or monarchical virtue as opposed to tyrannical vice
is turned on its head. Machiavelli’s prince will be a tyrant in the sense
of relying on force, fraud, and the capacity to instill terror. But he will
not be a tyrant in the sense decried most particularly by the ancients
in Book 9 of the Republic and elsewhere (and, at least on this point,
Machiavelli agrees with them). The prince who governs according to
Machiavelli’s prescription will not be a Nero or Caligula, an erotic out-
law and monster of excess constantly violating his subjects’ lives and
possessions. Neither, however, will the new Machiavellian prince strive
to perfect those virtues of character that, according to the classics, can
make the statesman an object of love and admiration among his com-
panions and fellow citizens. For that can only be achieved through being
excessively, ruinously clement. In this way, Machiavelli is attempting
to extirpate root and branch the teaching of Diotima’s Ladder in the
Symposium, where rationally guided erotic longing is the key to both

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personal and civic excellence. Specifically, political ambition is ennobled

by being placed on the second highest level of the Ladder, second only
to philosophic eros. By living virtuously in the service of the common
good, Diotima teaches, one can achieve the immortality of an illus-
trious reputation for posterity (like the account of Cyrus transmitted
by Xenophon) and be the object of an erotic longing among one’s fel-
low citizens who are attracted to the virtuous fulfillment that the best
statesmen bring to fruition because it answers to their own longings for
erotic completion in union with the beautiful and the good. We admire
and love in a virtuous citizen or statesman the nobility that we at our
best long for in ourselves, and those leaders, by participating in what is
eternally noble more fully than we do, present us with models to look
up to. All this, Machiavelli tells us, must go. Believing that the world
is rationally ordered and harmonious in such a way as to favor this
cultivation of virtue and the love it will inspire in others is the greatest
possible example of the dangerous reliance on Fortuna, for it makes one
face the world not only literally “unarmed,” but, much more important,
psychologically unarmed and deluded about what truly comprises “the
most outstanding virtue.”
We also encounter in Machiavelli’s formulations about love and
fear in this chapter of The Prince a sedulous and characteristic use of
elements of Christian ontology in order to undermine both the clas-
sical and Christian moral teachings. By arguing that relying on love
is too unstable because men will break their “chain of obligation”
through their “wickedness,” Machiavelli attributes this failing to an
Augustinian-sounding evaluation of man’s fallen nature. Yet whereas
Augustine would have argued that our wickedness makes us incapable
of virtue in the absence of God’s grace, Machiavelli is arguing that we
should abandon any effort to live according to this moral standard.
We are simply incapable of it, God or no God. Our natures are indeed
fallen, but with God left out of the equation. Moreover, our being
too “wicked” to love the prince must also extend to our incapacity
to love the Prince, the Prince of the Universe. In Chapters 6 and 7,
we will see in greater detail how constantly Machiavelli employs the
Augustinian view of nature and human nature as fallen in order to justify
the exclusion of the City of God altogether, along with its classical ante-
cedants, as being beyond the range of a possible and desirable politics.

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Machiavelli’s proof that it is better to rely on fear than love is the

behavior of Scipio, who, as he has told us, modeled all his actions on
“the life of Cyrus written by Xenophon.” The mutiny of Scipio’s troops
in Spain demonstrated his failure of one of the chief tests of republican
leadership, the exercise of military command in foreign wars:

(His) armies in Spain rebelled against him. This arose from nothing but his
excessive mercy, which had allowed his soldiers more license than is fitting
for military discipline. Scipio’s mercy was reproved in the Senate by Fabius
Maximus, who called him the corrupter of the Roman military.

The man who passed this test, the successful exemplar of leadership,
is Hannibal, whose methods could not have been more diametrically
opposed to the gentle approach of Scipio:

Among the admirable actions of Hannibal is numbered this one: that when
he had a very large army, mixed with infinite races of men, and had led it to
fight in alien lands, no dissension ever arose in it, neither among themselves
nor against the prince, in bad as well as in good fortune. This could not have
arisen from anything other than his inhuman cruelty which, together with his
infinite virtues, always made him venerable in the sight of his soldiers; and
without it, his other virtues would not have sufficed to bring about this effect.
And the writers, having considered little on this, on the one hand admire this
action of his but on the other condemn the principle cause of it.

Hannibal, who successfully united men of numerous nations in an impe-

rial enterprise and reconciled them wholly to his rule, cannot help but
remind us of Cyrus the Great, the model for Alexander and Caesar,
but not the Cyrus written about by Xenophon – consistently affable,
chaste, and humane – on whom Scipio modeled himself because he,
in accordance with Diotima’s presentation of the eros for immortal
fame through civic virtue on the second level of her Ladder of Love,
wanted to be loved and admired by his fellow Romans. Instead, Han-
nibal is like the real Cyrus, the Cyrus whom Machiavelli reveals by
stripping away the veneer of moral virtue with which he was endowed
by Socrates’ companion Xenophon. As interpreted by Machiavelli, the
Education of Cyrus emerges as a more or less self-consciously propa-
gandistic rewriting of history to credit Cyrus retroactively with all those
virtues of liberality and compassion praised ever afterward by the clas-
sical and Christian traditions of statesmanship, and whose materials

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might well have been supplied by the historical Cyrus himself as he,
along with Moses and the other examples of the most “outstanding
virtue,” shaped the accounts of themselves to be handed down to pos-
terity by religious, poetic, and philosophical filters. Machiavelli’s Cyrus
is the truly effective if terrifying reality, the man who rises through
force and fraud from base origins by constantly fighting the malignity
of Fortuna with his strength of will, so that he can, godlike, introduce
into matter whatever form he pleases.

machiavelli’s rhetorical employment of

xenophon in the appeal to antiquity

In the history of the mirror of princes genre, Xenophon was recognized

as one of the originals, along with Plato and Cicero. We have already
noted Castiglione’s praise of Xenophon in The Book of the Courtier.
As we have seen in this chapter, Machiavelli made extensive use of
Xenophon, and their kinship was recognized. This is evident, for exam-
ple, from Francis Digby’s 1685 translation of the Education of Cyrus,
which he recommends to the reader on the grounds that it is “writ-
ten, indeed, much like Machiavel’s Florentine Prince.” Yet as we have
seen throughout this chapter, Machiavelli’s approval of Xenophon is
carefully qualified and limited. Much of what Xenophon tells us about
Cyrus, Machiavelli implies, is useful for statecraft, but only so long as
we see that account primarily as a successful example of propaganda
after the fact, not the means by which such a man could actually rise to
the kind of power he eventually possessed.
We are now in a better position to understand both Xenophon’s
particular appeal for Machiavelli among the classical authorities on
princely government and Machiavelli’s reservations about his political
theory. To understand this appeal, we should step back for a moment
from the more equivocal aspects of Xenophon’s views and reemphasize
what is most massively distinctive about his point of departure. Whereas
Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics culminate in prescriptions for
the best civic community, the Education of Cyrus sets aside this pre-
scription at the outset in favor of an individual’s ambition for empire.
However, much as Machiavelli wishes to join Xenophon in commend-
ing the example of Cyrus’s success, he also wishes to distinguish “the life

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of Cyrus written by Xenophon” from his own appraisal of what such a

ruler would actually have had to do to succeed on this scale. Tracing this
distinction brings the double-edged quality of Machiavelli’s interpreta-
tion of Xenophon into focus. Moreover, Xenophon’s reservations about
the methods and character of a ruler like Cyrus help to explain Machi-
avelli’s reservations about Xenophon as an analyst of princely success.
Let us begin with the issue of candor about the ingredients of polit-
ical success. We must ask: is it a fair reading of Xenophon when
Machiavelli suggests that Scipio was misled by the Education of Cyrus
into the neglect of tough-minded governance for the pursuit of those
gentle virtues admired by philosophers? For in the very first pages of
Xenophon’s life of Cyrus, we read that Cyrus inspired such “fear of him-
self that he struck all people with terror and no one tried to withstand
him; and he was able to awaken in all so great a desire to please him
that they always wished to be guided by his will.” Thus, we receive from
Xenophon himself the description of a prince capable, like Hannibal,
of “inhuman cruelty” and whose success exceeded anything achieved
by the Carthaginian. Moreover, Tigranes, the former intimate of the
“sophist” whose execution by his father Cyrus avenges, advises Cyrus
after his first military victory to make his new subjects “moderate”
by inspiring them with “soul-crushing fear,” a policy he follows with
stunning success (3.1.23–25). In contrasting Machiavelli’s diagnosis of
princely rule with Xenophon’s, then, it does not seem sufficient to say
that Xenophon’s version is candy-coated. On closer inspection, more-
over, it proves that Machiavelli himself does not believe this, for, as
we have seen, he states his view that Xenophon did not present Cyrus
as succeeding solely through the “humanity and affability” admired by
Scipio but through a “variety of deceptions.”
In this respect, Machiavelli’s interpretation of the Education of Cyrus
is amply demonstrated by the smooth game through which Cyrus
strips the pathetic Cyaxares of his power while affecting to do him
homage. We noted other examples of Cyrus’s deceit earlier. If Machi-
avelli is aware that Xenophon is aware of the darker side of a polit-
ical success like that of Cyrus, why does he so strongly imply that
Xenophon’s version of Cyrus will lead an imitator to failure? The
answer lies, I believe, in the very qualified sense in which Machi-
avelli concedes Xenophon’s political realism. Machiavelli, as we saw in

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Book 2 of the Discourses, uses the example of the Xenophontic Cyrus’s

practice of deception to illustrate the point that someone is likelier to
rise to a high position through fraud alone than through force alone. He
does not, however, rule out someone rising through force and fraud. On
the contrary, he portrays the Romans as being adept at using both force
of arms and the reputation consequent upon their victories to delude
and intimidate their foes and their allies alike. In chapter 6 of The Prince,
where Machiavelli discusses examples of truly rare virtue, force is given
more emphasis. In this chapter, Cyrus – as distinct from Xenophon’s
Cyrus – is said to have led the downtrodden Persians in a rebellion
against their Median suzerains and thereby begun his rise to empire.
This contradicts Xenophon’s more seemly account of how Cyrus, as
heir to the throne of an autonomous Persian republic, was asked to
lead the Persian part of an allied military force against Assyria by his
kinsman the king of Media. As these chapters from the Discourses and
The Prince illustrate, then, when Machiavelli wants to emphasize the
need to use fraud, he buttresses his argument with Xenophon’s version
of Cyrus stressing his talents at deception. When he wants to emphasize
the need to use force, however, he ignores Xenophon’s version in favor
of his own. The implication is that while Xenophon teaches well enough
the need for fraud, he does not make his readers sufficiently aware of the
need to use force. Xenophon shows how Cyrus took advantage of his
status as heir to the Persian throne to pursue his ambition, but, Machi-
avelli implies, Xenophon does not make it clear enough that Cyrus’s
very legitimacy may have been a retroactive rewriting of history, con-
sequent upon victories achieved at even deeper levels of violence, base
origins, and usurpation.
That Xenophon downplays the need for force as opposed to fraud
strikes me as being a plausible characterization of Xenophon’s political
science, certainly from Machiavelli’s viewpoint. Whereas Cyrus’s use
of fraud in the Education of Cyrus can be established fairly easily by a
comparison of his statements, his use of force lurks more in the back-
ground, as we saw with the “disappearance” of Araspas under a cone of
silence. Its extent and degree can be inferred from how the foreground
events are affected by it. Typically, in Xenophon’s approach, “force” is
the discreet background guarantee of the “fraud” consummated in the
foreground by Cyrus’s many lengthy speeches. Cyrus always waits until

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he has deployed his forces in such a way as to achieve overwhelming

military superiority before completing, through rhetorical persuasive-
ness, the conversion of former enemies into “willing” allies and subjects
(3.1.1–6; 4.2.32). He relies on persuasion, not merely on fear, and is a
formidable “sophist” himself. His loquaciousness contrasts strikingly
with the silent and subterranean maneuvering of Shakespeare’s Henry
Bolingbroke, an exemplar, as I argue in the Conclusion, of Machiavelli’s
new prince on the Elizabethan stage. For example, Cyrus’s defense
of his conduct to his uncle Cyaxares, whose position he has usurped,
although based on well-constructed (if self-serving) arguments, is
silently guaranteed success by the fact that Cyrus has already lured
Cyaxares’ troops away from him and reduced him to a powerless figure-
head (4.2.11; 4.5.8–12). On another occasion, Cyrus deliberately lies
in wait for some of his newer allies drawn from among his conquered
subjects whom he suspects of wanting to sneak away at night with their
possessions. Those who attempt it are summarily slaughtered without
any chance of repentance. This slaughter follows immediately upon,
and silently underscores, a speech in which Cyrus promises these new
allies his friendship in exchange for their loyalty (4.4.9–13; 4.5.3–7).
The Education of Cyrus does furnish illustrations of Machiavelli’s point
that a ruler should play on his subjects’ fears in order to make them see
their self-interest as being served by his supremacy. It is also true, how-
ever, that in the Education of Cyrus we see much more of Cyrus giving
than taking, winning consent than coercing obedience, rewarding than
punishing. The most charming and memorable aspect of Xenophon’s
narrative is made up of the speeches that establish Cyrus’s reputation
for benevolence and his subjects’ loving gratitude. Machiavelli’s critique
of the Education of Cyrus, therefore, is not so much that it contains
nothing about the need for force as that this lesson is buried too deeply –
is too discreet and indirect – to be of practical use to real-life imitators of
Cyrus.
From Machiavelli’s viewpoint, then, it would appear that Xenophon
wants to have it both ways, like the other ancient “writers.” Although
Xenophon explores the prospects of princely ambition for achieving
political stability and prosperity much more extensively than Plato
and Aristotle, in the last analysis he refuses to abandon the princi-
pled distinctions between monarchical and tyrannical authority and

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between virtuous and vicious, noble and base, gentlemanly and unre-
strained conduct. He sees in a ruler like Cyrus a high degree of excel-
lence but also deficiencies that may be compensated for by the excel-
lences of citizenship and philosophy. Cyrus’s love of honor may be
too demotic and undiscriminating. He loves to gratify others but will
never allow himself to be put in the position of the beneficiary, which
calls into question his capacity for friendship. He is moderate but
also cold. By monopolizing all honor, he in the long run robs his
ruling elite of any serious responsibilities. His increasing reliance on
eunuchs symbolizes how his monopoly of honor has over the course
of time “effeminated,” to use Machiavelli’s term, his own once-proud
fellow aristocrats. He cannot provide a successor on his own level.
He truly benefits his peoples but is capable of ruthless violence. This
mixture of admiration for Cyrus and reservations about him makes
Xenophon unwilling to depict Cyrus either as an out-and-out tyrant or
as a paragon of virtue. For Machiavelli, as a consequence, Xenophon’s
not inconsiderable value as a source of advice for princes is under-
mined by the ancient philosopher’s ambivalence toward his own model
of princely success. Machiavelli would have us understand the unvar-
nished truth that successful princes act on their untutored impulses
for dominion, glory, and wealth. Xenophon, by contrast, holds up
the rare example of a monarch educated as far as possible like a
gentleman through the most elaborately wrought civic pedagogy – a
monarch who, although not exactly legitimate, especially beyond the
borders of Persia, is not exactly a tyrant either; who, although not
exactly noble, develops his talents and achieves many benefits for his
followers.
Xenophon’s unusual and equivocal position – less republican than
Plato and Aristotle, less “princely” than Machiavelli – explains the
double-edged relationship of his political thought to that of Machi-
avelli. Because Xenophon possesses the venerable authority of a classical
author, it is convenient for Machiavelli to be able to play up Xenophon’s
preference for princely rule and his elaboration of its advantages, and
so draw his readers’ minds away from the strictures placed on political
and military belligerence by Plato and Aristotle. Thus, as I observed at
the beginning of this chapter, Plato and Aristotle are not so much as
mentioned when the context (for example, the criticism of those who

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have “imagined republics”) would seem especially to require it, and

Xenophon is made to stand for all the nameless “writers” about the
traditional catalogue of the virtues. On the other hand, if Xenophon is
correct that a prince can achieve the most glorious success imaginable
and embody to a high (if not to the highest) degree the classical virtues
of liberality, moderation, and justice, then he poses a real obstacle to
Machiavelli’s desire to undermine the classical tradition as a whole. For
this reason also, then, Xenophon’s views must be dealt with at greater
length than the more republican-minded classical authors. It is pre-
cisely because Xenophon comes so close among the ancient authorities
to Machiavelli’s idea of an “effectual” politics that it becomes especially
important for Machiavelli to refute him on some grounds while embrac-
ing him on others.
There is another dimension to the rhetorical advantages Machiavelli
gains from singling out Xenophon for attention, and it is a way of
entering the issue of Machiavelli’s relationship to classical and Chris-
tian transcendentalism, which will be the special focus of the final two
chapters. Many of the Renaissance humanists cite classical authors such
as Cicero to show that pagan philosophy already anticipated the truth
of Christian revelation because of its orientation toward a vision of
the cosmos as beneficent, rationally ordered, and guided by the eter-
nal truth and through its adjurations to transcend bodily and temporal
passions guided by the divine spark in the soul. By stressing the proto-
Christian transcendentalism of the classics, the Renaissance humanists
also hoped to show their contemporaries that one could still assign top
priority to the concerns of the soul and eternal salvation through faith
while combining those most important of concerns with a more robust
commitment to this-worldly civic duties than was sometimes granted by
the exponents of medieval Christianity.9 Machiavelli, in sharp contrast,

9 Consider, for example, Castiglione on the influence of the classics and their reputation
during the Renaissance. His pantheon of heroes is similar to that of Machiavelli. This
passage combines a desire for eternal glory through the love of honor from the Symposium
with the superiority of the life of the mind from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, with the
added insight that the immortality of great writers better enables one to understand,
by analogy, the immortality of fame through noble deeds, hence the need for liberal
education: “What soul is there so abject, timid and humble, that when he reads the deeds
of Caesar, Alexander, Scipio, Hannibal and many others, is not enflamed by an ardent
desire to be like them, and does not make small account of this frail two day’s life, in
order to win the almost eternal life of fame, which in spite of death makes him live in far

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is only concerned with the extent to which the classical authors focus
on this-worldly statecraft. He excludes any consideration of classical
(much less Christian) transcendentalism from his understanding of
statecraft. In contrast with many of his contemporaries who wrote
about classical philosophy as well as statecraft and the way in which
the former must provide a moral compass for the latter, there is virtu-
ally no discussion of this kind in either The Prince or the Discourses.
Machiavelli almost always wears the garb of the historian, and when he
does occasionally allude rather distantly to philosophical debates (as we
consider in Chapter 7), it is never for the sake of a purely theoretical dis-
cussion but always directly connected to a concern with political prac-
tice. At all turns, he embraces the this-worldly “fatherland” (Discourses
2.2) to the exclusion of the otherworldliness of both the classical and
Christian traditions, the “imagined republics,” as he dismissively terms
this joint conglomerate, without naming names, in chapter 15 of The
Prince – a reference, we can be certain, not only to Plato’s Republic but
surely also to St. Augustine’s Civitas Dei. Among the classical sources,
Xenophon comes closest to matching not only Machiavelli’s pragma-
tism, partiality to imperial expansionism, endorsement of economic
prosperity, and high regard for political honor, but also his aversion
for metaphysical transcendence. Not unreasonably, Xenophon’s depic-
tion of Socrates has been characterized as philosophy stripped of the
Ideas.
To look preliminarily into the religious implications of Machiavelli’s
political philosophy that will bulk large in the remaining chapters of
this book, let us recall that chapters 15 to 19 of The Prince are a cri-
tique not only of the classical catalogue of the virtues but also of their
adaptations by Christian theologians and humanists. For instance, the
question as to whether princes should “keep faith” – that is, be hon-
est – can also be read as the extent to which they should “keep the
faith.” Similarly, the discussion of “compassion” refers both to the
classical conception of clementia, a civic virtue famously invoked by
Julius Caesar, and the cardinal Christian virtue of pity that is to some
extent built on its classical antecedent, while ultimately pointing to the

greater glory than before? But he who does not feel the delight of letters, cannot either
know how great is the glory they so long preserve, and measures it by the life of one man
or two, because his memory runs no further.” Quoted in Newell (2001) pp. 140–141.

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very different basis of a compassion for man through one’s pity for
Christ crucified. Indeed, the very term “pity” (pietas) reminds us that
so important was this virtue to Christian revelation that the word for
“piety” in general was appropriated for its specific designation. To pity
man for the sake of God was the sum and total of what it meant to be
pious. The undercurrent of religious motifs in Machiavelli’s discussion
of virtue is also evident in the contrast made in chapter 6 of The Prince
between “armed prophets” such as Cyrus, Moses, Romulus, and The-
seus and rulers who are “unarmed” owing to Christianity and ancient
moral philosophy. The description of pagan rulers as “prophets” would
appear to invest them with an authority at least akin to that of religious
revelation itself. Moreover, the equation of the prince with the prophet
in chapter 6 reminds us that when Machiavelli later contrasts the real
Cyrus on the one hand with Xenophon’s Cyrus and Scipio on the other,
he is still tacitly discussing different kinds of princely “prophets,” with
Scipio’s excessive compassion as a pagan ruler doubling as an excess of
proto-Christian mercy.10
In assessing Machiavelli’s joint critique of pagan and Christian
statecraft, it is well to remember that Christianity’s assimilation of
ancient moral philosophy had never been smooth or complete. Christian

10 On Machiavelli’s blurring of the distinction between prince and prophet, consider the
fine formulation by Ruffo-Fiore (1985) p. 2: “Machiavelli’s new Prince is unquestion-
ably an ideal hero, an exceptional military and political role-model with remarkable
capacities of intelligence, will, and character. He is a hero-leader who has mastered the
techniques of virtu and understands the inevitability of fortuna. Although Machiavelli
utilizes such classical sources as Theseus, Cyrus, and Romulus for the mold of his ideal
leader and seems deliberately to exclude the relevance of traditional Christian virtues to
his character and actions, the Prince does reflect a disciplined selflessness and dedication
in his pursuit of national identity, stability, and glory. The persistent interest in the
prince suggests that something in Machiavelli’s treatment captures the human imagi-
nation and fulfills a universal need. In studying this problem for a number of years, I
have concluded that much of this fascination with the prince derives from Machiavelli’s
allusive, pervading vision of the sacral nature of the national patriarch. As a leader the
new prince embodies the biblical idea of the prophet-king who has received a special
divine call, a covenant from God to guide the destiny of the nation toward an appointed
goal. The force and authenticity of this princely image, at once supremely attractive and
frightening, results from how Machiavelli metaphorically parodies the religious theme
of divine election and applies it in a purely secular context. His intent is to show the
redeeming, communal function of a trustworthy leader who will liberate the people
from captivity, define their national and ethnic identity, and reinstitute political order
in a time of crisis.” This is strong corroboration for the thesis formulated by Voegelin
according to which Joachite millenarianism is immanentized in the secular prince.

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orthodoxy could not abide the more full-blooded evocations of civic and
martial achievement found in the classics, but instead emphasized the
classics’ concern with transcending worldly politics in the direction of
the eternal truth. Thus, Petrarch, for example, as a good Augustinian,
abhorred Cicero’s pragmatic advice on statesmanship while admiring
his devotion to philosophy. Machiavelli’s aim of criticizing Christianity
in tandem with his criticism of the ancient philosophers is clear when
we bear in mind that his critique of Scipio the Elder for his reliance on
Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus glides easily into a critique of Cicero,
whose account of Scipio the Younger in the Dream of Scipio entered the
mirror of princes genre alongside the elder Scipio’s guide. In Cicero’s
depiction, the younger Scipio prefers the life of the mind and the fate
of his eternal soul to the world of political action, although virtuous
action in the civic sphere is the route to those higher kinds of fulfill-
ment. In the Dream of Scipio, it is his adoptive grandfather, the elder
Scipio who was the devotee of the Education of Cyrus, who imparts to
his descendant the eternal truth about the order of the cosmos. Thus,
the younger Scipio’s subordination of political ambition to the life of
the mind, admired by Cicero and enshrined in his dialogue, flows from
an ancestor who was decisively shaped by the writings of the Socratic
Xenophon. In the Discourses, as we will see, Machiavelli witheringly
criticizes Cicero’s crashing failure in real life to bring the ambitious
young Octavian Caesar under his guidance, attempting to practice that
sublimation of ambition by wise counsel idealized in his own portrait
of the younger Scipio and its antecedents including the prescription in
Book 4 of the Laws for the lover of the city to be governed by a wise
counsellor. When we read of Machiavelli’s critique of Scipio the Elder
in The Prince and Discourses, therefore, we are permitted subliminally
to think of the younger Scipio as well (especially given Machiavelli’s
penchant, earlier remarked upon, for treating two identically named
men as one). Both Scipios, elder and younger, compass the deleteri-
ous effects of Greek philosophy, in its unworldliness, on Roman vigor,
including on Cicero himself.
Machiavelli’s critique of Cicero is the reverse of Petrarch’s: whereas
Petrarch criticized Cicero for allowing his philosophical interest in the
eternal truth to be undermined by his preoccupation with political
life, Machiavelli’s implicit critique is that Cicero allows his grasp of
statesmanship to be undermined by his respect for philosophy. Cicero’s

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admiration for philosophy was often cited as a pagan prefiguration

of the life guided by Christian revelation. Machiavelli is criticizing both
the tendency of the classics to elevate moral and philosophic virtue over
the hard necessities of politics and Christianity’s selective reading of the
ancients to emphasize still further this transcendence of political action.
Altogether then, Machiavelli’s use of the Education of Cyrus illustrates
especially well the ambivalent relationship between ancient political
philosophy and Christian morality. Xenophon’s relatively open-minded
assessment of princely ambition made his works useful for Machiavelli
when he wished to play upon his Renaissance readers’ admiration for
classical antiquity in general in order to advance his own anti-Christian
views on statecraft. At the same time, for Machiavelli, Xenophon’s
embellishment of the real Cyrus’s ruthless drive with the virtues of
peace and justice is a prime example of how “thoughtless writers on
the one hand admire” a successful ruler’s actions, and “on the other
condemn the principal cause of them.”11
To pursue the religious undercurrent a step further: just as Xeno-
phon’s Cyrus and his imitation by Scipio illustrate for Machiavelli the
dangers of being “unarmed” by philosophical and religious morality,
Machiavelli implies that a biblical ruler like Moses, once stripped of
the Bible’s edifying camouflage, could be understood in much the same
ruthless terms as other “armed prophets” like the real Cyrus. Con-
versely, Machiavelli implies, we could start to view great secular rulers
like Cyrus as having the same epochal scope for the creation of “new
modes and orders” – new peoples, states, and moralities – that the
Bible reserves for a few of God’s appointed. If the linkage of Cyrus
and Moses in chapter 6 of The Prince deflates the claims of Christian

11 Coby (1999) makes a persuasive case that Machiavelli’s debt to classical Roman thought,
especially that of Livy, has sometimes been overlooked by those eager to enshrine him
as the founder of modernity and modern political science. He argues that Machiavelli is
both returning to ancient Rome and anticipating the Enlightenment, which I certainly
agree with. I would be more inclined, however, to make a sharp distinction between
Machiavelli’s endorsement of Roman practices and the content of Roman history and
his repudiation of classical political philosophy, including its influence on Livy. Whereas,
for instance, Livy is equivocal about whether harshness or gentleness are the best modes
of republican statesmanship, Machiavelli, as I argue in this chapter, although initially
echoing Livy’s balanced assessment, upon consideration is shown to definitely endorse
harshness within republics, reserving gentleness for monarchy, and implying that the
misapplication of gentleness by, for example, Scipio within a republic tends to subvert
its moral vigor.

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revelation over secular political authority by placing the biblical prince

on a level with the pagan one, it also expands the claims of secular
authority to an epochal scope formerly reserved for the instruments
of God, the beginning of the divinization of the political sometimes
associated with modern political millenarianism and totalitarianism.
By contrast, Xenophon, even at his most candid, never allows that
princes could exercise this power to shape “matter . . . into whatever
form they thought fit,” to re-create altogether the conditions of polit-
ical existence (if not of all existence per se). The contrast allows us to
see how far Machiavelli departs from the classical tradition even at its
most pragmatic and sympathetic to imperial ambition.
A final comparison of Machiavelli and Xenophon will illustrate the
restrictions placed by classical political thought in all its variants on
this view of princely rule as epoch-making and creative. We recall that
Machiavelli adopts the same stance toward the addressee of The Prince
as Xenophon has Simonides adopt toward Hiero. In both cases, the wise
adviser professes his ignorance about the life of high political authority
only to go on to reveal that he knows more about effective ruling than
the actual ruler. As we observed earlier, the parallel between the two
works is confirmed when Machiavelli, after criticizing the traditional
account of the virtues, in chapter 21 offers a gloss on Simonides’ advice
to Hiero on how to reconcile his subjects to his rule. Machiavelli advises
the prince to honor and reward the talented, innovative, and industri-
ous, a direct contradiction of Aristotle’s warning against innovation as
undermining the habit of lawfulness. The prince should also “encourage
his subjects to pursue their trades in tranquillity” by allaying their fears
of being despoiled or defrauded, a pithy anticipation of the Hobbesian
Sovereign as the umpire and enforcer of contract law. The people should
also be kept occupied with “festivals and shows,” and the prince should
make periodic displays of his generosity to the city’s various guilds and
clans. All of these points, frequently similarly worded, are found in
Simonides’ advice to Hiero. Each work tells a prince how he might
protect the humble interests of the common people and so win their
loyalty against the ambitious maneuverings of the nobility. However,
while Xenophon depicts a politically canny poet advising a tyrant, he
does not depict Socrates as doing so. Aside from protecting Socrates’
reputation, Xenophon may be, as I suggested earlier, implying that the
poet’s concern with “making” (poiesis) is more suitable for converting

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a bad ruler into a good one than is the philosopher’s concern with what
things permanently are. That is, Socrates may be reluctant to admit that
nature is so plastic or given to becoming that a ruler can supersede his
crimes and transform himself into what he was not before. By contrast,
Machiavelli simply merges himself as the author of The Prince with
this advisor. Ending the book with a poetic appeal to Italy’s prospec-
tive liberator, Machiavelli conflates the roles of philosopher, poet, and
advisor. Machiavelli also rejects the idea of nature as regular, orderly,
and placing limitations on human ambition for the “poetic” idea that
corrupt political “bodies” can be re-made into healthy ones by vigorous
princely action.
Xenophon’s reservations about committing philosophy to the reform
of tyranny might be thought to enable him to identify tyranny more
clearly for what it is than can Machiavelli. Still, Machiavelli is able to
adapt Xenophon’s writings to his own purposes by radicalizing their
character in a way that Plato’s and Aristotle’s works do not permit.
Whereas Xenophon divides the spheres of politics and philosophy so
as not to confound their respective excellences, Machiavelli simply lops
away the sphere of philosophy by adapting Xenophon’s political writ-
ings without making any reference to the Socratic ones. He thus takes
advantage of the greater latitude Xenophon offers for the separation of
politics and philosophy to argue that philosophy as traditionally con-
ceived has nothing to do with “effectual” government. Furthermore,
as we begin to explore in the next chapter, Machiavelli’s strongest ally
in this bifurcation between political primordialism and banished tran-
scendentalism is, strangely enough, the author of one of the greatest
“imagined republics” of them all, St. Augustine with his City of God.
Still, in characterizing the originality of Machiavelli’s new science of
politics, it would not go far enough to say that Machiavelli is liberat-
ing from Xenophon’s prudent reservations the capacity for poiesis that
Xenophon himself admits, through his depiction of Simonides, might
transform a tyrant into something he was not before. For, as I have
argued in earlier chapters, the classical Greek notion of “making” is
not tantamount to the Abrahamic notion of creation ex nihilo. As we
observed in Chapter 2, for the pre-Socratics and Sophists, remaking
nature has more the connotation of tapping into its vital rhythms and,
equipped with the insight that there is no distinction between seeming

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and being, recombining appearances through rhetoric for their persua-

sive effect. In combatting this teaching, the Platonic Socrates disarms
the constructivist power of poiesis even further by making the arts the
intimation of the Ideas, such that the practice of the art of ruling can
never lead to self-aggrandizement. Socrates’ analogies for poiesis imply
arrangement, design, breeding, and cultivation in accordance with the
preexisting eternal Ideas, not creation out of nothing in the Abrahamic
sense. So passive and noninterventionary is the demiurge in Socrates’
conception that he compares it to someone who carries around a mirror
and “makes” things by merely allowing this mirror to reflect them – “in
such a manner, he will quickly make the sun and the things in heaven,
and quickly the earth,” including animals, tools, plants, “and everything
else” (Republic 596d). In a fateful twist, Machiavelli is able to radicalize
tremendously the power of political effectuation by embracing a feature
of Christian ontology that is unique to it and incompatible with any
philosophical school of the ancients. I mean the reshaping or even re-
creation of nature by the will. He speculatively transfers this capacity
from the Abrahamic God to the most outstanding of secular princes.
He also accepts the Augustinian reduction of the classical account of
this-worldly civic virtue to mere power seeking, dominion, and selfish
glory, while jettisoning Augustine’s and all religious concerns with oth-
erworldly salvation. He says, in effect: Yes, there is no possibility of
high civic virtue of the kind extolled by Plato and Aristotle; there is
only power seeking – so embrace that reality. The last two chapters of
this book attempt to trace this remarkable new synthesis.
Here, then, is another place where Machiavelli and Xenophon must
part ways. Xenophon endorses monarchical honor seeking and the
acquisition of empire to a far greater degree than Plato and Aristotle,
and he also allows for a masterful exertion of personal will by such an
imperial conqueror and multinational monarch of a kind that Plato and
Aristotle generally decry or keep under wraps. To this extent, “the life
of Cyrus written by Xenophon” is a useful cloak in which Machiavelli
can wrap himself – given the widespread respect in which Xenophon
was held – so as to appear superficially to be doing no more than, like
the other Renaissance humanists, liberating a greater degree of civic
virtue and this-worldliness to offset the widespread perception, espe-
cially in Italy, that a return to ancient virtue and statecraft was needed

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as an antidote to contemporary instability and an excess of Christian

passivity.
However, at the end of the day, and notwithstanding the possibility
of a darker account beneath the surface when the Education of Cyrus is
read in a Machiavellian frame of mind, in my view Xenophon really does
regard even imperial virtue as compatible with moderation, generosity,
humanity, and justice, and it is in demonstrating these qualities that he
believes the life of Cyrus has its chief value. Moreover, as much as any
other classical thinker, Xenophon believes that the scope for human
excellence and success falls entirely within the ambit of nature; that
excellence and success come from more perfectly reconciling ourselves
to the Great Chain of Being and the reflection in our own characters of
the harmony of the cosmos through cultivating the virtues. Machiavelli’s
bold maxim that Fortuna can be conquered is therefore ultimately as
alien to Xenophon’s political thinking as it is to any other classical
source. It is in this new project for the conquest of nature “for the
relief of man’s estate” – as Bacon was to describe his new physics –
that we find an important distinguishing theoretical feature of modern
as opposed to ancient monarchy and the exercise of state authority
generally. For as Bacon generously acknowledges in The Advancement
of Learning (with a gloss on Machiavelli’s remark about “imagined
republics” in chapter 15 of The Prince): “We are much beholden to
Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they
ought to do. . . . As for the philosophers, they make imaginary laws for
imaginary commonwealths; and their discourses are as the stars, which
give little light, because they are so high.”12

12 Quoted in Kennington (2005).

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glory and reputation

The New Prince

A reader skeptical of my effort to draw a sharp line between ancients and

moderns with respect to the understanding of tyranny and of statecraft
in general (with Machiavelli inaugurating the modern approach) might
well ask at this point: when Machiavelli offers to show how princes of
“outstanding” virtue might achieve an immortal reputation for glory,
does he not share a fairly large degree of common ground with the
classical political philosophers? Is his prescription for princely honor
so different from, say, Diotima’s Ladder, whose second level promises
great citizens and statesmen an immortal reputation, to be extolled by
philosophically guided poets as Homer had earlier extolled Achilles, for
the virtues they engender on behalf of the city? In this and the following
chapter, I argue that, although on a certain level Machiavelli can be seen
as continuing the promise of immortality to great statesmen offered by
the classical thinkers, the kind of glory and immortality promised by
Machiavelli are of a fundamentally different character.
That difference can be stated summarily as follows. Plato’s politi-
cal philosophy is offering the virtuous citizen immortality through the
pursuit of traits of moderation and justice that are solicited by, and
characteristic of, the cosmos in its immortal perdurance. Poets properly
educated in this view of the cosmos – or suitably bowdlerized after the
fact, like the re-writing of Homer prescribed by the Republic – will find
artistic ways of extolling these recurrent demonstrations of virtue and
passing them down to posterity for emulation by statesmen to come.
In sum, for Plato, the statesman’s prospects for immortality fall within
nature through the statesman’s actualization of his soul’s potential for
virtue in harmony with the whole.

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Machiavelli, by contrast, is offering the prospect of a glory altogether

colder, more artificial and conventional. Emotionally, it has more to do
with Handel’s Music for Royal Fireworks – pomp and magnificence
drained of heart – than with Plutarch’s judicious and sympathetic sift-
ing of the shades of virtue and vice and how they contend for leadership
in the soul of a statesman, or a statue by Praxiteles in which princely
greatness and noble grace are indissolubly intertwined. Psychologically,
Machiavellian glory has more to do with Shakespeare’s coldly calculat-
ing Octavian Caesar, “the universal landlord,” than with his superbly
erotic, generous, humorous, and magnanimous uncle. For Machiavelli,
founders of the greatest strength of will, daring, and fortitude might be
able to shape events and mold human beings in such a way as to “satisfy
and stupefy” the multitude, and thereby convey to the future their epic
feats, retroactively endowing themselves with every admirable quality
(The Prince chapter 6). The new Machiavellian prince’s glory is entirely
of his own creation, very far from the participation in a transhuman
standard of the imperishable Good explored by Plato.
The expanded scope of the new prince’s power to shape events is
pointed to by Machiavelli’s blurring of the distinction between a states-
man who achieves immortality on classical grounds under the guidance
of reason and the prophet who introduces “new modes and orders”
with the supposed inspiration of God. Such princes must become the
creators of their own reputations for posterity, whether directly (as
in the authorship of the Torah traditionally ascribed to Moses) or
indirectly (Virgil’s Aeneid, which ascribes retroactively to his patron
Augustus all the Stoic virtues and links him to Rome’s first founder,
the immortal hero Aeneas, or, with the qualifications we discussed in
Chapter 5, Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus). These examples remind
us, it should be added, that Machiavelli frequently finds in the lives of
statesmen from Greco-Roman antiquity the best examples of his own
“modern” innovations. He is always careful to distinguish between
the ancient “writers,” whose views he rarely embraces and frequently
rejects entirely, and the ancient practices, perfected by his true heroes,
“the Romans” (although, for reasons we discuss in the next chapter, he
has little to commend about Augustus).
More than even blurring the distinction between princes and
prophets, for Machiavelli’s new prince to be successful, our very
notion of reason itself must undergo a profound reversal – to wit, the

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assimilation of virtue to the will, a watershed of modern thought

altogether, presaged here and reemerging with increasing radicaliza-
tion through Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Ficthe. As we considered
in Chapter 2, this transition is implied in chapter 22 of The Prince,
where Machiavelli argues that a prince must be the source of his own
wise counsel, and not, as the classics had urged, place himself under
the tutelage of a philosophic governor. In order for the prince to be the
source of his own prudence, wisdom must collapse into will, and the
concept of the will, as I have argued and continue to try to substan-
tiate in what follows, is one that is to be found only in the concept of the
Abrahamic creator-god and has no precise parallel among the writings
of the ancient thinkers. Only a prince bred to this insight will be able
to go the limit in creating his own reputation for posterity through the
use of fraud and violence. Or, to put it as succinctly as possible, the
glory and reputation of the new prince will exist nowhere but histori-
cally – a politics of pure primordialism, immanentized within a world
drained both of classical transcendence and Christian otherworldliness.
Although all three Abrahamic faiths stress the concept of a will that can
oppose nature, one way of explaining the particular connection of the
Christian version to Machiavelli’s new science of politics is to bear in
mind that Christ, the true prince (Il Principe) of the world, also embod-
ies, in his life as a man, the divine thoroughly immanentized within
fallen nature, a synthesis akin to Machiavelli’s prince in his inward
existential encounter with Fortuna. However, whereas Christ is resur-
rected and rejoins the Father in heaven, Machiavelli’s prince asserts his
transformative will entirely within the fallen sphere of the world itself.
His glory and reputation will be the consequence of stupendous, entirely
earthly, somatic, and this-worldly struggles and a well-nigh miraculous
reshaping of human mores, civilizations, and events. Such princes will
not mirror an eternal hierarchy where, as in Diotima’s Ladder, they will
dwell on a second level below that of their governors, the philosophers.
Instead, they will create such hierarchies on their own as forces of his-
tory, anticipating Nietzsche’s conflation of the founder, thinker, and
prophet in his Zarathustra.
The love of honor, then, certainly is a common theme shared by
Machiavelli and the classical thinkers in their respective analyses of
political existence. Yet as Machiavelli’s repeated critique of “imagined
republics,” Aristotle’s “middle way,” and the whole conglomerate of

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classical-Christian morality implies, he conceives of honor in a very dif-

ferent way. As we saw in Chapter 5, Machiavelli’s rhetorical invocation
of certain strains of classical thinking, especially that of Xenophon, is
meant in part to liberate the worldly pragmatism of classical statecraft
from the overlay of excessive Christian otherworldliness. In this respect
he is not unlike some of his contemporaries including Guicciardini. At
bottom, however, Machiavelli distorts the classics more fundamentally
than do his contemporaries, because unlike the other humanists, he
strips the classics of their own considerable transcendentalist and trans-
mundane leanings, a dimension of the classics that made it plausible
for the great theologians including Augustine and Thomas to attempt
to assimilate them to Christian revelation in the first place. Machi-
avelli’s praise of the ancient Romans for their methodical ruthlessness
and unbridled imperialism is meant to extol “the ancients” – that is,
their real-world politics – at the expense of ancient political philosophy.
Like physicians who can cure a disease the more readily the sooner they
diagnose it, “the Romans did . . . what all wise princes should do. . . .
Seeing inconveniences from afar, they always found remedies for them
and never allowed them to continue so as to escape a war, because they
knew that war may not be avoided but is deferred to the advantage of
others” (The Prince chapter 3).

how original is machiavelli? the relationship of

virtue and fortuna
Before turning to Machiavelli’s engagement with revelation, let us con-
sider further how he differs from his humanist contemporaries. Machi-
avelli’s understanding of virtue and fortune, as we have seen, is central
to his originality as a political philosopher, but the degree and char-
acter of that originality is a much-debated question. In one influen-
tial interpretation, Quentin Skinner (1980) argues that the context of
Machiavelli’s discussion of virtue and fortune is provided by the Italian
humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.1 Augustinian Chris-
tianity, Skinner argues, had viewed fortune as a lawlike force of divine
necessity that left little or no room for human freedom. According to
Skinner, the humanists by contrast reverted to the “classical belief that

1 Skinner (1980). Consider also Tarcov (1982, 2000) and Zuckert (2002).

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the human predicament is best seen as a struggle between man’s will

and fortune’s willfulness.” In this view, Skinner claims, fortune is no
longer seen as the “inexorable force of providence” but as a “capricious
power” of irrational happenstance. By exerting the “creative powers”
of his will against this flux, man is “able to shape” and “control his
own destiny,” “mould his own fate,” and “remake his social world to fit
his own desires.” Understanding the humanists’ revival of this classical
theme compels us, Skinner believes, to abandon the “textbook” view
that Machiavelli’s argument is entirely sui generis. However, this will
also enable us to see Machiavelli’s originality more clearly, as when,
for example, he departs from the “more orthodox defenders of repub-
lican liberty” by rejecting the “conventional Christian” meaning of
virtue.2
I question this interpretation of the classical, Christian, and human-
ist understandings of virtue and fortune, and, as a consequence, the
light they shed on Machiavelli’s comparative originality. The “creative”
view of virtue as able to master the world’s disorder and “remake” it
(to use Skinner’s terms) is certainly to be found in Machiavelli. The
conquerors and statesmen of “outstanding virtue” described in The
Prince receive no assistance from fortune in successfully founding new
modes and orders, and the belief that a supervening order of causes
grounds man’s hopes for peace and justice is squarely repudiated. In
my view, however, this conception of virtue is difficult if not impossi-
ble to reconcile with the classical view of the relation between human
virtue and the transhuman world. I would argue that there is scant
suggestion among Greek and Roman thinkers that virtue can be under-
stood as the creative will to overcome a capricious fortune so as to
shape it to human needs. Moreover, unlike Machiavelli, these ancient
authors do not equate fortune with the entire world external to or in
opposition to man, but treat it as a subsidiary dimension within the
complex of relations making up the order of causes. Because the classi-
cal writers believed the world to be rationally ordered – and hence the
very opposite of a “capricious” or “willful” happenstance – they had
a rather different way of conceiving of the problem of human freedom
versus the objective constraints placed upon it. I would argue that the
humanists cited by Skinner in his discussion of the relationship between

2 Skinner (1980) pp. 94–98, 129–131, 182.

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virtue and fortune have a view of fortune that is also hard to recon-
cile with the creative one. Instead, they counsel a kind of forbearance
against the reverses of fortune by accommodating oneself to the divine
order of the universe, a blend of Christian precepts with the classical
understanding.
Skinner does not wish to drive too large a wedge between Chris-
tianity and humanism and assures the reader that Petrarch and his
successors among the humanists were “unequivocally Christian” – as
well as classical – in their espousal of such traditional virtues as jus-
tice, liberality, faith, and love. He does, however, wish to distinguish
their variant of Christian faith, which he believes made room for the
“creative” view of virtue, from “conventional” or “orthodox” writers
who shared the Augustinian assumption that man should not attempt
to resist the dictates of providence. Unquestionably there were many
variants and shadings in Christian belief and in humanism during this
period. On the particular theme of virtue and fortune, however, I do
not believe that Skinner adduces sufficient evidence for his way of dis-
tinguishing the conventional outlook from the “new attitude” he finds
in Petrarch, Salutati, and their followers.3 If I am correct in my reading
of the classical, Christian, and humanist conceptions of virtue and for-
tune, for the humanists to conceive of virtue as man’s creative power
to “mould his own fate,” they must already have parted ways with any
attachment to the traditional virtues, whether classical or Christian.
For the traditional virtues presuppose man’s subordination to a natural
or divine hierarchy of ends that prescribe his substantive duties and
fulfillment. In this view, the world external to man cannot be seen as
“capricious,” and it is neither possible nor desirable to conceive of man
as being able to stand apart from the world and impose his own “will”
on it. The creative view of virtue cannot, in my view, be added to the
traditional one, which it contradicts at every level. I would argue that
the humanists in general accepted both the traditional account of virtue
and the traditional view of man’s place in the world, suitably adapted
to Christianity. Whereas Skinner tends to range the humanists along-
side the classics in opposition to orthodox, Augustinian Christianity, I
would suggest that the humanists he sees as bearers of the “new atti-
tude” about virtue were in fact much closer to the conventional view of

3 Skinner (1980) pp. 92, 97.

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it. What emerges from this reconsideration of Machiavelli’s context, I

suggest, is a Machiavelli who conceives of virtue and fortune in a rad-
ically different way from either classical, Christian, or other humanist
writers, a new synthesis that is, indeed, entirely sui generis.4

In Greek and Roman philosophy, man’s responsibility to choose virtue

over vice is examined in the light of the obstacles posed by objective
reality to his freedom of action. This transhuman reality is distinguished
according to its various aspects of fortune or accident, necessity, and
fate. Plato’s Republic and Laws, for example, explore the possibility
of reconciling man’s freedom to choose virtue over vice within the
overarching rationality of a cosmic order that provides the objects of
virtuous striving (Republic 377a–383c, 476a–480a, 484a–486d; Laws
840, 893, 904, 907). It might be argued that Plato’s endorsement of eth-
ical responsibility is, at bottom, irreconcilable with the determinism of
his metaphysics and theology.5 For if, as the protreptic dialogues hold,
virtue is knowledge and vice the equivalent of an error about one’s
own advantage, there seems to be no need for the specifically ethical
education of character that makes us choose virtue for its own sake or
for the honor it bestows on loyal and law-abiding citizens. As we saw
in Chapter 3, Aristotle responds to this dilemma by trying to preserve
ethical and political praxis from the dictates of the apodictic science
of royal rule sometimes endorsed by Plato. Statesmen and citizens are
responsible for grappling with the variable particulars of everyday pol-
itics, guided by a prudence developed through experience rather than
by direct philosophic knowledge. It may still be wondered, of course,
whether Aristotle is more successful than Plato in preserving man’s
freedom and responsibility for his actions within a rationally ordered
cosmos. His attempt to distinguish precisely among the types of causes
and his notion that final cause actualizes an immanent potentiality for
growth within natural beings can be seen as an attempt to close, or at
least narrow, the Platonic chasm between absolute Being and nature’s
self-movement (Physics 194a25–195a10; Magna Moralia 1182b5–
1183b20). Ultimately, however, it appears that Aristotle cannot find a

4 Hulliung trenchantly formulates the distance between Machiavelli and the Stoic and
Christian political morality of his predecessors. He sees the humanists as being “Christian
despite their admiration of pagan antiquity.” Hulliung (1983) x–xi, pp. 216–217.
5 Consider Guthrie (1984) pp. 139–142.

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place within this cosmology for fortune or accident as a genuinely

spontaneous occurrence – an effect without a cause (Physics 195b30–
198b10; Metaphysics 1026a35–1026b30, 1065a30–1065b5). His un-
easiness about the place of spontaneity in nature extends to politics
as well, where, as we saw in Chapter 3, he waffles between endorsing
republican self-government in which citizens are responsible for their
actions and an absolute monarchy that rules according to reason and
leaves no scope whatever for citizen participation. The classical account
of freedom altogether arguably has almost no trace of anything akin to
impulse, creativity, or spontaneity – it is no more than the freedom to
become happy by choosing to actualize those virtues that are always
already the best and only choice for you to make.
Because it is sometimes argued that Cicero is more immediately
important than Plato and Aristotle for furnishing the context of the
humanists, we should consider how he examines this dilemma of free-
dom and necessity. Two of his dialogues – On the Nature of the Gods
and On Fate – are crucial for our understanding of how the Stoic, Epi-
curean, Peripatetic, and Academic schools of philosophy had developed
the problem beyond its Platonic and Aristotelian formulations. On the
Nature of the Gods considers whether the gods are not completely
indifferent to, or powerless to influence, human life – in which case
it makes no sense to worship them or to live virtuously and piously,
echoing a disturbing possibility explored by Plato in the Laws and the
Republic. The opposing view is that the world is entirely “governed by
the will and wisdom of the gods,” which appears to leave no room for
human freedom (Cicero [1907] pp. 2–3). The Peripatetic Cotta attacks
Epicureanism as representative of the first view, and Stoicism as repre-
sentative of the second. The Epicureans, Cotta claims, are really atheists
who mount an appearance of belief in gods “for the sake of avoiding
unpopularity or punishment” (Cicero [1907] p. 106). But in reality, he
demands of them, “what reason is there for your saying that men ought
to worship the gods when the gods [in the Epicurean view] not only
do not regard men but are entirely careless of everything and do abso-
lutely nothing at all?” (Cicero [1907] p. 41). As for the Stoics, Cotta
argues, “the prosperity of the wicked destroys the idea of divine prov-
idence,” for how could omnipotent, omniscient gods tolerate this? On
the other hand, although good men “sometimes” succeed, this cannot
be proven conclusively to depend on the aid of the gods, as opposed

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to their own talent and effort (Cicero [1907] p. 137). The Stoic Balbus
declines to refute Cotta’s lengthy dissection of his philosophy, but sim-
ply observes that the falsity of Stoicism would mean the falsity of all
religion and piety, which “defend Rome better than she is defended by
her ramparts.” Although the Epicurean Velleius is won over by Cotta’s
demolition of both positions, Cicero depicts himself in the dialogue
as deciding that Stoicism possesses “the greater probability” (Cicero
[1907] p. 140).
St. Augustine’s interpretation of this dialogue in The City of God
is of great interest for understanding how the terms of the classical
debate about freedom and necessity were absorbed and altered by
Christianity. If, as Skinner maintains, Augustinian Christianity was the
main opponent of the humanist revival of the classical conception of
virtue and fortune, it should help to clarify the relationships among
all three bodies of belief. Not surprisingly, St. Augustine prefers Stoi-
cism among the ancient schools to the Epicurean principle of pleasure.
The Stoics believed the world to be governed by the rationality of the
supreme being. Man brings himself more closely into accordance with
this divine rationality by living virtuously. In interpreting Cicero’s place
in the debate, St. Augustine reasons as follows: if, as the Stoics correctly
believed, God is “the Cause of all causes,” he must also have foreknowl-
edge of the future. Cicero, however, believed that man cannot be free
if God has this foreknowledge. For if everything we do it predestined,
there is no point in holding people responsible for choosing virtue over
vice. The laws, education, and political morality meant to encourage
this choice would all be in vain. According to Augustine, this is why
Cicero, in his treatise On Divination, denies that there can be knowl-
edge of the future. For St. Augustine, this is tantamount to atheism:
“Thus, to make men free, he made them give up God.” Why, then, does
Cicero incline toward the Stoic view in On the Nature of the Gods? For
Augustine, this can only be explained as Cicero’s fear of being seen too
openly to embrace the impious view he actually holds (rather as Cotta
says of the Epicureans in the dialogue). Instead, St. Augustine argues,
Cicero places his real views in the mouth of Cotta (Augustine [1958]
pp. 102–105).
Augustine’s interpretation is arresting, but it assumes that Cicero
shared Augustine’s view that the “order of causes” necessarily implies
the foreknowledge of an interventionary supreme deity. Cicero did not

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see the matter in quite these terms, however, as can be confirmed

by examining another of his treatises, On Fate. Cicero uses the term
“fate” (fatum) when he wishes to discuss the problem posed by rational
causality for human freedom as a philosophical one strictly speaking,
as opposed to what he regarded as the deplorable superstitions fre-
quently associated with Fortuna and other Roman cults. Here, he is
explicitly concerned with finding a middle ground between the Stoic
view, which can lead to a determinism in which human freedom and
responsibility are impossible, and Epicureanism, which secures freedom
at the expense of belief in the gods, or at least in gods willing and able
to intervene justly in human affairs. Seemingly dry epistemological and
cosmological debates prove, as Cicero analyzes them, to have impor-
tant consequences for freedom and morality. The Stoic Chrysippus, for
example, is presented as maintaining that every proposition must be true
or false. Without this unambiguous correspondence between thought
and truth, “it will be impossible to prove that everything is done in
consequence of fate, and of the eternal causes of all future events.”
Epicurus, by contrast, denies this rather than “admit that everything
happens through fate.” For if propositions are true and false “from
all eternity,” human freedom is extinguished by the “necessity of fate”
governing every possible occurrence. According to Cicero, Epicurus
believed that his doctrine of the atoms avoided the determinism of this
supervening rational necessity. The “fortuitous” clashing of the atoms,
Cicero says, amounts to “an effect without a cause” (pronounced, we
recall, an absurdity by Aristotle in the Physics). This is especially true,
we may note, of the notorious “swerve” by which the atoms inexpli-
cably cease being carried perpendicularly downward by gravity and,
through a miraculous little ontological cha-cha, clash to generate visi-
ble phenomena (Lucretius De Rerum Natura 2:216–294). In Cicero’s
presentation, Epicurus believed that to grant that these combinations
of atoms are foreordained by “natural and necessary” causality would
be “to deprive man of his liberty” (Cicero [1907] p. 273). If the atoms
are not free to move spontaneously and generate new combinations, in
other words, neither are we.
At this point, Cicero sides with Epicurus as against Chrysippus, seem-
ing to prove St. Augustine’s view of him as an atheist (Cicero [1907]
p. 272). But Cicero is careful to say that he agrees with Epicurus only
rather than “grant that fate governs all things.” As the treatise goes on,

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it is clear that Cicero will not allow himself to be trapped between a

notion of rational causality that makes freedom of choice impossible by
rendering all acts predestined and a notion that we can be free only if the
world has emerged from an accidental concatenation of atoms. Finally,
he sides with Chrysippus, finding him to be “an honorary arbiter” who
“holds the middle course” between these extremes. Following Chrysip-
pus, he argues as follows: “(R)eason itself” does oblige us, after all,
to grant “that there are things true from all eternity,” and therefore
that every proposition is either true or false (Cicero [1907] p. 279).
It does not follow from this, however, that all things are “bound to
eternal causes of necessity.” Man’s freedom is compatible with the
“doctrine of fate” so long as fate is not synonymous with necessity
(Cicero [1907] p. 280). Some things are indeed caused by “necessary
and compulsory causes,” but human perceptions, for example, have a
more proximal cause, which explains their precise content. An object
“strikes our sense and conveys its image to our soul” – this is causal
necessity. “Yet it leaves us free to form our specific sentiment concern-
ing it.” The proximal cause of these sentiments rests with man: “we
have the moulding of their effects in our own power” (Cicero [1907]
p. 281).
The preceding is not so important because it adequately resolves
the problem of freedom versus necessity as for the light it sheds on
Augustine’s critique of Cicero. It appears that for Augustine, there can
be no “middle course” of the kind sought by Cicero between Epicure-
anism and the more deterministic version of Stoicism. Because Cicero
clearly means to preserve man’s freedom from divine necessity, St.
Augustine concludes that he could not really have believed in the order
of causes in any sense and was therefore driven to dissimulate his views.
As we have seen, however, not only does Cicero refuse to be bound by
this dichotomy, but his middle course does not require grounding in
an omnipotent, interventionary deity who stands beyond nature. The
distinction between fated and necessary causes is all that the Cicero-
nian solution requires. The absence of this activist Abrahamic deity
from Cicero’s understanding of a reasonably ordered universe explains,
I would argue, St. Augustine’s inability to enter the debate on Cicero’s
own terms, or on classical terms in general. For to the Christian the-
ologian, no resolution of the problem is thinkable apart from such a
supreme personal deity.

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This difference points to how much Christian theology altered classi-

cal thought about man’s place within the order of the world even while
adapting many of its categories and problematics. In Aristotle’s Physics,
for example, all natural movements are solicited into motion by a final
cause that is itself unmoved. The final cause is therefore not a willing
agency of any kind, which Aristotle would place under the heading of
efficient cause. It is, rather, a perfection that solicits movement toward
itself through efficient, material, and formal causes (Aristotle Physics
194b–195a, 258b10–259b20; Metaphysics 1071b10–1073a15). For
St. Augustine, by contrast, final cause is conflated with the efficient
cause of an interventionary deity whose will creates and sustains all
things.6 In keeping with this elevation of God’s will over all other kinds
of causality, St. Augustine’s own solution to the problem of freedom
versus necessity is to assimilate both “fate” and “necessity” to God’s
direct and constant supervision of the universe. As for fortune, chance,
or accident, he simply denies that, strictly speaking, they exist at all,
especially in human affairs. “As for the causes which are called fortu-
itous,” they merely appear so to our limited understanding; they, too,
are “latent” in the will of God. How is human freedom compatible with
a deity who wills all and knows all? St. Augustine’s answer is that God
gives us the power to choose good over evil, and the choices we freely
make reenter the chain of causes foreknown by God. In other words,
as the efficient cause of the universe including human voluntarism, God
wills our wills: “In His will is the supreme power which helps the good
choices of created spirits . . . (our) wills have no power save what He
gave them” (Augustine [1958] pp. 107–108).
Several contrasts emerge from the preceding analysis between the
Christian and classical conceptions of virtue and fortune. For the Greek
and Roman thinkers, the problem posed by the order of causes for
human freedom admits of a number of more or less provisional solu-
tions. We can summarize their general sense as follows: There is an

6 Compare St. Thomas, who represents Aristotelian causality not in its original sense
as perspectives on a thing but as successive stages of the divine artisan’s operations
on material reality. Whereas Aristotle treats natural causality as analogous to art – in
other words, like art in some respects, unlike it in others – Thomas is confident in his
commentary on Aristotle’s Physics that “nature is nothing but a certain kind of art, that
is, the divine art, impressed upon things, by which these things are moved to a determinate
end.” Thomas (1963) p. 124; my emphasis.

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eternal order of rational causality, but it does not fully determine every
human thought and action. The play of nature’s self-movement – and,
therefore, of accident and contingency – leaves a wide latitude for sen-
sible improvisation, as Aristotle had already argued with respect to
prudence. There may be gods which provide an objective grounding for
virtue, but this does not mean they constantly and reliably intervene in
human affairs on behalf of the good, at least not without a matching
effort by man (as Plato’s Timaeus puts it, the god of the cosmos is
“apathetic,” without impulse or feeling, while according to the Repub-
lic, the gods do not change shape or assume human form; Timaeus
28–34; Republic 379a–381e). In sum, the classical thinkers try to find a
place for fortune (albeit a severely circumscribed one) within the order
of causes. For St. Augustine, on the other hand, fortune simply vanishes
into the will of the Creator, or, expressed passively as His dispensation,
into Providence. (As we consider at greater length subsequently, the
fundamental theological conundrum as to whether God ought primar-
ily to be understood as “making” or as “revealing” will prove central
to Machiavelli’s revaluation of virtue and fortune.)
However, if the classical understanding of the relation between virtue
and fortune is different from the Christian one, still less does it resemble
the idea of virtue described by Skinner as man’s creative will exerting
itself over a capricious fortune so as to shape it to human desires, a
concept that, I am arguing, is distinctively modern and inaugurated by
Machiavelli. For the Greek and Roman thinkers, virtue is a conditioning
of the soul that brings one into closer proximity to eternal being. Cicero
never questions that the objects of the virtues are prescribed for man by a
rationally ordered cosmos; he works within this assumption even while
resisting its more deterministic interpretation. Accordingly, the classical
notion of virtue has no connotation of mastering fortune in the external
world. Rather, by cultivating the virtues, one lessens one’s desires, and
therefore one’s dependence on external goods. Because to be a slave of
external goods is to be a slave of what is perishable, accidental, or less
real, in this sense virtue can make one less vulnerable to the reverses
of fortune. But this way of coping with unpredictable or unmerited
suffering is more passive than masterful, grounded in our reconciliation
to our natural place within the Great Chain of Being. If the reverses
occur anyway, so the reasoning went, one can draw on the steadfastness,
dignity, and self-control achieved through the cultivation of virtue to

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sustain or console oneself against them. Plutarch, for example, is full

of homilies to this effect. In chronicling the lives of great statesmen
and generals, he wants his readers to understand “how far a noble
nature, an honorable ancestry and a virtuous upbringing can fortify
men against grief, and that although fate may defeat the efforts of
virtue to avert misfortune, it cannot deprive us of the power to endure
it with equanimity . . . (A) virtue which a man embraces on principle
and which is genuinely a part of his nature can never be transformed
into its opposite by any mere stroke of fortune . . . ” (Plutarch [1968]
pp. 193, 204). This gray-bearded eat your peas prescription for noble
resignation in the face of fortune’s reverses could not possibly be further
from Machiavelli’s praise in chapter 25 of The Prince of hot-blooded
youth’s power to wrestle Fortuna to the ground and take her.
By the same token, the classical thinkers do not identify the various
objective constraints on man’s freedom with Fortuna in Machiavelli’s
sense of an overwhelming and singular power of irrational happen-
stance. Plato and Aristotle, for example, understand the world as being
ordered by the intelligence that also provides human nature with its
telos (Plato Laws 892–900; Aristotle Physics 256b20–258b10; Nico-
machean Ethics 1142a25–30, 1143b1–5). Within this way of seeing
things, fortune or accident is relegated to the secondary role of meaning
the decline of perishable things from being into nonbeing. In keeping
with this primacy of rationality over accident, the effects of sheer irra-
tional happenstance – the whole gamut of natural disasters and human
impulse – are relegated to a secondary role in politics and morality.
This distrust of spontaneous impulse is reflected in the frequently noted
lack of “realism” in classical political philosophy: the emphasis on tran-
scending desire rather than acquiring the power to satisfy it; the empha-
sis on a stable internal politics and military self-defense rather than
on a dynamic foreign policy of imperial expansion. As we have seen,
what primarily concerned the philosophical schools of antiquity was,
instead, how this concept of a rationally ordered cosmos affected the
prospects for human freedom of choice. Does the order of causes leave
man responsible for developing his moral and intellectual excellence
through the pursuit of virtue? Because the telos is eternally prescribed
from a transhuman source, is there any room for man’s distinctive con-
tribution? Far from being – as in Skinner’s interpretation – too willful
or capricious, too apt to spoil expectations of regularity and order,

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the world surrounding man may be entirely too rational, orderly, and
good.

If we turn to the understanding of virtue and fortune among the human-

ists of the trecento and quattrocento with the classical and Augustinian
perspectives in mind, two features emerge. First, as Skinner observes,
they are indeed preoccupied with the power of fortune over human
affairs. However, rather than reverting to “the classical image of man’s
predicament,” as Skinner argues, it seems to me that they greatly
heighten this sense of man’s vulnerability to fortune’s reverses. Despite
this, however, the conception of virtue that the humanists invoke to
deal with fortune’s sway remains almost entirely classical in the sense
I have discussed here. It places far more emphasis on the need to sub-
mit and reconcile oneself to the divine or rational order that rules the
universe than on man’s capacity to “mould his fate” and to be “the
architect . . . of his own character.” This can be confirmed by examin-
ing the authors cited by Skinner as being important for furnishing the
“ideological” context for Machiavelli’s republicanism. These include
the followers of Salutati – Bruno, Poggio, and Vergerio – who in turn
influenced Alberti, Mannetti, Valla, and Palmieri. Skinner also argues
for the importance of Petrarchan humanism as helping to give rise to
quattrocento humanism. Skinner sees Petrarchan and civic humanism
as entering a distinct stream from that of “Augustinian Christianity,”
flowing into the republican ideology that flowered in the early sixteenth
century when Machiavelli began to write.7
According to Skinner, Petrarch – in a theme on which Alberti,
Manetti, and Pico della Mirandola made later elaborations – denies
that fortune is the “inexorable force of providence,” seeing it rather
as “nothing more than a capricious power.” Reverting to the classical
view that “Augustine had tried to obliterate,” Skinner argues, Petrarch
no longer emphasizes the view of man as “the possessor of an immortal
soul” but as able to “control his own destiny.” In keeping with this,
Skinner claims that Petrarch’s admiration for Cicero was not merely as
a contemplative sage but as a model for the life of action. However,
as we have seen from our analysis of the classical view in general and
Cicero’s in particular, the fact that man can possess a free will and – as

7 Skinner (1980) pp. 96–98, 69, 71.

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Pico della Mirandola writes, “many operations of intelligence” – is not

sufficient to establish Skinner’s thesis that virtue is now viewed as man’s
“creative powers” to “remake his social world to fit his own desires.”8
Certainly, as we have considered in previous chapters of this book, the
classical thinkers attributed moral and intellectual qualities to man that
made him fit for a life of civic responsibility. However, the strength of
character to be a good citizen or ruler was thought to come from the
transcendence of tyrannical and ungoverned desire – from avoiding, to
the degree humanly possible, the pursuit of boundless power and pres-
tige. Thus, it does not follow from the classical thinkers’ attribution to
human beings of free will and various kinds of talent that people are
able, as Skinner infers, to reshape the world as they see fit to serve their
own desires. Instead, the problem as the classical thinkers saw it was
whether the freedom and intelligence with which man was endowed in
order to pursue virtue were overwhelmed or rendered superfluous by
the supervening order of causes. As we saw in Chapter 1, for Plato it
was crucial to appeal to the passions on behalf of the intellect through
myths and images that sublimated man’s freedom to pursue honor and
glory but did not try to assimilate it altogether to the study of the
impersonal, unchanging One. Some scope for action had to be opened
up between unbridled tyrannical impulse and the satiation of erotic
longing by the pure light of the truth. The aim was neither to remain
bound to the shadows of the Cave, nor to flee them forever and live
in perfect detachment from human affairs like Socrates hanging in his
basket in The Clouds, but to remain engaged in the affairs of the Cave
guided by the light of philosophic enlightenment streaming into it from
above.
The difficulty with Skinner’s interpretation is evident in his charac-
terization of Petrarch’s dialogue On the Remedies of Good and Bad
Fortune as exemplifying the beginnings of the “new attitude” about
virtue and fortune (Petrarca [1967]).9 An examination of the dialogue
reveals that Petrarch is very far from encouraging a bold and masterful

8 Skinner (1980) pp. 87, 94, 98. Baron takes a different view. Although Petrarch admired
Cicero as a philosopher, Baron argues, “Cicero’s civic spirit was to him nothing but
an offense against all the traditions of the Middle Ages.” Baron (1938) pp. 72–97. As
described by Hulliung, Machiavelli’s opinion of Cicero is the precise opposite of this.
Hulliung (1983) p. 132.
9 Skinner (1980) p. 97.

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stance toward fortune’s caprices. On the contrary, Petrarch depicts Rea-

son as delivering a withering admonition to the youthful exuberance
and optimism of Joy and Hope. In celebrating the ascendant powers of
youth, Reason warns: “You put your trust in a most treacherous thing.
This ascendancy of which you speak is in reality a decline. This brief
life is furtively, between play and dreams, soon dissolved by unstable
time. Would that God would permit us to realize (this) in the begin-
ning. . . . Nothing is closer to life than death” (Petrarca [1967] pp. 4–5).
The young should therefore abandon their hopes and follow “the
straight and narrow path of virtue” before it is too late. Following
this path requires a mixture of Christian and classical precepts: “The
wise man will love God . . . he will love his neighbour, he will love virtue,
his country, his parents, his brothers, his friends, and if he is really wise,
he will also love his enemies – not for themselves . . . but for the sake of
Him who wishes us to do so” (Petrarca [1967] p. 16).
According to Petrarch, the key to this way of life is to “learn once
and for all” to “love” and “think of . . . eternal things,” turning away
from “that which is transitory:” “If you love nothing but what is vis-
ible, you can love nothing that is great” (Petrarca [1967] p. 14). One
should overcome the love of beautiful bodies, for example, for the love
of beautiful souls (Petrarca [1967] p. 10). Cicero and Plato are cited to
adduce the familiar classical notion that bodily love makes one depen-
dent on transitory goods that cannot last and desires that cannot be
satisfied. By loving the eternal, we rise above such “anxiety . . . coarse
desires, sighs and . . . burning thoughts” (Petrarca [1967] p. 17). As we
can see from this, contrary to Skinner’s interpretation, Petrarch places
a great deal of emphasis on man’s possession of an immortal soul.
Of particular significance for our discussion of virtue and fortune is
Petrarch’s most un-Machiavellian argument that a wise man’s love for
eternal things also frees him from the passion for fame, which is like-
wise a transient thing – not true virtue, but its “shadow.” According to
Petrarch, in the form of praise for acquiring virtue, fame may help to
educate a “generous and modest soul.” But pursued for its own sake,
it “casts down foolish and presumptuous souls,” transforming prema-
turely celebrated young men into “unknown old men” (Petrarca [1967]
p. 22). The exceptional fame of great statesmen and generals praised
through the ages is, according to Petrarch, especially to be avoided,
calling into question Skinner’s claim that Petrarch admired Cicero’s

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interest in worldly politics. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and

Augustus Caesar, he writes, may have been “very fortunate,” yet “they
nevertheless lived constantly in disquiet; they were constantly involved
in turbulence and, therefore, never happy. Besides, death [often] came
to them prematurely” on the battlefield (Petrarca [1967] pp. 23–24).
Only those who acquire virtue by turning away from such “transient
and uncertain” goods are truly happy (Petrarca [1967] p. 25). They
are also less vulnerable to fortune’s reverses, because they have no high
station from which to fall and will not be conquered or betrayed by
their rivals.
It is difficult to imagine anything further than this from Machiavelli’s
view that fortune can be mastered by virtu of the kind displayed by Cae-
sar, Alexander, and Cyrus. Old Man Reason’s finger-wagging at the
“joy and hope” of youth’s ascendancy in Petrarch’s dialogue is the per-
fect foil for Machiavelli’s encouragement of the hot-blooded new prince.
It certainly does not support Skinner’s argument that whereas Augus-
tinian Christianity commended the pursuit of blessedness and moral
virtue, “Petrarch and his successors” understood virtue as the acqui-
sition of “the greatest possible amount of honor, glory and worldly
fame.”10 Rather, Petrarch’s emphasis is on the classical notion of virtue
discussed earlier, filtrated through Christian otherworldliness – the cor-
rect education of the soul in accordance with virtues prescribed by a
rationally ordered cosmos. The aim is not to subdue fortune in the
service of desire but to transcend desire altogether – desire being the
chief way in which fortune undermines us. Thus, one can minimize
the reverses of fortune not by trying to master the world but precisely
by resisting the passion to master it. Petrarch thoroughly dampens the
youthful impetuosity that Machiavelli was later to praise as the best dis-
position for overcoming Fortuna. In his dismissal of the fame won by
the ancient statesmen and generals as a delusion compared with man’s
inescapable mortality, in his emphasis on the need to orient oneself
by the eternal and invisible rather than by the perishable and worldly,
Petrarch’s tone owes even more to Augustinian Christianity than it does
to classical philosophy.11 Plato’s images of the soul, the realm of metaxy

10 Skinner (1980) p. 100.

11 As Nachod observes: “As a faithful son of the Church, [Petrarch] was fully satisfied
with her teachings and did not need another guide in the labyrinth of this life, in

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between the human and the divine where passion is sublimated by rea-
son through the eros for honor, is utterly jettisoned, exposed as cheap
tinsel, and stripped of its allure as it is “dissolved by unstable time.”
Although they can draw on more Greek and Roman texts for illustra-
tions and arguments, the quattrocento humanists do not appear to be
any closer than Petrarch to advancing the conception of virtue described
by Skinner as man’s power to reshape the world. In Manetti, Albertus,
and Pico della Mirandola – three figures whom Skinner links with the
Petrarchan view of virtue – we encounter the same mixture of Christian
theology with classical moral philosophy and metaphysics. For exam-
ple, Manetti’s On the Dignity and Excellence of Man does not suggest,
as Skinner argues, a commendation of man’s creative powers to grap-
ple with the world and subdue it to his needs.12 Instead, according to
Manetti, the dignity and happiness proper to men are conferred on those
who fully understand that the soul is immortal and of divine origin. By
pursuing virtue, Manetti argues, we can approximate that transmun-
dane purity more closely in our earthly lives. Kings and princes, far
from being urged to use their talents for worldly success, prestige, and
stability, are adjured to submit themselves to the divine order: “Your
duties, as regards understanding and acting, you have in common with
omnipotent God; consequently, by acquiring and cultivating virtue, you
may attain the beatitude of a tranquil immortality” (Manetti [1967]
pp. 83–84, 100).
Similarly, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man
cannot really be said, as Skinner would have it, to posses as “a central
theme . . . the individual’s free and creative powers.”13 The teleology
that Pico describes is incompatible with the primacy and freedom of the
individual. According to it, God endows human beings with a hierarchy
of “potentialities.” At the bottom are those who live for their appetites
and so resemble “plants” and “brutes.” At the top is the philosopher – a

this respect particularly under the spell of his great model Augustine.” Nachod (1948)
p. 241. See also Kristeller, who points out that Augustinian Christianity was very much
a part of Petrarch’s rediscovery of classical literature – not, as Skinner implies, a foil
for it. Kristeller (1969) pp. 361–363. On the general importance for the humanists of
neo-Platonism as it was filtered through Augustinian theology, see Cassirer, Kristeller,
and Randall (1948) pp. 6–7.
12 Skinner (1980) p. 97.
13 Skinner (1980) p. 97.

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type who, having risen above his animal desires, is “a creature of

heaven and not of earth” (Pico [1967] pp. 144–145). Statesmanship
and other kinds of worldly political success do not even figure in
this hierarchy, distinguishing it from its classical antecedents such as
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and reflecting the Augustinian deval-
uation of civic virtue. The “frenzies” of an ancient philosopher like
Socrates to escape this fallen and impure world can, according to Pico,
meet with far more certain success in Christian philosophy. This will
“enable us to reach such ecstasy that our intellect and our very being
become one with God” (Pico [1967] p. 152). Those who seek knowl-
edge to be practically employed for the sake of worldly gain or success,
rather than purely for its own sake, are roundly condemned (Pico [1967]
p. 156).14
Clearest of all in this regard is Albertus’s dialogue on Fate and For-
tune. As Skinner observes, fortune is presented here as a power engulfing
human affairs, anticipating Machiavelli’s imagery in chapter 25 of The
Prince about damming and redirecting a swollen river (Alberti [1967]
pp. 35–38).15 Albertus depicts fortune allegorically as a river carrying
people along on its current, some of whom drown while others make
it to shore. In the terms of the allegory, those who cling to “blown and
pompous” skins to stay afloat are characterized by such vices as per-
fidiousness, shamelessness, cruelty, avarice, calculation, and gluttony.
Those who “trusting to their own strength . . . swim the whole course of
Life” on their own fare much better. This appears to confirm Skinner’s
interpretation of the humanists’ espousal of energetic self-reliance and
willpower. Two points must be balanced against this, however. First, it
is not the river current representing fortune but “the gods” who have
the final influence on how people fare in the allegory. Moreover, it is
not the swimmers whom the gods think most highly of and are there-
fore most likely to reward with good fortune. In Albertus’s depiction,
the self-reliant people have to pause to regain their strength for swim-
ming by clinging to “little boats.” These boats carry along in perfect

14 Pocock regards Pico’s Oration as an example of neo-Platonism that forsook the virtu
needed for civic community in favor of “an illumined communion with the cosmos.”
Pico’s failure to find a bridge between philosophy and the requirements of political life
helps to explain, in Pocock’s view, his attraction to the “holy community” preached by
Savanarola. Pocock (1975) pp. 98–99.
15 Skinner (1980) p. 96.

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safety the most virtuous people of all. These are the “just, wise (and)
honest,” who “never cease thinking worthy thoughts.” They “do good
to others by offering a helping hand to those who are in difficulty.”
Moreover, “(n)one among men who are struggling in the river is more
welcome by the immortal gods than those who, in the little boats, look
to faith, to simplicity and to virtue” (Alberti [1967] p. 36). There is no
elevation here of Skinner’s interpretation of virtue as the Promethean
capacity of man to “control his own destiny.” Although the energetic
and self-reliant people are given their fair due of commendation, they
are clearly depicted as dependent on, and morally inferior to, those sur-
passingly good people in their modest little boats. On no level of the
allegory does Albertus suggest that the mighty power of the river could
be tamed and rechanneled to serve man’s needs, as in chapter 25 of
The Prince. Everyone must submit to its current, perhaps as to Provi-
dence, but the virtuous are able to make safe boats for themselves to
avoid its dangers as they are borne along.
Turning to the other humanists cited by Skinner, we find further
variations on the conception of virtue as a conditioning of the soul that
brings one into closer proximity to eternal truth and being. Castiglione
maintains that virtue can overcome fortune – but by virtue he means the
moderation of the Golden Mean and insists that power should never
be pursued for its own sake or for selfish and merely practical ends
(Castiglione [1959] pp. 14–15, 323–324).16 Valla illustrates especially
clearly how close the humanists often were to orthodox Christian for-
mulations of virtue and fortune when he observes that Fortune or “the
divine will . . . condemns some and saves others” without our knowing
why (Valla [1967] pp. 63–64). In contrast to Skinner’s view of how the
humanists understood virtue, Valla argues that the appropriate response
to this dilemma is not to rebel and assert our wills against fortune but
to submit even more thoroughly to its dictates. We should not “request
a guarantee” from Christ but hold onto “faith, hope and love.” Here,
the classical notion of virtue as a source of dignity and strength of soul
amidst fortune’s reverses is radicalized into the Christian’s total faith
in providence and disavowal of any need to account for God’s ways.
Aristotle’s ambition for comprehensive knowledge of the order of the
universe is accordingly dismissed as “proud and foolish,” echoing an

16 Consider also Woodhouse (1978) pp. 65–67, 150–160.

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Augustinian characterization of philosophy when it is unilluminated by

and not subordinated to divine revelation. “Nothing is more becoming
to the Christian,” Valla concludes, “than humility.”17

As we began by observing, Skinner links the humanists with what he

takes to be the classical conception of virtue as man’s exertion of will
against Fortune’s willfulness, as opposed to the Augustinian view that
man cannot and should not resist providence. Our exegesis leads to a
rather different conclusion. Augustine does represent a radicalization
of the classical analysis of the several kinds of limitations on human
freedom into a single, all-encompassing divine necessity grounded in
the will of God. As I argue later in this chapter, Machiavelli’s own con-
flation of every force external to man as the overwhelming singularity
of Fortuna is in a way prepared for by Augustine’s radicalization of
the transhuman order into a single overwhelming force of providence.
But the classical conception of the limitations placed by the cosmos on
man’s freedom is still very much one of objective and eternal rational
causality, and not, as Skinner would have it, a “capricious power.”
Moreover, while the classical conception of virtue certainly provides
more latitude than the Christian one for independent political judg-
ment and improvisation, it is in no sense “creative” or able to “control
destiny,” as Skinner argues; instead it has its place within the order of
causes. By contrast, Augustine would subordinate the order of causes
to the will of God, while Machiavelli would subordinate it to the will
of the prince. We saw that the humanists, although perhaps more pre-
occupied with the problem of fortune than their classical predecessors,
shared their view of virtue as having its place within the order of causes.
By reading into the other humanists what is in truth a uniquely Machi-
avellian conception of virtue that is difficult to reconcile not only with
Greek and Roman thought but with humanism as well, it seems to me
that Skinner exaggerates the differences between Augustinian Christian-
ity on the one hand and classicism and humanism on the other, while
misconstruing the terms of the real differences among these three on the
question of virtue and fortune.

17 Valla was highly skeptical of prospects for the synthesis of classical learning with Chris-
tian revelation. See Trinkaus (1948) p. 149.

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As we have seen, the classical thinkers were not primarily con-

cerned with the problem of accident or fortuitous happenstance as an
impediment to human freedom. They tended to identify accident with
nonbeing, the failure of a thing to attain its end. Instead, they were con-
cerned with how to account for man’s freedom and responsibility to
choose virtue over vice, given this rational order of causes. As Cicero’s
On Fate demonstrates, thoughtful Greeks and Romans had various
teachings to choose among that gave more or less scope to man’s free-
dom of choice and action within this order. Christianity took over the
classical conception of an ordered but heterogenous cosmos and inter-
preted it as the laws through which God’s singular and almighty will
operates on mundane reality. This led to a narrowing of the classical
debate. What had before been more of an open question, typified by
dialogues such as Cicero’s, now hardens into orthodoxy. God’s will
explains everything, and although worldly virtues are not unimportant,
they are of far less significance than faith in and reliance on divine
providence.
It is perhaps because the rigidity of the Christian doctrine seemed
so inadequate to explain the tribulations of Italian politics that the
humanists felt so much at the mercy of random circumstance. If God’s
will embodied reason, then the world around them, where God’s will
manifestly had not established peace and justice, was obviously an
unreasonable place. Nevertheless, given what may be this increased
feeling of vulnerability to the blows of fortune, the striking thing is that
the humanists largely retained the classical conception of virtue rather
than elaborate a coherent stance of rebellion and mastery in the face of
fortune’s “malignity.” The transcendentalist metaphysics of the classics
were taken to presage the final revelation of Christianity, but their com-
paratively more pragmatic statecraft might also offer Christian citizens
and statesmen more latitude for strictly political considerations than
Augustinian orthodoxy. Erasmus, for example, while certainly stressing
the centrality of religious education to forming the character of a good
prince, sees no contradiction between that priority and an exposure to
the noble deeds of the ancients.18 Nonetheless, that more pragmatic

18 “The deeds of famous men fire the minds of noble youths, but the opinions with which
they become imbued is a matter of greater importance. . . . A prince who is about to

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political teaching still remained firmly within the order of nature,

never suggesting that nature could be mastered. Accordingly, while the
humanists could not part ways with the classical understanding of virtue
as man’s reconciliation with the order of nature, they could not entirely
part ways with the orthodox Christian conception of virtue either, for
the Augustinian and other Christian views drew on the classical tra-
dition just as they did. Skinner, it seems to me, underrates the tenets
that the humanists held in common with more conventional religious
opinion, despite the greater erudition and suppleness of their argumen-
tation. He writes as if only Augustinian Christianity subsumed fortune
under a lawlike, divine necessity, whereas the humanists understood
virtue in terms of spontaneous freedom of choice. But this overlooks
the large element of the classical view that flowed into both the human-
istic and Christian understandings. All three shared the view of virtue
as a conditioning of the soul that brings one into closer proximity to
eternal truth and being.19
What Christianity and humanism shared in common with the clas-
sics makes us aware of how very different was Machiavelli’s conception
of virtue and fortune, a difference surpassing, in my view, any differ-
ences among the other three. For only here do we find the consistently
elaborated view of fortune as an irrational flux that can be mastered
by an anthropocentric purposive and calculating will. Plato and Aris-
totle saw the virtuous soul as embodying the rationality that orders
the world as a whole. Machiavelli, however, treats man and Fortuna
as opponents. He never examines fortune under its traditional rubrics
as a subsidiary dimension of the order of causes, but rather equates it
with all conditions external to the human will. The classical distinc-
tions among necessity, accident, chance, coincidence, and fate are thus
collapsed into a single protean force of happenstance. The world does

assume control of the state must be advised at once that the main hope of a state lies
in the proper education of its youth. This Xenophon wisely taught in his Cyropaedia.
Pliable youth is amenable to any system of training.” Erasmus, The Education of a
Christian Prince, quoted in Newell (2001) pp. 212–214.
19 By contrast, Felix Gilbert observes: “Machiavelli did not merely refute the idealist
enterprise in politics in general but . . . wrote with the conscious aim of discrediting the
idealized conception of the prince as contained in the (humanists’) catalogue of the
virtues” (1939) pp. 478–480. In Hulliung’s view, Machiavelli inhabits the form of
the humanistic mirror of princes genre the more effectively to undermine its Christian
and Stoic substance (1983) pp. 11–19, 24–25, 245.

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not supply man with his rationality and end. Instead, princely men
impose “new modes and orders” on the world. In this way, the terms of
the debate about the relation of virtue to fortune undergo a profound
ontological alteration. The classical view had been that the cultivation
of virtue, by aiming at the rational and eternal, enabled man to over-
come the power of chance. Pedagogically, psychologically, and morally
this meant that overcoming tyrannical desires made a human being less
dependent on perishable and external things. Machiavelli, however,
wishes to expose the belief in an ordered universe, with its reflections
in the utopian “republics” of Greek and Roman thought, along with
Augustine’s Republic of God, as a delusion. After reducing these (what
he takes to be) imaginary standards to random chance, he opposes to
it a conception of virtue as anthropocentric will that has no transcen-
dental relation to the nonhuman world. Virtue can overcome fortune
not by transcending chance through transcending desire, a prescription
common to classics, Christians, and humanists alike. On the contrary,
by yielding to our desires for glory, wealth, and power, as princes or as
citizens of vigorous expansionist republics, we orient ourselves by the
vital disorder that is at the heart of all existence.
I have been arguing in this book that Machiavelli’s originality lies
in this paradoxical reliance on disorder. He is not merely arguing that
fortune is unreliable, but that fortune’s hindrances are in a strange way
actually to be welcomed and are constitutive of sound psychology and
statecraft. Machiavelli’s use, for example, of the Polybian cycle of the
rise and decline of states in the Discourses, which we consider at length
in the next chapter, omits Polybius’s concern with transcending this
temporal cycle in the direction of the eternal.20 As Machiavelli puts
it, “chance” and “the aid of events” can “perfect” republics without
any assistance from such transcendental sources. Because there is no
nunc stans or eternality of true being – because “everything is in per-
petual movement” – “disunity” is a more reliable source of a republic’s
power and freedom than a unity that is doomed by the flow of events.21

20 See, for example, Pocock (1975) p. 189.

21 See Mansfield, who draws a connection between Machiavelli’s use of the term “first
cause” to describe the disorder underlying Rome’s freedom and his use of the term
“humors” (that is, bodily conditions) to describe the factions in Roman politics. I take
him to mean that Machiavelli here converts the classical meaning of “first cause” into
its opposite – into subrational chance – and that, in keeping with this reversal, political

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Moreover, the challenge of founding or reforming a state in which peo-

ple and conditions are unremittingly corrupt or hostile adds glory to
the ruler’s eventual success. A “wise prince,” seeing that overcoming
fortune’s hostility increases one’s prestige, will imitate fortune by, for
example, deliberately cultivating hostilities among his subjects and then
stamping them out (The Prince chapter 20). The correct employment of
the lion and the fox – the belligerent and calculating aspects of human
selfishness – depends on recognizing that disorder is indeed “the order
of things.” By being “impetuous” – that is, by letting this disorder fuel
one’s conduct – the prince can preempt the impetuosity of Fortuna. By
being willful in this new kind of way, Machiavelli suggests, we can tap
fortune’s willfulness into our own calculations. We can be on guard
against fortune’s caprices because we have liberated that capriciousness
through our own selfish impulses. That new stance, as we now consider
more closely, is not comprised simply of a repudiation of Augustinian
otherworldliness, but by a secularization of it.

sundering diotima’s ladder: the city of man, the

city of god, and machiavelli’s new synthesis
Many interpretations of Machiavelli stress either the relationship of his
thought to classical political philosophy or to the classical teachings as
they were transmitted by humanist writers on princely and republican
statesmanship. Most scholars also agree that Machiavelli undertakes
a refutation of both ancient political philosophy and of many of its
humanist devotees for being insufficiently realistic and offering little
practical advice for grappling with the problem of political instability
and unrest.22 As Machiavelli puts it in a passage that simultaneously
recalls the optimal politeia of pagan philosophy and the Christian civitas
of St. Augustine:

Since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it

has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the
thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and

discourse in the Aristotelian sense is to be converted from the rational deliberation on

ends grounded in the first cause of the visible cosmos into the random clash of impulse
or interests. Mansfield (2001) pp. 42–43.
22 For a good general discussion of Machiavelli’s uses of classical thought, see Gilbert
(1984) pp. 179–200.

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principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is
so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go what
is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.
(The Prince chapter 15)
I broadly agree with these interpretations, and my main purpose in
this book has been to use my readings of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon
as foils for illuminating some of the original tenets of Machiavelli’s state-
craft. However, I am also arguing that more attention should be paid
to Machiavelli’s relationship to Christianity – not simply as an obsta-
cle to combat but as an opponent whose categories influence Machi-
avelli’s thinking even as he attempts to repudiate them. I am trying to
show that Machiavelli owes a kind of negative debt to Christianity that
helps us to understand why his thought cannot be viewed simply as
a return to the greater latitude for worldly statesmanship afforded by
pagan philosophy in comparison with Christianity. There are two main
facets to this negative debt. I will sketch them schematically, and then
show how they come together in the discussion of the prince’s relation-
ship to Fortuna, famously (and notoriously) personified in chapter 25
of The Prince. In the next and final chapter, I try to show, through a
reading of the discussion of the origins of republics in the Discourses,
how Machiavelli’s departure from the classical approach to the theme
of the founding weaves together with his negative debt to certain tenets
of Christianity to establish an entirely novel synthesis and a dynamic
new prescription for political freedom.
The first element in Machiavelli’s debt to Christianity concerns the
altered meaning of causality effected by Christian theology. For Plato,
causality is chiefly a matter of solicitation, not effectuation. In Aris-
totelian terms, final cause takes ontological priority over efficient cause.
Phenomena are summoned toward their respective completions by the
Good. The Good causes the fullness and fruition of their growth toward
the stable form that perfects each class of beings. The Image of the Sun
in Book 6 of the Republic best conveys this solicitative causality (506–
509). As the Sun summons each natural being toward its growth, this
solicitation sets in motion its natural power and energy for develop-
ment. In other words, the form toward which each being naturally
tends entails effectuation and structure. The same is true of the soul.
For Plato the soul is naturally drawn toward the repose and stability
offered by the prospect of union with the Good. Diotima’s Ladder in the

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Symposium is a sketch of how the Good solicits the soul’s movements

through the Beautiful toward itself, a summons that energizes the soul’s
volition and desires in the proper direction. When Socrates abstracts
from eros in discussing the soul in the Republic, he stresses the ener-
getic struggle that one must undergo in order to turn the soul away from
its baser attachments – and its deluded identification of mere opinion
with the truth – toward the light of transcendence. The prisoner in the
Cave needs “someone” to turn him around through benevolently
aggressive dialectical investigation and refutation (514–519). Yet this is
not the same thing as arguing that one can strive for transcendence by
willing oneself to overcome the limitations imposed by nature on our
freedom, a hallmark of modern ethics begun by Machiavelli and per-
fected by Kant. For Plato, the energies that effectuate the soul’s ascent
are all along solicited and directed by the natural objects of erotic
longing. Effectuation, in other words, is housed within the natural con-
tinuum of desire and the objects of desire linking the primordial and
the transcendental. As Diotima puts it, eros is the “great spirit” link-
ing man to the subhuman and the transhuman, between becoming and
being, the source of both prudence and correct opinion. An exertion of
human will cannot achieve this ascent on its own. Even when stress-
ing the harsh, refutational path to transcendence – the turning around
toward the light from the bonds of the Cave, a jarring transition that
is first imposed on the prisoner by rough hands – Socrates is wont to
compare it to a natural process (birth pains [Theaetetus 150–151], a
kind of medical treatment [Gorgias 479–480], or gymnastic exercises
[the Lovers] the soul must undergo for it to develop into a fit condition
to receive the light and begin to be borne up toward it).
I do not of course mean to argue that efficient cause has no inde-
pendent place in Platonic cosmology. The dialogues sometimes describe
a god who “makes” (poiein) things – the demiurge of the Republic
and Timaeus; the god in Book 10 of the Laws who sets up the cos-
mos in such a way that human beings can participate in the victory of
order over disorder by becoming allies of nous (almost a nonhistori-
cist version of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit [Laws 897, 904–906]).
Even when Plato describes a god who fabricates, however, it is not in
the sense of the God of revealed religion who literally creates some-
thing out of nothing, including (in Thomism) the very matter out of

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which things are shaped, and whose creations are not constrained by a
preexisting – or, depending on the theology, even a posterior – pattern
of natural order and regularity. This difference is underscored by the
fact that, because every noun in Attic Greek has an article, one can-
not unambiguously express the concept of God – it is always the god
(ho theos), which indicates the supervening whole within which we find
it, including the possible existence of gods other than this one. The
Platonic god of the Timaeus creates things in accordance with already
established patterns of rationality and coherence. The demiurge is an
agent of a cosmic rationality already present for him to actualize. There
is a very great difficulty in reconciling this subordination of effectua-
tion to an eternally preexistent cosmology with the God of revealed
religion. Socrates depicts the gods as disembodied paradigms of objec-
tive clarity that do not intervene in human affairs, do not perform
miracles or answer prayers, but uphold the eidetic stability of the world
and thereby support human efforts to inculcate that repose within the
soul through the cultivation of the virtues, even and including the best
regime itself, a “pattern in the sky” that can be housed in an indi-
vidual’s soul as a moral compass for the inferior regime in which he
lives. As Book 2 of the Republic puts it, the gods do not change their
respective eide like wizards; they have no personal qualities whatsoever
(380d).
By contrast, the Christian God as depicted in Thomistic, and even
more clearly in Augustinian theology, conflates final cause with the
efficient cause of an interventionary deity whose will creates and sus-
tains all things. As St. Augustine puts it in criticizing Cicero and other
pagan philosophers for identifying the highest being with an imper-
sonal, objective rationality, “the only efficient causes of all things are
voluntary causes, that is to say, causes of the same nature as the spirit
or breath of life. . . . The Spirit of Life, which gives life to all and is the
Creator of all matter and of every created spirit is God, a Spirit indeed,
but uncreated.” The difficulty of reconciling the Platonic, or more gen-
erally the classical account of causality with the Christian doctrine of
creation is clear, to take but one example, from the objections made
to Thomism by Christian critics who believed that even it too greatly
constrained the creative power of God with the causal categories of
pagan metaphysics, despite the fact that Thomas is quite clear that the

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latter are merely the means through which God effects his creative will
and are entirely subsequent to God’s creation of the world. Even mat-
ter, according to Thomas, not only the form imposed on it, must be
seen as created out of nothing by God, lest even in its inert preexisting
condition it somehow latently conditioned or shaped what God could
fashion from it. Thomas argued that although God was free to create
the world in whatever way he saw fit, once he had established its ratio-
nal plan (ratio), phenomena would occur according to recurrent natural
causes unless God intervened miraculously to alter his own laws. Short
of these miraculous incursions, as a favor to us and our human need for
regularity, He would leave the natural laws by which he had originally
ordered the universe to operate on their own.
For more conservative theologians, however, during the period
of debate over Thomism before his eventual canonization, even this
attempt to subordinate pagan metaphysics to divine creation restricted
God too much by implying that creation would ordinarily adhere to a
settled natural pattern, mediating between God’s will and our experi-
ence of phenomena. In this more fundamentalist, resolutely antipagan
theology – which often viewed itself as cleaving to St. Augustine and
which would reemerge with Luther – God constantly, endlessly, and
directly supervises every event in the universe at every moment in time,
sustaining it all through his active will. Otherwise, it would fall into
the disarray and decay that is the essence of all natural matter. Accord-
ing to the Augustinian formulation, as the efficient cause of the entire
universe including human voluntarism, God also continuously wills the
wills of all humans. The pursuit of no mere natural object of aspiration,
however noble or just it may appear, can ever enable us to live as we
should – indeed, this will only drag us down. God so conceived is the
great artificer who stands beyond all natural limitations and determina-
tions, because he is their originator. He does not create in accordance
with form; he creates form and imposes it on nature. Nature by itself
is mere matter in motion, as Hobbes would later put it. Left to itself,
it would fall into disarray. Its only potential for order and structure
comes from the forms God continuously imposes on it. In this reading,
modern physics, far from being a repudiation of Christian cosmology,
flows directly from it, shorn of God’s sustaining will, now to be replaced
by Machiavelli’s prince who creates “new modes and orders,” Bacon’s
scientist who converts nature into power “for the relief of man’s estate,”

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and Hobbes’s human artificer of the social contract.23 Insofar as reason

is assimilated to the human will, not only can princes be the source of
their own prudence, but the thinkers who provide the new desacralized
physics of chance are themselves princes of thought because they make
the exertion of the human will over nature theoretically possible.
Therefore, one of the keys to understanding the originality of Machi-
avelli’s political thought is to see how it transfers to human rulers this
conception of a creative willpower to overcome natural limitations. In
this way, while repudiating the moral restrictions placed by Christianity
on successful statesmanship, Machiavelli makes use of a central tenet
of Christian theology and, by misapplying it, opens up a scope for
princely action going far beyond anything envisioned by even the most
tough-minded and pragmatic writers on history and politics in the past.
This is most trenchantly put in chapter 6 of The Prince in discussing
the greatest founders, those of “outstanding” virtue, and the formation
there is worth repeating: “As one examine their actions and lives, one
does not see that they had anything from fortune other than the oppor-
tunity, which gave them the matter enabling them to introduce any
form they pleased.” From nature, in other words, the prince receives
nothing but a chance to assert himself and gain power. As we see later
in this discussion, for Machiavelli neither the world at large nor one’s
own natural character offers any teleological potential for development
into an approximation of transcendence through civic and intellectual
virtue. Christianity, especially in its quasi-Manichean Augustinian vari-
ation, had already drained nature of teleology and reduced it to matter.
Machiavelli in effect removes God from this causal equation, leaving
the statesman to face the same dismal environment and subdue it rather
than allowing its random reversals to subdue him. Into this purposeless
stuff, this sheer necessitousness that so often ruins human hopes, princes
of virtu have the power to endow nature with the purpose it intrinsi-
cally lacks. They can, through sufficient persuasion and terror, create
entirely new modes and orders, not merely serve or revive old ones.
The concept of a creative will that can introduce into matter whatever
form it pleases cannot, strictly speaking, be derived from Platonic or,
more generally, classical metaphysics. Human beings are certainly never

23 A detailed discussion of these connections between Machiavelli and his successors is

undertaken in the Conclusion.

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attributed the power to reshape the world by classical thought; as we

observed in Chapter 2, even the dissident strain of the pre-Socratics and
Sophists, despite their embrace of political expedience, do not go to this
length. For the classics, our only prospect for minimizing the reverses of
fortune is to transcend our vulnerability to fortune through the desires
by subordinating our desires to the natural and reasonable order of the
cosmos. The fewer externals we consume, the less vulnerable we are to
being knocked down by their chance destruction. The Platonic gods, to
reiterate, are not attributed any such power of creatio ex nihilo. Their
poiesis is not the creation of whatever they please, but their fashioning
and rendering forth of phenomena according to the preexisting struc-
tures of nous. Only the God of revealed religion literally “introduces”
a “form” of his own “pleasing” into matter. As we observed earlier,
Machiavelli’s language here is recognizably scholastic as it transfers this
power to the human prince.24

24 The issue of creation out of nothing is at the heart of the contrast between reason
and revelation. As Strauss argues in the essay Progress or Return?, classical philosophy
and revelation can travel a certain distance along the same road together, inasmuch as
both recognize the centrality of justice to human existence. At a certain point, however,
they reach a fork in that road, and it is over the ultimate status of reality – for revelation,
the creation of the world out of nothing; for classical reason, the eternity of the universe.
These two cannot be reconciled. Strauss (1989). See also Newell (2010).
The Timaeus, used in medieval Christendom to show how Platonic philosophy
anticipated Christian revelation, is one of the closer points of contact between the
Abrahamic Creator God and Platonic cosmology. Yet the teaching of the Timaeus about
the demiurge is not ultimately compatible with the Creator ex nihilo of Christianity.
The demiurge fashions the world in accordance with a preexistent cosmic Good and
Mind that in effect reduces divine agency to a subordinate partner in bringing things
into being according to rational criteria that exist from all eternity – another version of
the eternity of the universe, the principle that according to Strauss decisively separates
reason and revelation. Timaeus says that everything depends on our choosing between
two alternatives – 1) that the whole sprung into being spontaneously from nothing or
2) that it comes into being regulated by this preexisting orderliness (Timaeus 1235b–
1236a). It is number two that is being urged on us. For classical philosophy as a whole,
it is impossible to conceive of the Creator God or revelation without recasting it as
chance or fortune (tuche). Revelation amounts to a cause without an antecedent cause
(or as Augustine puts it, a Creator who is not created), which, as Aristotle puts it, is
unintelligible, literally “without logos,” because it would see the world as issuing out
of sheer happenstance (Physics 196a25–196b).
In the history of Christian theology, the debate over creation took the form early
on of two alternatives: God created the world out of nothing or He created it from
preexisting matter, a view of God as an “arranger” more easily in harmony with pagan
natural philosophy as exemplified by the passage from Plato cited in chapter 6 (Republic
596d). Borrowing from Platonism, Origen argued that matter was preexistent with

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The transfer to human princes of a potentially godlike power for the

transformation of human nature and the natural environment under-
standably leads to Machiavelli’s implicit sanctioning of a degree of
political violence and terror of biblical proportions. He only reveals
this by degrees as he leads the reader from their veneration for the great

God as he created the world. However, Ireneus, wishing to expel Greek philosophy
altogether, argued that there was no preexistent matter. To this, Tertullian added the
argument that God also created the matter out of nothing from which the rest of the
world was then created. Thomas also held that God created matter out of nothing before
imposing form on it. As Colin Gunton puts it, “God is not to be likened to . . . a potter
who makes a pot from the clay which is to hand; he is, rather, like one who makes both
the clay and the pot.” Gunton (2001) p. 17. See also Copan (1996) and the exhaustive
discussion in Pangle (2003).
Thomas Aquinas addresses the issue in the Summa Theologica, in the discussion of
eternal and natural law. He asks: Is God’s creation of the world consistent with the
existence of a preexistent ratio, that is to say, a preexistent form, mind, or good (ST I. Q
44, 93)? The answer for Christians must clearly be no, for the reasons sketched earlier.
Nothing restrains, guides or limits God’s power to create out of nothing. That is why it is
a mysterium – it can only be expressed as paradoxes. Thomas’s solution to reconciling
Aristotelianism with Christian theology goes no further than this: it is a gift of God
that the world God creates out of nothing operates, after He creates it, according to
Aristotelian natural law. Not because it must do so. God could make it operate any way
He wants, could change it any or every nanosecond. The reason He makes it operate this
way is out of compassion for us, so that we will have reliable benchmarks and regularity
in making sense of the world. In sum, the Aristotelian natural law is operative only after
the creation, and only because God makes it so. See also Thomas, The Principles of
Natural Science Book 2, lecture 14, no. 268.
It should be stressed that even that compromise, which so clearly subordinated
Aristotelian natural reason to Christian revelation, was not enough for Thomas’s critics
like the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, who suspected that Thomas was trying
to sneak too much pagan philosophy into the faith and that even this endorsement
of Aristotelian natural law as operative only after the creation still placed too many
restrictions on God’s constant, unpredictable power for miraculous interventions and
power to sustain every single thing in the universe for every second of its existence by
the sheer force of His will, unconditioned and unmediated by any natural causality.
Etienne Tempier, Condemnation of 219 Propositions. In Lerner and Mahdi (1963)
pp. 337–354.
To be clear, I am arguing that, in his secularization of creation ex nihilo, Machiavelli
does not argue that, in mastering Fortuna, the prince can actually create matter out
of nothing. Rather, he can “introduce” whatever “form” he chooses into preexistent
matter. In this respect, he is somewhat closer to the neo-Platonic creationism of early
Church fathers such as Origen, which held that matter preexisted with God, than to
what emerged as the mainstream view of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Thomas, according to
which God created both matter and form out of nothing. This is borne out, as I discuss
in Chapter 7, by Machiavelli’s ruminations on the insuperable limitations placed on
man’s will by the underlying generational substratum of nature (reflections adapted in
part from Lucretius’s materialism).

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names of antiquity to a clearer insight into the methods they must have
employed in creating entirely new “modes and orders.” At the end of
chapter 6, having introduced us to his pantheon of outstandingly virtu-
ous princes (Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus), Machiavelli briefly
mentions Hiero of Syracuse as a “lesser example” than the greatest
princes but still one that “will have some proportion with the others”
and can “suffice for all other similar cases.” In other words, Hiero of
Syracuse did not attain the level of great civilizational founders like
Moses or Cyrus, but his methods illustrate on a lower level what those
greater men might also have done. For the present in chapter 6, we
are merely told that Hiero eliminated the old military and established a
new one. Shortly thereafter, in chapter 8, we are given the example of
another ancient tyrant, Agathocles of Syracuse, through which Machi-
avelli prepares us preliminarily and by stages for the new understanding
of virtue, in which crimes can be virtuous. Agathocles summoned the
Senate and the great men and had them slaughtered by the soldiers,
thereby becoming tyrant (not, as Machiavelli says, “king”). He then
takes us through three stages of reflection: 1) Because this slaughter
removed all opposition and dependence on others at one blow, Agatho-
cles owed little or nothing to fortune and is therefore virtuous according
to the new definition of virtu in chapter 6. But: 2) Murder, betrayal, and
fraud cannot be spoken well of or called virtue. However: 3) Cruelty
can be “well or badly used.” Well-used cruelty (“if,” he writes, it is per-
missible to speak well of evil, implying now that it may not necessarily
not be) is “done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself and
is not persisted in but turned to as much utility for the subjects as one
can. Badly used cruelty, by contrast, grows with time.” Therefore: 4)
Because Agathocles used cruelty well, the final judgment is that such
rulers can “remedy . . . their state with God and man.” In chapter 16,
having softened the reader up for his new concept of virtue by his intro-
duction in chapter 8 of the distinction between well-used and badly used
cruelty, Machiavelli is now more explicit than he had been at the end
of chapter 6 that Hiero did not merely eliminate the old army but had
it “cut to pieces.” The lesson of chapter 16 is that one should not rely
on mercenary troops, as do so many Italian states, but on one’s own
arms. He then quite openly places the murderous Hiero on a level with
David, God’s anointed, and arguably a prince of “outstanding” virtue,
using David’s refusal of King Saul’s gift of arms in fighting Goliath as

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a metaphor for relying on your own arms rather than those of another
man (as Cesare Borgia relied on his father the pope). Machiavelli also
endows David with a knife, not found in the biblical account, presum-
ably because a sling is too distant from action at close quarters and
therefore too reliant on Fortune (and God). Machiavelli can be very
Machiavellian, old Nick himself!
To resume our main theme: the prospect of this seemingly super-
human power over nature, once the exclusive preserve of God, is now
dangled by Machiavelli in front of secular rulers, a Nietzschean and mil-
lenarian dimension to his thinking that will require a new physics and
a new kind of training. It may perhaps even imply historical progress as
the retarding influences of the old morality are gradually drained away
through enlightenment and newer generations of potential princes are
ever more directly introduced to the new science of politics without a
Christian or classical competitor. We sift some of these lineages issuing
from Machiavelli in the Conclusion. In Machiavelli’s view, the founder
of new modes and orders need not possess a naturally moderate charac-
ter nor the good fortune to have associated with a wise legislator in order
to successfully establish his world. Plato’s equivocations and circum-
spection about employing tyranny to found a just regime, as well as the
elaborate pedagogy required to turn the soul away from its tyrannical
longings, can be swept away. Because Machiavelli reduces the “virtue”
of the prince to what is already the prince’s own unprompted and spon-
taneous urgings for power and glory at the expense of his competitors,
there is no need for a “pattern in the sky” to convert the potential tyrant
into a benevolent statesman or citizen friendly to philosophy.
To be sure, as we see in this chapter and the next, the new prince can-
not act spontaneously on his spontaneous longings. He needs training
and direction. That training is not a kind of paideia, however, through
which those spontaneous longings are sublimated and directed toward
the Good. Instead, the prince needs a method for acting on his impulses
that will bring about their own selfish agenda. Method differs from
character formation, the essential meaning of paideia. That is, while
Plato dwells on rehabilitating the passions by directing them toward
their own highest ends, achieving both the governance of reason and
emotional satisfaction for the soul, for Machiavelli, precisely because
the passions contain no such potentiality for transcendence, they can
only be manipulated externally by the prince’s will within himself – the

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internalization within the Prince of the pure formalism of God’s will

over the random spontaneity of the now-secularized fallen realm of
nature. Because reason is now fully immanentized within a desacralized
irrational nature, even reason must be depicted somatically, as a “fox,”
that is, another kind of animal to control the “lion.” The method of the
fox is not so much reason as what we moderns might term “rationality,”
a distinction grounded in Machiavelli’s Realpolitik and still a feature of
contemporary political analysis in international relations. For example,
to say that Vladimir Putin is a “rational actor” does not mean that he
is reasonable, only that he will use any method necessary, including
the threat of force, actual force where he can deploy it without fear of
defeat, and the suspension of rights in order to maximize Russia’s and
his own power, but only if it does not entail a serious risk of Russia’s
and his own destruction, while at the same time he is not motivated by
any millenarian or utopian fantasy of redemption through mass anni-
hilation, including one’s own, like Hitler or Ahmadinejad. We make
some further broad comparisons of this kind in the Conclusion to this
book.
Because there is no need for paideia, there is also no need, from
Machiavelli’s viewpoint, for Plato’s and Aristotle’s circumspection,
detailed in previous chapters, about the brutal facts of how successful
and stable regimes are originally set up. Whereas exploring the con-
structive uses of tyranny amounts, as we have seen, to a filigree within
the classical treatment of the best regime and sound statecraft, Machi-
avelli reverses these proportions entirely: the internal just ordering of
the republic becomes a filigree rarely spotted throughout his massive
concentration on achieving power, and even when “good laws” are
discussed for a few lines in The Prince, we quickly learn that they can-
not exist without the prior establishment of “good arms,” so better
to concentrate on that. Understanding Machiavelli’s appropriation and
distortion of the concept of the will to overcome nature helps clarify
these departures from the classical approach. Because he accepts Chris-
tianity’s assimilation of formal cause to efficient cause and assimilates
the latter to a purely secular or immanentized statecraft, Machiavel-
lian politics are a politics of pure effectuation, an anticipation of what
Heidegger means by “technology” and what George Grant, in charac-
terizing the dynamic of technology within modernity, describes as “the

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will to will.”25 Let the reader note that I say “anticipate.” I am argu-
ing that something akin to Nietzsche’s will to power, something akin to
what Heidegger means by global technology, are possibilities that dwell
within Machiavelli’s new thinking as harbingers of what Horkheimer
terms the “dark” side of modernity. Later on, however, I will be careful
to argue that Machiavelli does recognize limits on man’s power over
nature and that certain facets of his thinking are also antecedents of the
more benign liberalism of Spinoza and Locke. Indeed, how and whether
these dangerous and benign strains can be reconciled in Machiavelli’s
own thought is an excellent way of beginning to pose that question
about modernity as a whole.
As Machiavelli writes in chapter 15 of The Prince, he is not concerned
with imagined republics where men live as they ought, but the “effectual
truth” truth of how they do live and are to be governed. The act of the
founding becomes the cause of all stability; the ambition of the prince
becomes the cause of a successful founding. By collapsing the ends of
statesmanship into the genesis of power, Machiavelli is able to overturn
the Platonic formulation of the relationship of power to wisdom, so
that the “wise counsel” of the prince must now originate in his own
“prudence,” not in someone else’s. Machiavelli is as much aware as
Plato that all political constitutions decline with time, even the best
ones, just as he recognizes that some aspiring tyrants will turn out to be
brutal, rapacious thugs and nothing greater. His stress on the prince’s
need for disciplined method and self-control concedes precisely this
observable fact. However, because Machiavelli 1) agrees with a certain
strain of Christianity that nature strictly speaking has no independent
inner capacity for order and regularity and 2) rejects the limitations
placed on human ambition by both the classics and Christianity, he
is able to arrive at the prospect that a prince can, godlike, re-create
corrupt political “bodies” and “humors” so that they become healthy
ones through vigorous acts of reconstruction. Indeed, whereas for Plato
the decline of good constitutions into corrupt ones in Book 8 of the
Republic is a lamentable but unavoidable necessity of time’s passing –
of the fact that physis grows toward the permanence of Being but never
permanently attains it, falling back into becoming and decay (546) – for

25 Grant (2005) p. 679.

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Machiavelli, a prince should welcome a corrupt and vicious society

because it offers more scope for the reforms that can be effected by his
will:

And truly, if a prince be anxious for glory and the good opinion of the world,
he should rather wish to possess a corrupt city, not to ruin it wholly like
Caesar, but to reorganise it like Romulus. For certainly the heavens cannot
afford a man a greater opportunity for glory, nor could he desire a better
one. . . . (W)here corruption has penetrated the people, the best laws are of
no avail, unless they are administered by a man of such supreme power that
he may cause the laws to be observed until the mass has been restored to a
healthy condition. (Discourses 1.10.6)

This brings me to my second main point about Machiavelli’s connec-

tion to the way in which Christianity altered the relationship between
human virtue and nature, and how Machiavelli is able to utilize this
transformation in such a way as to criticize both the classical and Chris-
tian approaches to politics and statecraft. Christianity tended to divide
the natural realm from the divine realm, and to see the natural realm
as fallen, shot through with sinfulness, and dependent on the will of
God. This is particularly true of Augustinian Christianity, which, as is
widely noted, never entirely lost its Manichean tincture.26 There is no
longer, as in Diotima’s Ladder, a continuum from bodily hedonism to
the love of the noble, but instead a chasm between fleshly drives and a
perfection now seen to reside beyond nature altogether, attainable only
through salvation. The Ladder of Love is broken into two pieces, the
City of Man and the City of God.
This sundering has the further effect of reducing politics from the
Platonic concern with the possibility of human nature attaining at
least a degree of perfection within a well-ordered political commu-
nity to a politics of the merely naturalistic – the management of nat-
ural human impulses that, left to their own workings, are uniformly
sinful and exploitative. For Augustine, eros could not be the key to
human transcendence – it could never be directed from its lower to
its higher objects – because eros is at the core of human sinfulness.
Eros has no inner potential for redirection but is indistinguishable
from compulsive lust: “Nature, which the first human being harmed, is

26 Van den Berg (2010).

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miserable. . . . Who can control this when its appetite is aroused?”

([1974] 6.25). The summum bonum, the proper object of erotic longing
in Platonic ontology, is drained out of political life and transposed to an
afterlife of incorporeal beatitude, while desire loses its rank order and
sinks to the level of indiscriminate concupiscence. According to Chris-
tianity, perfection cannot be properly aimed for, let alone achieved,
within the political sphere alone. Whereas for the pagans, piety and
civic virtue were mutually reinforcing and could not exist without one
another, for Augustine, the most one can say in favor of political life
is that Christians, by being unconcerned with its honors and riches
and devoted entirely to salvation, happen to possess secondarily the
moral qualities requisite for good citizenship as well, so long as they are
divorced from imperialism and other kinds of false grandeur.
The chasm in Augustine’s thought between political success and the
highest good means that there is indeed a family resemblance between
Augustine and Plato, and it is not difficult to see why Augustine would
prefer Plato over the other pagan thinkers.27 Plato’s distinction between

27 See his discussion of Socrates and Plato in Augustine (1958) pp. 146–150 Many his-
torians have argued that as Greco-Roman antiquity unfolded, the transcendentalist
dimension of neo-Platonic philosophy and the longing for a single, spiritually pure god
in place of the frivolous anthropomorphic gods of the Olympian pantheon intensified,
preparing a way for Christian monotheism. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations posits a
division between the fallen world of bodily necessity and an inward realm of pure soul
that alone is truly free that is almost Manichean or proto-Augustinian in its intensity.
Indeed, if we were unaware of his identity, we could almost be reading Augustine or
Meister Eckhart: “Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux and
the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and
the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement.
And, to say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what
belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn,
and after-fame is oblivion. What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing
and only one” (quoted in Newell [2001] p. 166). For Marcus, it is philosophy, but it
could as likely be faith. For the Stoic, all a man can do is bear up with integrity in the
whirlwind of flux, but for the Christian, repose awaits in the world to come, although
worldly fame is oblivion just as it is for Marcus.
In the City of God, Augustine poses a contrast between two irreconcilable ways of
life, the city of the flesh and the city of the spirit. A life devoted to worldly ambition
is vain, exploitive, arrogant, and restless. A life devoted to God is moderate, modest,
peaceable, and allows a man to be at peace with himself: “Let us imagine two indi-
viduals. . . . Of these two men, let us suppose that one is poor, or better, in moderate
circumstances; the other extremely wealthy. But our wealthy man is haunted by fear,
heavy with cares, feverish with greed, never secure, always restless, breathless from end-
less quarrels with his enemies. By these miseries, he adds to possessions beyond measure,

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the Idea of the Good and the realm of mere becoming, and his argu-
ments for the superiority of philosophy and the purity of the soul over
the satisfactions of ordinary politics, are indeed at times akin, espe-
cially in proto-Stoic dialogues such as the Gorgias, to the dualism of
Augustine, especially when contrasted with Aristotle’s attempt to locate
the prospects for virtue more squarely within ordinary politics (a prefer-
ence for the middle realm of what is “first for us” that is understandably
more congenial to Thomism, which, broadly speaking, tries to modify
the dualism of Augustine in a manner analogous to Aristotle’s mod-
ification of the “divine madness” of Plato). Nevertheless, this broad
similarity between Augustine and certain aspects of Plato is trumped
by a more essential difference. For Plato, however wide may be the gap
between conventional political honor and philosophical transcendence,
that highest way of life can only be ascended to by way of the virtues of
the best regime, the regime that is best not only according to nature but
according to logos, guided by the soul’s erotic ascent through political
nobility toward the Idea of the Good as the perfection of nature. At
bottom, the metaxy of Diotima’s Ladder is more representative of Pla-
tonic philosophy than its occasional excursions into dualism. Augustine
cannot follow Plato along this road, for the divine logos of Christian
revelation altogether surpasses nature, even entails its obliteration or
crucifixion.
For Augustine, the virtue that comes from obedience to God cannot
be understood in any sense as an erotic pleasure, however sublime. As
Augustine presents it, politics at best has a police function. It can dis-
courage the grosser manifestations of sinfulness for the sake of public
order. A Christian government’s first duty is to protect the Church as an
outpost of the City of God within the fallen purview of the City of Man.

but he also piles up for himself a mountain of distressing worries. The man of modest
means is content with a small compact patrimony. He is loved by his own, enjoys the
sweetness of peace in his relations with kindred, neighbour and friends, is religious
and pious, of kindly disposition . . . chaste in morals and at peace with his conscience. I
wonder if there is anyone so senseless as to hesitate over which of the two to prefer.”
In general terms, this theme is a familiar one from Plato, in, say, Socrates’ contrast
between the philosopher’s and the tyrant’s ways of life in Book 9 of the Republic, or his
claim that Callicles is a “double man” because he cannot reconcile natural happiness
with a lust for political power. Although there are reaches of Plato in which the division
between the body and soul is pushed to a proto-Stoic extreme, the crucial difference is
that, for Plato, the happiness of the soul is available within the natural world of the here
and now and most definitely by way of worldly civic virtue.

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On its own, considered apart from the useful work it can do to pre-
pare Christians for their salvation by protecting Christian institutions,
politics can only aim at domination. For even the justice that regulates
mundane political affairs does not originate within the natural realm
and the limits of mortal reasoning. It is rather a gift of God conferred
through the natural law whose content is specified by the Decalogue and
the superordinate revelation of the New Testament. On its own, secular
authority cannot achieve justice even of the secular variety, and “in the
absence of justice,” Augustine asks, “what is sovereignty but organized
brigandage?” ([1958] p. 88). The classics would have made a distinc-
tion between regimes organized according to a virtuous principle such
as aristocracy and those organized around the maximization of self-
interest, which could take the form of venal “garden variety” tyrannies
or collectively selfish and defective regimes like oligarchy, or imperial-
istic “tyrant” cities such as Athens as it was described in Thucydides.
Yet Augustine, much like Machiavelli was to do later (as we consider
in detail in the next chapter), collapses the distinction between good
and bad regimes and reduces them all to being defective. Whereas
Augustine does this to purify virtue by removing it from the natural
realm, Machiavelli does it to purify politics by removing it from the
transcendental realm. Augustine goes on, with what sounds like a slap
at Romulus’s founding of Rome:

For what are bands of brigands but petty kingdoms? They are also groups
of men, under the rule of a leader, bound together by a common agreement,
dividing their booty according to a single principle. If this band of criminals,
recruiting more criminals, acquires enough power to occupy regions, to cap-
ture cities, and to subdue whole populations, then it can with fuller right
assume the title of kingdom, which in the public estimation is conferred upon
it, not by the renunciation of greed, but by the increase of impunity. ([1958]
p. 88)

According to St. Augustine, this is what the Roman Empire over the
course of time achieved. However:

The reward of the saints is altogether different. . . . (Their) city is eternal.

There reigns that true and perfect happiness which is not a goddess, but a gift
of God – toward whose beauty we can but sigh in our pilgrimage on earth,
though we hold the pledge of it by faith. ([1958] p. 112)

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Here is yet another anticipation of Machiavelli’s negative debt to

Christian revelation. In describing the evolution of Rome from a gang
of thieves on the Tiber into the greatest empire the world had ever
known, Augustine is sharply contrasting the brutal and avaricious real-
ity of pagan political conduct with the empire’s lofty pretensions to
have institutionalized the noble philosophical doctrines of the Stoics
and other great thinkers. While for Augustine, even those philosophers’
claims to transcendence are hollow in contrast with the revealed truth
of Christianity, the reality of pagan politics was in utter contradiction
to even those professed and dubious moral values of the pagan philoso-
phers. In his praise of the evolution of Rome in the Discourses, the
theme of the next chapter, Machiavelli also sharply contrasts the real-
ity behind its success with the moral virtues extolled by the ancient
philosophers that could only condemn those practices. Yet whereas
Augustine is using this contradiction to discredit political life, Machi-
avelli, employing Augustine’s own depiction of politics as dominion,
is using this contradiction to free politics altogether from that tran-
scendental standard. Instead of Rome standing shamed (as it does in
Augustine’s judgment) by the contradiction between its profession of
pagan piety and the reality of its vices, Machiavelli’s Romans use the
appearance of piety as a useful tool of social control as they gratify
their vices full bore. We should realize from Machiavelli’s revaluation
of the Augustinian dichotomy – his embrace of the City of Man while
jettisoning the City of God – that, again, it is not simply a question
of Machiavelli opposing the realism of his politics to the idealism of
the classics and Christians but of collapsing the ideal into the real, or
the high into the low. The real is all that it should be, already the core
insight of historicism beginning with Spinoza.
Plato had criticized some of the Sophists for depicting political com-
munities if not as large-scale gangs of thieves, then as large-scale gangs
of would-be thieves who forgo their opportunities for open-ended crime
so as to maximize their long-term net gain in security and self-interest.
In other words, justice for the Sophists had no more than an instru-
mental value and could never be choice-worthy for its own sake. The
view that Plato stigmatized as characteristic of those who did not
believe the political community was capable of encouraging virtue for
its own sake, St. Augustine characterizes as the reality of all political

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communities that believe they can achieve virtue within the limits of
nature. By arguing that dominion is the sole aim of a politics guided by
nature, Augustine in effect restores the Sophists’ low view of the city
for the sake of elevating revelation above its taint. For classical polit-
ical philosophy, the question of which constitution one lives under is
crucial for a happy life because the prospects for actualizing the soul’s
potentiality for excellence is inextricably linked to the laws and the civic
morality they enhance: it very much matters, for example, whether it
is an aristocracy or an oligarchy. For Augustine, however, the whole
traditional subject matter of the best regime, and how actual consti-
tutions measure up to it, although not unimportant as a preliminary
guidepost to virtuous living, pales into insignificance when we consider
the vanity and frailty of all merely human prudence. Thus, although St.
Augustine defends Christianity to its remaining pagan critics partly on
the grounds that the moral rigor enjoined on Christians by their faith
also makes them decent citizens of the City of Man, when he addresses
the expectations one may properly form of political life in its own right,
his tone is world-weary and despairing:

When it is considered how short is the span of human life, does it really matter
to a man whose days are numbered what government he must obey, so long
as he is not compelled to act against God or his conscience? . . . Is it reasonable
and wise to glory in the extent and greatness of the Empire when you can in
no way prove that there is any real happiness in men perpetually living amid
the horrors of war, perpetually wading in blood? Does it matter whether it
is the blood of their fellow citizens or the blood of their enemies? . . . And
even though a crooked world came to admit that men should be honored
only according to merit, even human honor would be of no great value. It is
smoke that weighs nothing. ([1958] p. 113)

The erotic unity explored in the Symposium between duty and plea-
sure is irrevocably dichotomized here into a realm of nature, in which
the drive for sensual gratification leads to the pursuit of power over oth-
ers, and the divine as the transcendence of nature and desire. No peace
and justice of any kind is truly to be found on earth; all lasting peace
and justice are transposed to the other world beyond this mortal life.
Given that all politics are fallen, what does it really matter what kind
of regime we live under? A brief comparison with Plato illustrates how

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thoroughly this transforms the meaning of politics. In Book 1 of the

Republic, Socrates dumbfounds Polemarchus by showing how, if jus-
tice is viewed on the analogy of the arts, then the city can do no harm,
meaning that it can never go to war or punish malefactors, because
the arts only benefit but never harm what they work upon. Moreover,
because justice is meant to do good to friends and harm to enemies,
it is impossible to necessarily identify those who deserve our friend-
ship according to their natural merit with those who happen to be our
fellow citizens. The direct application of philosophy to politics, then,
leads to the disappearance of the city. Thrasymachus’s angry interjec-
tion is meant to restore the centrality of the regime and its varieties,
and although they agree on little else, Socrates thereafter accepts that
justice must be found within the confines of a city-state that will also, at
least defensively, have to go to war as well as police aberrant passions
internally. For the classics, in other words, whatever justice and peace
man can find must take place within the limitations of a community that
cannot always be at peace. For Augustine, however, peace is taken out
of the natural realm of politics altogether and found in its purity only
in the heavenly afterlife, leaving the city itself as nothing but a field for
conflict. In contrast with the classics, there is no necessary or intrinsic
connection between success in achieving political dominion and an eter-
nal order that might ennoble those worldly talents. To repeat: Diotima’s
Ladder is broken in two: the City of God and the City of Man.
For Plato, physis is a growth from arche toward eidos, a continuum
between necessity and transcendence – in human terms, between the
baser compulsions of animal desire and the fulfillment of our noble long-
ings for completion through civic virtue and philosophy. The “nature”
of man, in other words, is not a biological substratum to which the
distinctively human traits of the will, personality, or mind have been
added. It is a cyclical development out of necessity toward fulfillment
and back. For St. Augustine, by contrast, just as nature is irrational
disarray, the natural side of human life is synonymous with the basest
compulsions of passion. Human nature evinces no potentiality for tran-
scendence in its own right, either as an ascent from desire to fulfillment
as in Diotima’s Ladder or as an economy and harmony of the affects as
in the psychology of the Republic or the famous images of the soul like
the Chariot in the Phaedrus. Faith in God is the only source of stability
and goodness in a mortal’s life. Thus, although he grudgingly prefers

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the moderation of Stoicism over the hedonism of the Epicureans among

the successors to Socrates, for St. Augustine, the Stoics’ belief in the
natural human capacity for virtue and wisdom is at bottom as vain as
the Epicureans’ more openly and self-consciously shameless belief that
the individual’s pleasure is all that matters ([1958] pp. 115–116). As
he puts it in a characteristic if charmless passage, whereas the Epicure-
ans openly make virtue into a whore, for the Stoics she is superficially
more ladylike but still has a shady reputation. Indeed, the profession of
virtue among pagan teachings is a more dangerous snare of Satan than
those that are openly licentious, for whereas hedonism works openly
as a streetwalker, Stoicism, which is every bit as much a slut for tempt-
ing us to believe we can be virtuous without God’s help as hedonism
is in telling us to embrace fleshly pleasures, is harder to spot because
she is, as Frank Sinatra might put it, a classier broad. If we do achieve
a degree of decency and restraint in this world, Augustine stresses,
this is due “solely to God” – solely to His grace and mercy when we
acknowledge our utter dependence and open ourselves to him ([1958]
p. 116), Being good is not an occasion for pride, as it is for Plato and
Aristotle, because it is literally not something we have achieved on our
own through cultivating an inner natural potentiality.
In the Symposium, Socrates presents the seeress Diotima as the source
of his understanding of eros as a way of mitigating the “manly,” ago-
nistic kind of eros bent on conquest in the pursuit of private and public
pleasures – the error about ends that has led Callicles to confuse his eros
to possess the boy Demos with possessing the Athenian Demos, seeking
in both cases a one-sided gratification through victory, but that in fact
will reduce him, Socrates foresees, to being at the beck and call of both
fickle beloveds. Diotima is a fleshing out of that feminized “Madame
Philosophy” (“philosophy” being a feminine noun, he philosophia)
who, Socrates claims to Callicles, speaks through him the truth that
it is better to suffer injustice than to do it (Gorgias 482b). From
Socrates down to the neo-Platonists, philosophy was often depicted as a
goddess – a being who offered the sweet prospect of natural perfection
through the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. Yet as we have seen in the
passage from The City of God quoted earlier, for St. Augustine the
object of man’s need is “not a goddess” – not a being of natural beauty
and nobility, however perfect-seeming. Although St. Augustine respects
to a degree the moral teachings of Socrates and the Stoics as precursors

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of the revelation of Christ, he believes that their trust in the unaided

intellect to understand the truth undermines their own commendable
desire to promote justice and the other virtues.
When Augustine refers in his critique of Rome quoted above to “a
goddess” ([1958] p. 112), he most likely primarily means the Fortune
of Rome, sometimes personified for worship as a goddess as part of the
imperial cult. Given that Augustine has also stripped Fortuna of her
Stoic garb to stand exposed as just another pagan shady lady, how-
ever, it is hard not to think simultaneously back to Diotima, one of a
number of divine females in the pagan tradition like Athena who guide
men toward virtue through their love of honor, and forward to Machi-
avelli’s advice that Fortuna is not be worshipped but mastered. Given
Augustine’s distrust of the natural human condition, the goal of natu-
ral happiness whether through pleasure or through virtue takes on the
aspect of a whore. The reduction of natural happiness from a noble
goddess to a shady lady is not in itself tantamount to Machiavelli’s
notorious encouragement, in chapter 25 of The Prince, of a relationship
between princely virtu and Fortuna akin to rape. On the contrary, the
point of Augustinian theology is to repress natural longings for victory,
pleasure, and power to the utmost degree possible for fallen humans.
However, the Augustinian reductionism concerning the worth of human
nature and its unaided capacity for virtue lends itself to Machiavelli’s
own undermining of the classical teachings. By denying any continuous
connection between natural desire and transcendence, between eros and
the good, in the interest of making obedience to God the sole path to
virtue, Augustine unwittingly prepares the way for Machiavelli. Because
of the dichotomy between nature and goodness already propounded by
Christian thinkers in their critique of pagan philosophy, the object of
princely virtue in Machiavelli’s thought is no longer an eternal Beauty
that assimilates, sublimates, and uplifts the tyrannical passions but is
instead an alien Other, severed from all claims to nobility and eter-
nal worth, an object of conquest to be taken as brutally as necessary.
Augustine transposes the highest good to a world beyond nature and
so deflates the moral claims of worldly politics. Machiavelli accepts the
removal of the highest good from nature in order to liberate worldly
politics from those moral claims.
Moreover, I would argue that Machiavelli’s secularization of the
Augustinian City of Man as the basis for his understanding of power

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politics and acquisitive human nature helps explain the tendency in his
works to take what for the classics was a highly variegated and multi-
farious concept – that of Fortuna – and reify it into a single, unitary,
and overwhelmingly hostile and irrational force governing the entire
nonhuman world in opposition to man. For the ancients, Fortuna was
a phenomenon that could manifest itself in numerous ways – sometimes
hostile, sometimes unpredictable, but also as a benevolent, fecund force
of pleasure and prosperity. We considered some of the philosophical
nuances in our discussion of Cicero earlier in this chapter. A famous
Roman statue of Fortuna conflates her with the archaic figure of Mother
Earth, covered with the fruits of agriculture and dozens of life-giving
breasts and potent testicles. The Fortune of the Roman People was
worshipped throughout the empire as the benevolent guiding spirit of
Rome’s great success, peace, and virtue. All of these qualifications and
shades of meaning Machiavelli casts aside, reducing fortune to an over-
powering and empty singularity that goads man into fighting back.
The counterpoise to Machiavelli’s secularized Augustinian landscape
of politics as sheer dominion and acquisition is the reification of the
place formerly occupied in it by the saving will of the One God into
the overwhelmingly adverse power of Fortune, the Single Other, whose
power can also be utilized within ourselves so as to free ourselves of
our dependence on her, a kind of secular salvation. (I discuss the stages
of this process in the next section of this chapter.)
Machiavelli’s identification of Fortune as the Single Other provides
some insight into Leo Strauss’s intriguing remark that Machiavelli’s
presentation of Fortuna “reminds one in some respects of the Biblical
God” ([1969] p. 214). He continues: “She takes the place of the Biblical
God. She is indeed not a creator and she concentrates entirely on the
government of men.” Strauss’s formulation implies that, in terms of the
theological paradox attempting to express God as that which “reveals”
in distinction to that which “makes,” Machiavelli attributes to Fortuna
the role of revelation. For, as Strauss goes on, it would appear that
Fortuna had established and “elected” the Roman people to greatness
because of its justice, meaning that “Fortuna is guardian or source of
justice.” The proof is that Fortuna punishes cities less the more they are
“filled with virtue, religion.” Yet “she is indeed not a creator.” I surmise
from this formulation that, as Strauss sees it, while Fortuna provides
Rome with the revelatory dimension of guardianship and election, the

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role of the “maker” in the dyad of making/revealing is presumably trans-

ferred to the prince, or, as we consider in the next chapter, to republican
statesmen who, through their willpower and disciplined vigor, render
Fortuna’s revelatory dispensation into actual political and imperial suc-
cess by reshaping the “occasion” Fortuna gives them. Of course that
constructivist dimension, the will of the statesman or the prince, must
also be enfolded within Fortuna’s sway, that is, wholly immanentized
within the life-world we call Fortuna. Fortuna’s sway points to no tran-
scendence strictly speaking in either the classical or Christian sense,
no soul with a connection to the nunc stans beyond the currents of
time. Because Fortuna (as Strauss puts it) “concentrates entirely on the
government of men,” nothing strictly speaking transcends “the govern-
ment of men.” Nothing transcends the actualities of politics, society,
and power. Anticipating Spinoza and Hegel, Machiavelli appears to col-
lapse God into existence, to equate God with the world, such that the Is
equals the Ought. Finally, with Heidegger, Fortuna sheerly reveals, and
“making” is stigmatized as a corrosive and intrusive force, technology,
divided from Being as revelatory origination.
To take a Hegelian perspective, the Augustinian dichotomy between,
on the one hand, human nature conceived of largely in terms of domin-
ion and, on the other, a transcendence that stands beyond nature is
crucial for understanding much of modern thought, even or perhaps
especially thought that superficially appears to be markedly secular and
anti-Christian in character. Hegel argued that modernity as a whole
is a post-Christian phenomenon inasmuch as modern subjectivism can
only be understood as a development of the radical self-alienation from
nature prefigured in the God of the Absolute Religion – a divinity who,
having created nature from without, reenters it as Christ and suffers a
mortal death. This complete immanentization of the ideal within the
real, the kernel of historicism, begins, I suggest in the next chapter, in
Machiavelli’s Discourses, although for reasons I discuss in the Conclu-
sion, it does not strictly speaking anticipate the full-blown Philosophy
of History, which must await the crucial ingredient of Rousseau, himself
an idiosyncratic admirer of the Florentine. For now we can make the
broad observation that, for Hegel, modern autonomy is unintelligible
without the intervening concept of the Abrahamic God’s freedom from
nature and cannot be seen as a mere derivation from classical philo-
sophical notions of the soul like those of Plato and Aristotle, much as

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these may have been a seed bed for a more universalistic politics to be
brought about by stages by the progress of history. This is why, in the
Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel distinguishes between the “indepen-
dence” (Selbstandigkeit) honored by the aristocratic morality of pagan
antiquity and the “freedom” (Freiheit) acknowledged as the goal of
humanity in the modern age. “Independence” is a kind of “lordship”
and self-sufficiency thought to be possible through the cultivation of a
naturally superior character, the model of “the best man” so important
in the Republic, Gorgias, and other Platonic dialogues, as well as in
Aristotle’s understanding of phronesis. The ancients, in Hegel’s view,
saw this aristocratic character as a reflection of the substantive hier-
archy of ranked ends that characterized nature as a whole, as when
Aristotle, for example, bases his justification of natural mastery on the
notion that nature as a whole is characterized by pairs of ruling and
ruled parts. Callicles’ erotic longing for completion through political
preeminence and Socrates’ attempts to educate it toward a properly
natural fruition – moderate politics in the service of the common good
guided by a philosophically grounded cosmology of friendship – would
be seen by Hegel as an instance of the classical belief that independence
could be achieved through a harmony with “Immediate Being,” the
supposition of an orderly cosmos within which human perfection finds
its permanent place. “Freedom,” by contrast, is the specifically modern
consciousness of a capacity to overcome the limitations placed on us
by nature, including apparently natural, substantive and fore-ordained
differences between ranks of human beings, through an exertion of
will. It is born of a sense of opposition between human satisfaction
and nature – not, as for the ancients, from the prospect of a harmony
between human nature and the cosmos. It owes its origin to the religious
concept of a divine will that stands beyond all natural determinations,
thereby reducing nature to empirical necessity.
Hegel believed that the progress of history was resolving this con-
tradiction between the “substantive” Being of the ancient world and
the “subjective” spirit of the modern, post-Christian will to freedom.
My concern is not to pursue that large issue here, but to consider how
the Hegelian distinction between ancients and moderns might enable
us to clarify Machiavelli’s relationship to modernity as a whole, partic-
ularly to the question of how techne becomes the engine for the con-
quest of nature, rather than, as for Platonismn, a key to self-forgetting

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and transcendence, an adumbration of the patterned orderliness of the

Ideas radiating from the Idea of the Good. Machiavelli, I have argued,
accepts the Augustinian valuation of politics and statecraft as domin-
ion, while dispensing with Christianity’s encouragement of shame over
this natural fact deriving from its otherworldly standard of goodness.
Thus, when Machiavelli observes in chapter 15 of The Prince that no
one can possess all the virtues or be consistently virtuous “because
human conditions do not permit it,” there is a double irony. On one
level, Machiavelli is using a characteristically Augustinian formulation
in order to subvert the conventional Christian sentiment by altering
its inner meaning. Augustine reminds us of the insufficiency of human
nature to sustain virtue in order to remind us of our need for God’s
grace and mercy to carry through our own frail efforts and to save us
from the sinful pride of believing that the nature of any created being
could attain self-sufficiency and happiness on its own. Machiavelli uses
the same kind of formulation to excuse us from even trying to practice
these virtues, because the conditions of existence can make practicing
them the very ruin of a prince or citizen. On another level, however,
he agrees with Augustine: considered apart from the sustaining will of
a Creator, nature is indeed nothing but random motion and perishable
disarray, a realm whose disorderliness erupts in the compulsion of indi-
viduals and states to seek survival and power at the expense of others.28

28 As Wolin puts it, Machiavelli consigns the whole of political existence and human life
altogether to the recesses of Plato’s Cave, cut off from the sunlight of eternal truth,
a world of “fleeting sense impressions and phenomenal flux” (2006) pp. 211–212.
Consider also the essay by Kennedy, which argues that Machiavelli’s politics amount to
Augustine’s City of Man stripped of the City of God (2000). For Kennedy, it is bootless
to speculate whether Machiavelli (or later Hobbes) were believers. If they were, the fact
that they hid this proves their theories were entirely secularized: “Machiavelli would
agree with Augustine about the prevalence of evil in the saeculum, where men were
bereft of faith, especially faith in one another. But Machiavelli was to offer no city of
God as an alternative, or his faith in such a city was weakened by what he saw in the
church’s involvement in Roman, Florentine, and Italian politics in general, providing
him with examples for The Prince. The earthly city, it would seem, was all man had
and he should make the best of it, modelling it somewhat on the ancient polis, which
would try to control chance, or Fortune. Machiavelli may have been a believer, as
indeed may have been Thomas Hobbes (with whom he is often linked because of his
power-based political philosophy). But the extent to which he hides it is itself a sign of
secularism.” Kennedy believes that this adaptation of Augustine’s City of Man as all
that we can aspire to must make us see Machiavelli as more of a pessimist and less as the
founder of modern political science and the modern political era. But if we emphasize

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Because nature offers no inner potential for the transcendence of those

compulsions but is itself reducible to necessity, it makes no sense for a
statesman to aim at a consistent standard of goodness: “It is necessary
to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be
good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity” (The Prince
chapter 15).
Machiavelli further observes that for the prince to be able to alternate
between what are conventionally perceived as virtues and vices accord-
ing to what the circumstances call for, he must have “a spirit so built
that (he is) able to know how to change to the contrary” (chapter 18).
The prescribed mutability of the prince, we might say, is another sec-
ularized strain of Christian ontology. For what religion more than
Christianity, in which God becomes man and man God – in which,
as Luther’s hymn put it, “God is dead” owing to the crucifixion before
being resurrected – shows the capacity to “change to the contrary”?
The psychological power of Christianity was arguably something new
in the world. Its capacity to “change to the contrary” means that sight,
the hallmark of classical metaphysics, is more vulgar and treacherous
than touch, in the same measure as the visible world is a lure for the
credulous and less reliable than our interior drives. Machiavelli’s new
methodologist who battles fortune within himself before mastering her
outwardly, or, as later with Bacon, “vexes” and woos her, also takes
his bearing from touch. As Machiavelli sums it up in chapter 18:

It is not necessary for a prince to have all the above-mentioned qualities in

fact, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them. . . . By having them and
always observing them, they are harmful, and by appearing to have them, they
are useful, as it is to appear merciful, faithful, humane, honest and religious,
and to be so; but to remain with a spirit built so that, if you need not to
be those things, you are able to know how to change to the contrary. . . . A
prince should thus take great care that nothing escape his mouth that is not
full of the above-mentioned five qualities. . . . He should appear all mercy, all
faith, all honesty, all humanity, all religion. And nothing is more necessary

not merely the view of the saeculum that Machiavelli adapts from Augustine but also
his focus on transferring the constructivist power of God’s will to secular rulers, then
his debt to Christianity is compatible with the view of his political theory as dynamic,
future-oriented, and ultimately optimistic about man’s capacity to improve his lot in the
world. For another perspective on “Machiavelli’s anthropology as a secularized version
of Augustine on original sin,” see Cosh (1999).

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to appear to have than this last quality. Men in general judge more by their
eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone, touching to
few. Everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are.

In general, then, by accepting the Augustinian characterization of

human nature while rejecting the transnatural standard in light of
which, for Augustine, our natures are a source of shame and proof
of our need for God, Machiavelli is in effect exempting our natures
from any blame for being appetitive and dominating. By truncating
from Christian theology one of the key differences between Chris-
tianity and classical thought – its reductionist account of nature and
human nature – Machiavelli is able both to repudiate Christianity’s
otherworldly morality and use a residue of Christian ontology to deny
the Platonic contention that human nature in itself, without recourse
to divine intercession or fortune, contains the immanent potentiality
for its own development from base appetite to the noble pleasures of
civic virtue and philosophy. For Machiavelli, human nature cannot be
blamed for being unable to practice the virtues because it contains no
such potentiality. The ill effects on peace and stability of the open clash
of appetites are to be remedied not by civic paideia but by more effi-
cient techniques of rule, or harnessed to provide energy for dynamic
and prosperous republics and principalities. In this respect, Machiavelli
is very close to Marlowe’s stage Machiavel, who famously observes that
the only real sin is ignorance. Machiavelli himself puts it this way in
chapter 12 of The Prince, with a sideswipe at the monk Savanarola,
who tried to rule Florence through sermons and ended up being burned
alive over the Piazza della Popolo:

And he who said that our sins were the cause of it spoke the truth. But the sins
were surely not those he believed, but the ones I have told of, and because
these were the sins of princes, they too have suffered the punishment for
them.

The consequences of faulty statecraft are not to be blamed on the

moral failings of the people. Correcting those consequences is the goal
of the art of ruling. For, as we have already observed, giving into one’s
passions for the acquisition of glory in the right way at the right time
requires method. If one is to achieve virtu, acting on one’s spontaneous

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desires cannot be done spontaneously, if only because the power of the

“imagined republics” over the imagination is so strong. The “desire to
acquire” comes naturally, according to Machiavelli, but the successful
execution of this subrational urging requires a certain kind of rational-
ity. One must “learn to be able not to be good” – it does not come
automatically. Hobbes comes close to the same insight when he writes:
“the fault is not in men as they are the matter, but as they are the
makers of the commonwealth” ([1971] p. 363). As “matter,” man is
driven by the compulsion to survive at the expense of one’s competitors
for survival. Regulating these compulsions the better to achieve their
natural goal is the task of a princely willpower that has freed itself
from the delusions of classical and Christian transcendence through
“learning” how and when to allow those compulsions their sway and
when to choke them back. Machiavelli’s new pedagogy will be indis-
pensable for enabling princes to be themselves. His silent claim to be
a prince of thought, which we discussed in Chapter 5 in connection
with his own power to “make” matter into whatever form he chooses
in his depiction of Cyrus and other great princes, is further evidenced
by his stance in the Dedicatory Letter to The Prince. Ostensibly sup-
plicating, it is actually patronizing toward its alleged addressee. While
disavowing that a man from a low station could discuss the affairs of the
high, by comparing his advice to that of a landscape artist, he implies
that, just as they know the nature of high and low places, he knows the
natures of both princes and peoples. Another way of putting it is that,
as a prince of thought, Machiavelli knows both natures.
In a way, of course, Machiavelli does encourage a return to the
comparative pragmatism of pagan political philosophy as opposed
to Augustinian Christianity and the more pious recesses of Christian
humanism. Machiavelli certainly tried to rehabilitate the pragmatic
dimension of classical statecraft that had embarrassed the faith of the
less worldly of the humanists like Petrarch. To see Machiavelli as doing
only this, however, misses the deeper transformation. For although
he rejects the City of God and its putative transcendence of appetitive
human nature, Machiavelli does not urge a return to the Platonic or
more generally classical view that politics can develop a potentiality of
the soul for happiness through the practice of civic virtue. In this respect,
he stands between Plato and Aristotle – who are able to evoke the

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full-bloodedness of political ambition so as to redirect its passions

toward the Good while preserving a civic role for its vigor – and Hobbes,
who takes Machiavelli’s imposition of methodical rationality on the
passion to rule to the extreme of trying to extirpate that passion entirely
from human nature. As we consider in the Conclusion to this book,
much as Hobbes is often seen as one of Machiavelli’s lineal descendants,
we have to go from Hobbes to English Republicans like Harrington to
recapture Machiavelli’s more fully rounded phenomenology of politics.
Harrington’s Atlanticist republicanism, which invokes Machiavelli as
its preceptor, is richer than Hobbes’s bureaucratic Leviathan – Sir
Francis Drake as opposed to Kafka’s The Castle – although Hobbes’s is
the superior mind. In sum, Machiavelli attempts to liberate the City of
Man from the City of God on the grounds that because human nature
is indeed driven by desire and dominion, statecraft must work with
those necessities, free of either Christian or classical hopes for peace
and repose. The world of Machiavelli’s worldliness is not the classical
view of the world but the Augustinian world stripped of God.
As Machiavelli describes princes of the most outstanding virtue in
chapter 6 of The Prince, the external world provides no mediating link
between the soul’s inner potential and cosmically grounded objects of
noble longing. It provides only the bare “occasion” for a prince’s self-
assertion and usually a negative inducement, an obstacle on which to
focus and expend his power: “Such opportunities therefore made these
men successful, and their excellent virtue enabled the opportunity to
be recognized; hence their fatherlands were ennobled by it and became
very prosperous.” We recall from our comparison of Machiavelli and
Plato in Chapter 2 that, in the Laws, the Athenian Stranger dwells
briefly on the impediments that fortune can place in the way of states-
manship, only to deny that we should feel overwhelmed by a sense of
frailty before these forces and doubt our capacity to achieve virtue in
cooperation with the nous that supervenes over chance disorder. The
Platonic teaching altogether stresses that the only way in which a per-
son can achieve independence and dignity is to rise above the passions
operative on human nature through tuche; otherwise, as in the Chariot
Image of the Soul, these passions will drag us down into the maelstrom
of motion. By contrast, Machiavelli encourages us to dwell on, even run
to embrace, the impediments thrown up by fortune – to see the world
straight on as a place full of hostile forces – so as to encourage us to

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fight back and master it. We must come to see that, as chapter 6 puts it,
statesmen “need” to encounter opposition, oppression, disorder, and
corruption. These forces “make” them successful by compelling them
to struggle, and thereby give them the opportunity to make their coun-
tries prosperous. They must experience a life-and-death struggle. Only
if faced with the prospect that nature might overpower them will they
be galvanized to assert their mastery.

the three stages of mastering fortuna

I now want to suggest more schematically that, as Machiavelli presents
it, the process of mastering Fortuna has three main stages.
1. The prince or would-be prince must distance himself from the
world. He must distrust it. He must not believe that human hopes for
peace, happiness, and justice are grounded in the order of the world
itself. He must not trust the looks of the world, the superficial appear-
ance of stability and calm that Plato argues offers an intimation of a
cosmic orderliness that supervenes over chance and perishability. As
against the eidetic reasoning of classical thought, which encourages us
to follow the eyes because sight glimpses in the looks of ordinary things
the structures that transcend and ground all phenomena, Machiavelli
advises us to turn inward, arming ourselves against this false appearance
of stability. Eidetic reasoning is in fact the reasoning of the credulous
many, for to repeat an earlier maxim: “Men in general judge more
by their eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone,
touching to few.”
In this emphasis on inwardness, self-consciousness, and receptivity to
“touch” as opposed to allowing oneself to be led astray by the looks of
the world, one grasps another negative debt of Machiavelli’s to Chris-
tianity – to the distrust of the world that St. Augustine evinces in his
most Manichean moments. This Augustinian tenet was later crystal-
lized in Luther’s theses from the Heidelberg Disputation that “he is not
worthy to be called a theologian who sees the invisible things of God as
understood through the things that are made” (19) and “that wisdom
which sees the invisible things of God as understood through His works
altogether puffs up, blinds and hardens” (22). Machiavelli in effect
secularizes this Augustinian theological tenet, newly emergent through
Luther, when he argues that the traditional “writers” on statesmanship

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misidentify the visible outcome of princely virtue for its invisible cause,
when in truth the visible stability and prosperity are caused by the pri-
mordial passions of the prince for power and glory. The writers, in other
words, reify the “things that are made” by a prince of sufficient virtu into
the preexistent and eternal causes for which virtue comes into being.29
2. Having separated himself from the world, the prince or would-
be prince must “imitate” Fortuna by letting Fortuna’s impetuosity
empower him through his passions. For example, Machiavelli says,
fortune likes to build things up in order to to knock them down. In
the political realm, a prince can imitate this dimension of fortune’s
behavior by triumphing over adversity, which always compels admi-
ration from subjects or adversaries. Someone who has attuned himself
deeply to fortune’s unseen rhythms can imitate fortune by anticipating

29 Blanchard (1996) discusses the importance of the distinction between touching and
seeing as a way of reflecting on how Machiavelli’s epistemology, and therefore his state-
craft, differs from that of Plato. However, for Blanchard, instead of viewing Machiavelli
as diametrically opposed to Plato, we should see in his statecraft “modifications of the
Platonic approach (rather) than . . . a complete rejection of Plato.” As he sums up this
modification: “Whereas Plato resolves the problematic [about man’s dependence on
chance] by founding the soul on that which is, and which is better than and prior to
man, Machiavelli supposes that man, starting from scratch, can construct his own foun-
dations.” Surely, though, this is all the difference in the world, not a mere modification.
For if man is primarily defined in terms of a soul that is higher than and anterior to
man, then that cannot be the same man who might start from scratch and construct
his own foundations. The repudiation of Platonic cosmology inevitably entails an alter-
ation in how we conceive of “man” as a political actor. If the Good is always already
given, as it is for Plato, then man can never “start from scratch.” Similarly, if art is not
contained within the order of nature, as in Platonic cosmology, but can be employed by
man to “construct” new foundations entirely on his own, then the world must already
be reenvisioned in such a way as to make it capable of being reconstructed, and man’s
technical capacity to do so must now be understood as standing outside of nature, rather
than, as for Plato, enfolded within it. Thus, although Blanchard is right to argue that
Machiavelli’s encounter with Plato is a genuine dialogue – as evidenced, for instance, by
the fact that Machiavelli’s discussion of the limits placed by chance on human affairs,
and how human reason, virtue, and art might overcome those restrictions, parallels the
discussion in Book 4 of the Laws – and although Blanchard is also correct to observe
that both Plato and Machiavelli begin by appearing to concede that the sway of chance
is overwhelming only to conclude that it can be overcome to a large degree, I would
argue that Machiavelli’s view that a prince can aspire to master nature and assimilate
reason to the will, thereby making himself the source of his own prudence, is not only
a modification of Plato’s view but a profound reversal, which changes the meanings
of all the cognate terms in the parallel as well. That is, just as Machiavelli overturns
Plato’s belief that man must find his place within nature, so do the meanings of fortune,
knowledge, virtue, art, and prudence all undergo a complete reversal of meaning.

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this particular tendency and consciously manipulating it to increase

his authority. Thus, a prince might deliberately encourage conspiracies
among his foes so as to have the opportunity to stamp them out. By
building up his own enemies in order to knock them down, rather than
sitting idly by while fortune builds them up – as will happen in the
course of political affairs in any event – the prince preempts fortune’s
hostility while tapping “her” power and converting it to the service of
his will (The Prince chapter 20).30
Thus, by first extricating himself from the world and renouncing all
hopes of a connection between human happiness and the order of the
cosmos, the prince lets the world empower his passions as disorder.
Because he is conscious of this alienation between his will as the source
of order and the world’s disorder flooding through him, however, he
will not be swept away or overpowered. For Plato, one could overcome
fortune to some degree by aiming at transcendence. This meant pursuing
virtue and thereby approximating through the governance of intellect
over passion in the soul the predominance of harmony and stability over
disorder that prevails in the world at large. For Machiavelli, however,
this is tantamount to allowing oneself to be swept away by a powerful
delusion, the root cause of being psychologically “unarmed” rather
than armed, and of “relying on Fortuna and the arms of others” rather
than on “virtue and one’s own arms” (The Prince chapters 1, 6, 7).

30 This passage, recommending that a prince cultivate conspiracies so as to stamp them out,
illustrates the active/passive dyad of the interior interaction between Fortuna and the
prince. In chapter 6, fortune provided the bare (and hostile and dangerous) “occasion”
for potential princes to imprint their will on “matter,” a blank slate to be filled with
their virtue. Here, the situation is turned around, and Fortune is reified into a weirdly
benevolent goddess who actively contrives to put such occasions in the prince’s path.
Fortune, Machiavelli says, “wishes” to make a new prince great. The new prince does
not have a hereditary position, which means he is already not reliant on the arms and
the fortune of others (as was, for example, Cesare Borgia). Therefore, Fortuna “makes”
enemies and obstacles for him so that, by crushing them, he can “climb higher” through
an enhanced reputation for victory entirely through his own efforts. Understanding the
weird favor Fortuna has done for him by throwing every possible threat and obstacle
at him, a “wise” prince, having established his power through overcoming the initial
impediments she created, will imitate her by deliberately encouraging conspiracies to
form so that he can continue to “increase his greatness” by crushing them. In other
words, what Fortuna does to the prince spontaneously, the prince will imitate methodi-
cally. This is the difference between “relying” on fortune, as do those who rest content
with the status they have inherited or been given, and those who master Fortuna by
channeling her spontaneity.

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Machiavelli’s prescription is an act of methodical self-abandonment.

You allow the disorder of the world to enflame the passions and fuel
the will precisely and only to the extent necessary to exert control
over the limiting conditions on one’s will. Thus, whereas Plato presents
the relationship of the longing for virtue to the objects of virtue as
an ascent through the visible hierarchy of human goods guided by an
eros progressively enlightened as to its true satisfaction, Machiavelli
presents the prince as alternating with dispassionate efficiency between
the mode of the lion and the mode of the fox – to let himself be carried
away by anger, rage, and belligerence or not to let himself be so carried
away, depending on what maximizes power in the given circumstances
(chapter 18).
The alternation between the violence of the lion and the cunning
of the fox arguably parallels the alternation between force and fraud
in the Discourses discussed in Chapter 5. Although Cicero is not dis-
cussed by name in either context, Machiavelli’s pairings of force/lion
with fraud/fox directly echo a similar discussion by Cicero in chapter
14 of the Offices (1955), where Cicero introduces the lion and the fox,
pairing the lion with force and the fox with fraud. However, Cicero’s
judgment of these forces is the exact opposite of Machiavelli’s. Injus-
tice, Cicero says, can be committed in two ways: by “force, the property
of a lion” or by “fraud, the property of a fox.” He continues: “Both
are utterly repugnant to society, but fraud is the more detestable.” He
concludes: “But in the whole system of villainy, none is more capital
than that of the men who, when they most deceive, so manage as that
they may seem to be virtuous men.” It is hard to imagine two more
diametrically opposed views than those of Cicero and Machiavelli on
these traits. For Cicero, force and fraud are both “utterly repugnant”
because, as the similes of lion and fox imply, they reduce us to the
level of animals, forgetting about our souls and virtue. Fraud is “more
detestable” because it involves sly, sneaky deceit rather than brute open
force, which is at least honest in its directness. Machiavelli, as we have
seen, is equally at home with the use of either force or fraud, depending
on the circumstances, but in general favors fraud – for Cicero, the more
despicable of the two – over force, because the lion lacks the subtlety
of the fox. Moreover, whereas Cicero deplores the fact that the use of
force or fraud reduces a man to the bestial, Machiavelli segues from
the half man/half beast Chiron to the lion and the fox, endorsing the

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complete bestialization of the human character and the animalization of

even its mind, traditionally thought to be the soul’s closest connection
to eternity. Finally, echoing Plato’s discussion of the two ways of life
in the Republic, virtue (including civic virtue) and vice (culminating in
the extreme of tyranny), and how (as Glaucon maintains) the tyrant at
his most successful can disguise his unjust actions as just, whereas the
truly just man is taken to be unjust and is persecuted, Cicero writes
that the lowest depth of moral depravity is that of men who deceive
in order to take advantage of others but don the appearance of being
just. Machiavelli, by contrast, tells the prince that there is nothing more
useful for him than to cultivate the appearance of possessing the tradi-
tional virtues as a reputational smokescreen behind which he can gain
and preserve power, involving, if necessary, any degree of fraud or vio-
lence required, the practice of those virtues for their own sake leading
to political suicide. Could there be a more resounding demonstration
of the fact that Machiavelli is completely opposed to Cicero’s political
teaching, rather than being, as some in the contextualist school would
have it, his successor?31
Cold-bloodedly to allow oneself to be overwhelmed by passion is
plainly a matter requiring the greatest dexterity, acuity, and subtlety, the
political equivalent of windsurfing in which too little or too much release
or control – too much impetuosity or too much caution – can submerge
one’s craft. Thus, it may be, as Hannah Pitkin suggests, that Machiavelli
chooses to reify Fortuna as a woman so that the prince does not feel
completely overwhelmed by the randomness and hostility of the forces
he combats but has a recognizable and desirable foe to subdue.32 Yet the

31 A similar argument is made by Ball (1984) pp. 73–76.

32 Pitkin (1999). Zuckert (1996) argues, based on Machiavelli’s Clizia and the presenta-
tion of Sofronia, that Machiavelli attributes the capacity for virtu equally to men and
women (Sofronia is a play on the Greek word for prudence, sophrosune). At the same
time, she observes, Machiavelli does not mean by prudence what the classical thinkers
meant. It is not a virtue that is fully actualized through political community but is on the
contrary based squarely on one’s own self-interest and property. Zuckert’s essay is part
of a wide-ranging debate, well sampled in this volume, over the status of Fortuna and
of Woman for Machiavelli. Zuckert’s argument is meant as something of a corrective
to Pitkin, who argued that Machiavelli failed to live up to his political theory’s aspira-
tions for greater freedom and prosperity for mankind because of his root and branch
misogyny, crystallized by his advice on the need to use force to subdue Fortuna, which
she characterizes as a proto-fascistic conception of virtu as sheer machismo. Pitkin’s
most telling observation is that it may be necessary for Machiavelli’s prince to personify

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prince can only subdue Fortuna if he “imitates” her. For the ancients, the
imitation of nature meant the attempt to inculcate the orderliness of the
world in one’s own character and habits, what the Stoics called integri-
tas. For Plato, philosophy and its ordered view of the whole must be the
supervisor and guide for correct poetic “imitation,” such that Homer
must be purged of his Dionysian sweetness, leaving only examples of
virtuous living, the philosophic images that will replace the tragic poets’
and Sophists’ shadow show cast on the wall at the rear of the Cave.
For Machiavelli, however, the imitation of nature means allowing the
multifarious, unpredictable, subtle, treacherous, and malignant currents
and moods of fortune to course through oneself; sampling them, savor-
ing them, but never being swept away by their current; instead, turning
their power outward in one’s manipulation of others, especially in one’s
manipulation of how the credulous many see one’s external reputation
for virtue. We see again how Machiavelli conflates the roles of philoso-
pher and poet. The hierarchy of philosophy over poetic imitation is
replaced by the alternation between control and release.
Thus, there is an interesting ambivalence in Machiavelli’s depiction
of manliness. On the one hand, he encourages a crude masculinity and
brute exertion of power:
Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to
beat her and strike her down. And one sees that she lets herself be won more
by the impetuous than by those who proceed coldly. And so always, like a
woman, she is a friend of the young, because they are less cautious, more
ferocious, and command her with more audacity. (The Prince chapter 25)
Even among the ancient exponents of tyranny, of the superiority of the
“manly men” (andres) who live for victory in the contest for distinction,

the hostile and unpredictable forces of the external world as Fortuna – as a woman –
because those forces will be less terrifying to the extent that the prince can reify them
as one single foe who must be subdued. My own position is something of a middle
ground between these two. Because I present the relationship of the prince to Fortuna
as a kind of dance between his psychic interior and the generative matrix of nature,
a dance in which the prince must tap into nature’s own spontaneity and capacity for
force, I agree with Zuckert that Machiavelli is arguing for a certain kind of mutuality
and reciprocity between the masculine and the feminine, grounding the belief that, based
on self-interest, women could be prudent as well as men, a basis for “liberal feminism.”
At the same time, though, I believe Pitkin is correct to see the prince’s dyad with Fortuna
as a potentially dark and terrifying fracas, and that although caution is sometimes to be
preferred to impetuosity, in general the hot-blooded virility of the young is a better bet
for bringing Fortuna under control.

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it is hard to match the unvarnished crudeness of this portrait. Perhaps

Callicles comes close in his extolling of the “natural master,” identi-
fied with the archaic superhuman and wandering marauder Hercules
(Gorgias 484). Yet even the Sophists argued that the art of rhetoric and
the worldliness acquired from a foray into philosophy were necessary
accoutrements of manly prudence – one could not prevail against the
many by physical strength alone, for they would always win the con-
test through sheer force of numbers. As Werner Jaeger points out, the
Sophists billed themselves as a replacement for the old aristocratic code
of honor reaching back beyond Marathon.33 With Machiavelli’s liken-
ing of virtu to rapine, we seem closer to Nietzsche’s blonde beast, or
Heidegger’s declaration that “the young” have already given themselves
over to the destiny of the people, so that, having made the existential
decision to follow the Fuhrer, they no longer need philosophy or the
life of the mind.
Stoic and Christian gentlemen down to and including the Renaissance
humanists were taught to recoil from this naked sort of belligerence as
the coarse indelicacy of a slavish character who has no control over his
bodily passions, the very epitome of the tyrant.34 One need only think
of Castiglione, who smoothly adapts Diotima’s Ladder to a creed of
courtly love in which chasteness and delicacy alone make one worthy
of the beloved’s love. As the would-be rapist of Fortuna, Machiavelli’s
prince is thus a good deal more “macho,” as one used to say. On the
other hand, although capable of a directness leading to bold, even crude
actions, Machiavelli’s prince will not be reliably open and honest in his
dealings with others – unlike, say, Aristotle’s great-souled man, who
will not stoop to deceive or dissimulate because that would suggest
a shameful preference for popularity among his inferiors over telling
the truth (Nicomachean Ethics 1124b13, 1125a3). Machiavelli’s prince

33 Jaeger (1965) pp. 289–296.

34 Erasmus illustrates well how the classical denunciation of the tyrant as a monster of
excessive passions was assimilated to Christian statecraft: The tyrant is “a frightful,
loathsome beast, formed of a dragon, wolf, lion, viper, bear and like creatures. . . . Never
sleeping, but always threatening the fortunes and lives of all men; dangerous to everyone,
especially to the good; a sort of fatal scourge to the whole world, on which everyone
who has the interests of the state at heart pores out execration and hatred, because its
maliciousness is hedged about with armed forces and wealth. This is the picture of a
tyrant. . . . Monsters of this sort were Claudius and Caligula.” Quoted in Newell (2001)
p. 275. For a discussion of classical and courtly love, see Newell (2003) pp. 12–27.

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will cultivate a reputation for honesty to the extent useful, but he will
always manipulate it from behind the scenes, capable of the slyest deceits
and most shameless reversals. In a way, therefore, Machiavelli’s prince,
although on one level excessively masculine in contrast with the classical
model of the gentleman, is on another level more “feminine” in the
sense that he takes on some of the qualities of fickleness, treachery, and
evasiveness attributed by Machiavelli to personified Fortuna herself.35
This alternation between the bold and the deceitful, the forthright
and the sly, undulates throughout the new psychology of the lion and
fox. For example, when he praises the “inhuman cruelty” of Hannibal
(The Prince chapter 17), Machiavelli is providing what he regards as
the unvarnished truth about the kind of firmness in governing that the
ancient authors also admired while flinching from identifying its actual
psychological source. However, Machiavelli also praises treachery and
deceit as routine methods for maintaining authority. In discussing “well-
used” cruelty, for instance, he cites the examples of Agathocles of Syra-
cuse and Oliveretto of Fermo. Whereas Agathocles convened the People
and Senate of Syracuse and had his enemies among them slaughtered in
the open, Oliverotto prepared to seize power first by luring the opposi-
tion to a “most secret” chamber and killing them out of sight. Reflecting
on this contrast between ancient and contemporary examples, one won-
ders: Has the incredible psychological hold of the “imagined republics,”
epitomized by the Church that is at once a world government and mili-
tarily powerless, yet can sway powerful men through their piety to serve
its own interests, introduced into the world a contradiction between
appearance and reality that is much sharper than anything known to
the ancients? That is to say, it may be more difficult, given the enor-
mous psychological hold of the illusory imagined republics, to kill one’s
enemies openly, because such pragmatism is considered sinful, but less
difficult to deceive them and kill them in secret because Christian naivete

35 In this connection, the summation by Lord (1979) of the relationship between the
Mandragola and Machiavelli’s larger political philosophy appears to be apt: to the
extent that man might aspire to overcome Fortuna, and if the proper mode for success
in doing so is akin to a hot-blooded youth’s wooing of a tempestuous woman rather than
to a cautious man’s trust in the rationality of the cosmos, then Machiavelli’s thought,
although neither precisely comedic nor tragic (certainly not tragic, inasmuch as will and
reason can plot a clear method for man’s triumph over necessity and chance), bears a
closer affinity to comedy, “if one understands by comedy the archetypical celebration
of the triumph of youth and desire over age, authority and duty.”

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has made men more credulous in general and more inclined to accept a
profession of virtue as its reality. One is reminded of how Shakespeare’s
characters so frequently alter their identities, from a woman playing a
man playing a woman, from a wastrel to a king. If one wants to appre-
ciate the full force of Machiavelli’s wit, one need only think through
his remark to the addressee of The Prince about what gifts a prince
like Lorenzo would most enjoy receiving and the means through which
Cesare Borgia lured the Orsini to Sinigaglia.36
The Machiavellian prince is profoundly interiorized and detached
from the visible world with its established customs and distinctions, in
this sense sharing the Augustinian soul’s alienation from the world. He
is as much Iago as Hannibal, as much an expert in the invisible levers
of power as in its ferocious open exercise, as much if not more fox
than lion, and both masculine and feminine by turns. All see him, but
few “touch” what he is. The abstraction of the self from any concrete
object of erotic longing in the world – a prerequisite for the mastery of
self and others – calls for a plasticity and mutability of character whose
feline slipperiness would have been excoriated as much by Callicles
as by Socrates. The exchange of traits between the “virtuous” prince
and the “malignant” goddess Fortuna is crystallized in a writing by
Bacon, who credited Machiavelli with having understood that the pur-
pose of knowledge is “the relief of man’s estate” through the extraction
of power from nature. Indeed, the methodological skepticism toward
received opinion and tradition that formed the basis of the new natural
science is arguably grounded in the Machiavellian ontology of alien-
ation from, and imitation of, Fortuna. Bacon describes the scientist
as someone who woos nature, who taps into nature’s inscrutable
rhythms, and to this extent imitates her and begins to merge with her.
Yet this empathy exists only for the sake of subverting nature’s power so
as to empower human projects, torturing nature through experimental

36 In this connection, consider Dietz (1986), who argues that Machiavelli’s advice to
Lorenzo in The Prince is meant to hasten his overthrow and restore the liberty of
Florence. To which one must respond, it could be true. However, it does not “[return]
The Prince to its specific historical context” if this is seen as something at odds with
his later legacy. After all, one can observe that Shakespeare’s plays are at once veiled
criticisms of the Tudors based on his own personal experience and observation and
ascend to universal truths that speak to the ages. There is no need to choose between
the “historical context” and the transhistorical experience, for the latter emerges out of
the former and is transmuted by ongoing acts of interpretation.

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science so as to reconstruct nature’s parts (Bacon[1960] p. 25; [1857]

I.iii). To do this, the scientist must rigorously puncture the pleasing
images, what Bacon calls the “idols of the mind,” that previous philos-
ophy generated through its heavenly illusions; the scientist must forsake
the surface and probe the interior. This indicates another connection
between Machiavelli’s meditations on Fortune and biblical revelation:
As Leon Kass has argued, there is a profound kinship between the dis-
trust of the visible world found in revealed Abrahamic religion and
modern physics.37
3. The methodical alternation of self-release and self-control,
grounded in a subjectivity constituted by the reflection that the world
is a field of hostile forces, allows one to master Fortuna. By doubt-
ing the world, man can begin striving to locate himself outside it as a
source of order. In this way, the will to impose form on matter tra-
ditionally attributed to God might be practiced by princes. It leads to
a new paradigm for knowing. For Plato, techne provided an intima-
tion of the substantive order and harmony that governed the whole.
Precisely because he wants Callicles to realize that he cannot achieve
whatever he pleases, Socrates compels him to subject his longings to the
clarification afforded by the analogy of prudence to expertise, which
leads to a view of the cosmos as governed by geometric proportional-
ity and friendliness, and thereby helps to dampen tyrannical ambition.
For Machiavelli, by contrast, art reflects nothing about the nonhuman
world, lacking even that “small part” of it (rhetoric) that (as I hold)
the pre-Socratics and Sophists argued was connected to physis. Art is
the imposition of form by man on an otherwise recalcitrant and hostile
nature. Just as it can combat Fortuna in the literal, outward sense by
damming up rivers before they flood, so can princely rigor purge the
social order of its malign “humors.” It apes the form that the Divine
Artificer imposes on the inchoate stuff of matter in Augustinian and
Thomistic theology. Far from limiting tyrannical ambition, as it does
for Plato, art is now its consummation, an expression of power so per-
fect that it ranges far beyond mere personal triumph to the imposition
of epoch-making “new modes and orders,” unprecedented in nature or
history, on the currents of time. In this way, techne starts to become
technology. There is a path from Machiavelli’s art of princely rule to

37 Kass (2003).

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Hobbes’s contention that statecraft can imitate God understood as the

artificer of the universe. Just as God is held to have originally cre-
ated nature, homo faber can improve on it, specifically by making a
political state that will remedy those innocent faults that proceed from
unreconstructed human nature in its spontaneous pursuit of survival
and dominion (Hobbes [1971] pp. 81–83, 188, 196, 202). Neverthe-
less, this path from Machiavelli is not the only one leading out of his
thinking. For, as we consider in the next chapter, the interaction of
the rhythms of Fortuna through the rise and fall of states with human
virtu points to an ontology of history whose currents elude complete
predictability and control.
As we have observed, for Machiavelli, mastering nature does not
mean only, or even primarily, the power to literally impose one’s will
on external conditions. Before projects of literally reconstructing the
natural environment or the state can be firmly undertaken, they must
be grounded in the rooting out of that part of one’s own nature vulner-
able to the belief in the utopian morality of ancient thought and Chris-
tianity. Even so ruthlessly “virtuous” a prince as Cesare Borgia, after
all, showed himself vulnerable to morality when he allowed an enemy
to become pope, hoping that Julius II’s gratitude would wipe out his
desire for vengeance: “And whoever believes that among great person-
ages new benefits will make old injuries be forgotten deceives himself”
(The Prince chapter 7).38 In order to resist the traditional moral teach-
ing that service to the common good is preferable to “princely” (that
is, tyrannical) power, Machiavelli argues, we must resist believing in
the traditional characterization of tyranny, even if we are planning to
choose it over virtue. In other words, it is not enough to choose tyranny
and reject the common good. In the final analysis, Machiavelli is not
urging an acceptance of the view argued by Callicles and some of the
Sophists, that the best way of life is to become master of the city so as to

38 In criticizing Louis XII in chapter 3 for ceding the Romagna to Pope Alexander because
he was under an obligation to him owing to the resolution of his marriage, Machiavelli
observes that there is nothing “miraculous” about the fact that, by disobeying the
Romans’ rules for taking provinces, he failed. Because modern Christian rulers and
states are taught to want peace above all else and view success such as the ancients
achieved as vice, they cede the maximum of control over their own affairs, thereby
making themselves maximally vulnerable to the reversals of fortune, hence making
politics seem like a field of “miraculous” and equally accidental triumphs and defeats.

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be able to gratify one’s own pleasures to the utmost. For, Machiavelli

implies, in choosing a life of political mastery defined in terms of erotic
excess, we make ourselves vulnerable to the Platonic critique. We are
already part of the way to accepting the traditional account of the tyrant
as someone whose excesses leave him wretchedly unhappy compared
with the happiness of contemplation or beatitude.
The classical thinkers do encourage the release of the passions in
a certain sense. Because Plato believed that the good life must entail
both happiness and justice, he did not see any sense in simply preach-
ing abstinence and self-restraint. Socrates’ exaggerated emphasis in the
Gorgias on an emptily geometrical cosmic order, leaving Callicles’ eros
across a gulf untouched and unrepentant, is compensated for by the
Symposium, in which eros itself, properly clarified, leads the soul on
a simultaneously emotional and intellectual ascent to the Good. To
take another example of Plato’s awareness that virtue must entail the
satisfaction of the affects, the Athenian Stranger criticizes Kleinias for
thinking that the passions can simply be made war on (repressed or
punished) without regard for the soul’s inner satisfaction. The gloomy
doubts of spirited young men who believe that the gods do not exist or
do not care for them must be assuaged with a psychologically satisfying
account of the whole (Laws 886–888, 899–901). Plato offers a wide-
ranging evocation of tyrannical ambition, hedonism, and the pursuit
of honor through a political career and then tries to show how these
ambitions, properly understood, contain principles of orderly develop-
ment that would bring the passions to fruition by enlisting them in the
service of truly noble ends, rather than allowing them to drag the soul
down into mere random lusts or spasms of anger and belligerence. The
goal, in other words, is not merely to repress the desires but to show
that their fullest satisfaction lies in the direction of the common good
and contemplation rather than in tyranny.
Thus, Plato presents Achilles as a man whose indiscriminate urges
make him explode in anger at every opposition because the world
presents so many impediments to his unconstrained passions. He is
heroic but mad, as capable of attacking a river as fighting his coun-
try’s bravest foe, or, conversely, paralyzed by his ruminations over the
meaninglessness of life. In Plato’s presentation, his passionate anger,
although left to itself destructive of political order, contains the seed of
its own rehabilitation, for it expresses in an inchoate way the longing

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for a world in which one’s needs are recognized and granted some
grounding beyond oneself. Achilles is right, in other words, that the
world should answer in some way to his own needs. The key to reform-
ing such ambitious types is to educate their needs so that they come
to experience the equilibrium between the development of their own
best qualities and the harmoniousness characteristic of the most real
dimensions of the cosmos. Such men will then turn their anger inward
against their own aberrant impulses or restrict its outward exercise to
enemies of justice and decency, like the Auxiliaries in the Republic,
whose steadfast and moderate manliness is Plato’s replacement for the
doomed and brooding Achilles. They will no longer howl with anguish
like Achilles at their inability to achieve everything they desire, or, as
Socrates puts it in Book 10, cry like a small boy holding the place where
it hurts until someone kisses it better, because the noble harmony of
the world as they have been educated to apprehend it will suffuse their
passions and harmonize them within the soul (Republic 386a–388b,
390e–391c, 604d).
For Machiavelli, by contrast, it is necessary to release one’s passions
without being seduced by the longing they produce for some such ulti-
mate satisfaction in the world. Before one can hope to master nature
and the natures of one’s subjects, one must first win the battle against
the seductive inner promptings of nature in oneself. One must let one’s
will be empowered by the longing for might, satisfaction, and honor
while refusing to allow those passions to weave imaginary republics
of repose and harmony that captivate these longings and sap their pri-
mordial strength. For Fortuna in Machiavelli’s depiction, as we have
observed, loves to build something up so that she can knock it down,
and in Machiavelli’s estimation, there is no more of a tragic cathar-
sis in this nemesis than there is in being hit by a bus; there is nothing
redemptive about failure and suffering. This is why Machiavelli is much
more given to depicting princely virtue in terms of belligerence, violence,
deceit, and cold-hearted glory rather than as the fruition of eros. Plea-
sure and happiness as ends in themselves, as the achievement of repose
and tranquillity, are virtually absent from his prescription for princely
rule. Although opposed to the Stoic model of steadfast self-control,
even less does he want to return to the ancient philosophical school of
hedonism, the main successor in the dissident strain opposing the classi-
cal natural right of Plato and Aristotle, which argued that the pleasures

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properly cultivated led to an inner harmony of the soul best achieved

in private life and away from politics. The use of rape as a metaphor
for the prince’s relation to Fortuna is meant above all to forestall any
sentiment on the prince’s part that there is a link between the world and
his own better qualities of self-restraint and admiration for nobility and
beauty.
Machiavelli does not attempt to link the tyrant’s longing for pub-
lic preeminence with ultimate personal satisfaction akin to a success-
ful love affair, rejecting not only the Platonic attempt to rehabilitate
the longing of a Callicles but Callicles’ erotic longing itself. To avoid
the Platonic cure, Machiavelli throws out the Platonic diagnosis of the
disease. Not only the Platonic therapy for tyranny but the very diagno-
sis of it as the disorder of a potentially orderly eros must be expelled
with a pitchfork, and the expulsion of Augustinian transcendence while
retaining its reduction of virtue to dominion greatly aids Machiavelli
in this project. The objectification of nature as the treacherous god-
dess Fortuna is meant, in other words, to entirely forestall the Platonic
starting point for the diagnosis and rehabilitation of the erotic long-
ing for wholeness manifested by ambitious public men like Alcibiades
and Callicles. In depicting the personality of Callicles, Plato gives us
to understand that his kind of confusion of public and private erotic
longings was the source of the tyrant’s ambition to possess the city like
a lover, but also contained the potential for its rehabilitation and educa-
tion toward virtue. For Machiavelli, on the other hand, this confusion
of public and private erotic longings is precisely what gets in the way
of the clear-headed, single-minded pursuit of power undistracted by the
concerns of the hedonist, whether reformed or not.
Thus, whereas Plato wants to curb eros for the sake of civic virtue and
philosophy, Machiavelli wants to curb it for the sake of an “effectual”
politics. Machiavelli does not object merely to the Platonic reform of
the ambition to rule but to the description of it even in its basest spon-
taneous erotic manifestations – a diagnosis that already implies the
reform. Whereas Plato argues for the assimilation of erotic unruliness
into the harmony of the Good, Machiavelli argues that the delusions of
eros get in the way of the dynamism of the primordial impulse toward
mastery. On the whole, as we consider at greater length in the next
chapter, Machiavelli prefers the fox to the lion, prefers calculation to
aggression: “One needs to be a fox to recognize snares and a lion to

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frighten the wolves. Those who stay simply with the lion do not under-
stand this” (The Prince chapter 18). At the same time, on the whole,
he prefers impetuosity to caution. Within classical thinking, this com-
bination would be a contradiction. If a wise calculation rules the soul,
the aggressiveness of ambition will be tamed. If spirited impetuosity
rebels against calculation, the cool-headedness of caution cannot pre-
vail. For Machiavelli, however, there is nothing contradictory about
this combination of opposites. The lionlike side of passion, left to itself,
tends to get carried away and make its possessor forget why he allows
himself to roar. Someone who manipulates his own rage by remote
control, with the coolness of the fox, is more likely to bring off suc-
cessfully those impetuous assaults on enemies and hostile “occasions”
that Machiavelli thinks are likelier to put one in control of one’s fate
than waiting cautiously for favorable circumstances to arise. Because
only if channeled efficiently – channeled away from the distraction of
erotic longing, even an eros for honor and mastery – can the power of
the passions be methodically focused against Fortuna.
Thus, to expand on an earlier motif, there is a larger meaning than is
sometimes supposed to Machiavelli’s advice that it is better for a prince
to be guided by fear rather than by love in his dealings with his subjects.
It does not merely mean that a prince should inspire fear rather than
be kind. This hardheaded tactic is only one consequence of the more
general implication that a prince should not practice the virtues in order
to become an object of love to his subjects. He should resist the delusion
that they can have friendly feelings for him based on their admiration
for his superior qualities of character.39 This is the kind of civic philia
between citizens and statesmen sketched by Socrates for Callicles and
elaborated by Diotima. In resisting this temptation, the prince will resist

39 Tolstoy’s War and Peace provides a vivid illustration of the erotic longing for honor that
may be stirred in a subject by his absorption in the nobility and beauty that he sees in the
prince when Tolstoy describes a review by the czar of his troops, as well as the young
nobleman Nikolai Rostoff’s transport of martial and patriotic ecstasy as he imagines
dying in battle for the splendid and kindly young emperor. The emperor’s outward
splendor perfectly mirrors the noble nature Rostoff attributes to him and toward which
he is irresistibly drawn: “The handsome young Emperor Alexander in his Horseguards’
uniform and three-cornered hat worn point forward, with his pleasant face and clear but
not loud voice, was the cynosure of all eyes . . . ‘My God! What would happen to me, if
the sovereign were to address me!’ thought Rostoff. ‘I should die of happiness! . . . Oh,
to die, to die for him! . . . My God! How happy I should be if he would only bid me to
dash instantly into the fire!” Quoted in Newell (2001) pp. 352–354.

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falling in love with his own reputation as magnified by his subjects’ love.
Otherwise, a prince-statesman can forget the levers of his power and
float away in rapture with his own reputation, until this infatuation
with the reified image of his own nobility makes him lose his “touch”
for sensing subterranean threats to his power from the discontented
or from secret plotters among his colleagues. Thus, whereas Socrates
wishes to help men like Callicles understand that their eros cannot be
satisfied by political achievement alone, Machiavelli wishes to help them
understand that eros is a distraction from political achievement.
That statesmen avoid believing their own achievements are actually
summoned into being by a preexisting objective hierarchy of noble ful-
filment is good not only for princes but for popular regimes as well. As
we saw in Chapter 5, according to Machiavelli, a republican statesman
like Manlius had a character of such natural savagery that he was cruel
to everyone without distinction, so that his rigor to enforce the laws
was quite disinterested. This made him very much to be preferred to
statesmen like Valerius Corvinus and Scipio who, by trying to make
the people love them, thereby confused a private erotic relationship
with the maintenance of the republic. They subverted the impartial
rigor of the law by showering favors on their admirers and clients,
threatening to replace republican equality with the personal authority
of a monarch over his household. Thus, whereas Plato presents thu-
motic savagery as capable of being tamed by paideia (in the Republic)
or assimilated by an eros for political nobility (in the Symposium) as
two alternative routes to serving the public good, Machiavelli truncates
them. Thumotic savagery and an eros for honor are not two perspec-
tives on routes to the unity and health of the soul, with eros taking the
leading role, but two kinds of ambition – the more savage one helpful
to republics, the gentler one subversive of them. Manlius Torquatus is
pure thumotic indignation bereft of a Platonic education in the harmo-
nious beauty of the cosmos. Scipio’s eros for fame and the admiring
love of his fellow citizens, the kind of longing thought by Plato to be
a basis for public service, is for Machiavelli the germ of the Roman
Republic’s corruption into an “eastern” despotism sapped of its manly
rigor.
We recall that the love of a prince’s subjects, according to Machi-
avelli, is a voluntary obligation. The prince relies on them to incur this
obligation so long as he cultivates the virtues of soul recommended by

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the traditional writers. In terms of Diotima’s Ladder, subjects see their

prince as participating in the beneficent harmony that characterizes the
beauty and goodness of the cosmos. They are drawn toward him in
admiration because he supplies an object for their own love properly
educated. For Machiavelli, however, the belief in this evanescent bond
between lover and beloved in public life is a particularly disastrous
example of relying on fortune – relying on the morality according to
which people are capable of feeling an obligation to a virtuous ruler and
of honoring him. By alienating himself from the hope of participating in
this beautiful ladder of transcendence, the prince begins to master for-
tune in himself. By reducing his subjects to their consciousness that they
depend on him for survival, either because he protects them or because
he has the power to destroy them, the prince snaps this evanescent bond
purporting to unite him and his subjects in their common love of the
beautiful and good. Their obedience is now necessary, rather than vol-
untary; in the prince’s control rather than dependent on their sense of
obligation, in this way reversing the maxim of Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics that a virtue practiced by choice is nobler than one practiced from
compulsion (1110a–1112a). (As we see in the next chapter, Machiavelli
consistently reverses Aristotle’s maxim so as to make necessity the very
basis of freedom.) Rather than relying on the visible image of his repu-
tation to elicit love and respect, the prince will “touch” directly on the
invisible compulsions that motivate his subjects to preserve their lives
and possessions. He will rely more on their self-consciousness rooted in
insecurity and desire than on their capacity for self-forgetting in their
absorption in the object of their admiration. In elevating fear over love
as the basis for the prince’s reliance on the people, Machiavelli secu-
larizes Augustine’s dichotomy between the City of God and the City
of Man, radicalizing the Christian theologian’s truncation of Diotima’s
Ladder by replacing God’s sustaining will over nature with the will of
the prince.
By removing these hopes for transcendence from his relations with his
subjects, by appealing to them primarily through fear and their desire
for self-preservation, Machiavelli’s new prince chastens the relation of
their passions to his will just as he has chastened this relation within
himself. Thus, the prince, having learned from the necessitous perils
of Fortuna to purge himself of hopes for erotic transcendence in order
to fight back and establish his mastery, imparts the same lesson to his

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subjects. His rule institutionalizes the malignant power of Fortuna, but

for politically constructive purposes rather than caprice. By teaching
his subjects to be guided by self-preservation rather than hope and
ambition, his “state” replicates on the political level the more general
lesson that life teaches us when we understand fortune. What Fortuna
does to humans unconsciously and spontaneously, the prince can do
consciously and methodically to – and for – his subjects, just as in
the next chapter we see how Machiavelli argues that the successful
unfolding of the Roman republic into an empire, having unfolded by
chance, can now be consciously reenacted through method.
Statecraft can preempt the dangers of Fortuna to us all by channeling
“her” power to inspire dread through the prince so as to stimulate the
people to labor and achieve prosperity – a prosperity that this cold-
blooded and self-disciplined prince will not despoil but protect. As
Hobbes was to systematize this insight in chapter 14 of the Leviathan,
without the fear of violent death imposed on us by nature, whether
directly or through the invasive passions of our competitors, the social
contract is but a bundle of unenforceable words. The Sovereign can
replicate this terror and thus periodically compel his subjects to give up
dangerous political ambitions and prosper in private. He can remind
his subjects of their good fortune in escaping the state of nature by
occasionally reproducing its terrors. Or as Hegel puts it in describing
Nature’s immediate threat to life that the Master wields mediately over
the Slave, “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Thus, whereas
Plato thought the common good could be served by a certain kind of
education of eros, Machiavelli thinks it is best served by the extirpation
of eros from the subject matter of statesmanship, a path already laid in
part by Augustine for completely opposite reasons. If they follow his
advice, princes – whether real-world rulers, potential princes, or princes
of thought – must uproot from themselves all vestiges of reliance on the
world as characterized by Platonic friendship and harmony. Here we
encounter the beginning of the impersonal authority, of the deeroticiza-
tion of the sovereign, closely linked to modern terror and technological
domination, but also to the beginning of the benign idea that govern-
ments should get out of the way of their subjects’ desires to prosper and,
as long as they do not harm one another or raise their hand against the
state, let them live as they please. Machiavelli’s advice that the prince
should not plunder his subjects’ possessions and should encourage them

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to prosper anticipates the modern conception of the state as the imper-

sonal arbiter and umpire of contract law (The Prince chapters 9, 17, 22;
Hobbes [1971] pp. 196, 202). Rule as denatured management begins
to replace rule emerging from character development and civic peda-
gogy. Manlius is savage, but he has no distinct personality; he gives
no inkling of suppressed wants, pleasures, or hidden complexities like
those of Alcibiades and Callicles that make them so ripe for Socrates’
erotic therapy. He is like a natural force erupting directly into the polit-
ical order as an engine of enforcement. As we see in the next chapter,
Machiavelli believes this force can be institutionalized as a part of the
constitutional balance of powers.
In concluding this chapter, and by way of transition to the next, I
want to reiterate that I am not attributing to Machiavelli the belief that
nature can literally and in every way be brought under the sway of
human mastery. I have suggested throughout that Machiavelli goes
further than any classical thinker in promising the possibility of a
hitherto unprecedented human power to stand outside of nature and
achieve greater control over it, and that this possibility emerges from
the regrounding of political existence in a post-Christian ontology that
has no precise analogue in the classical approach. However, as we will
see in turning to the Discourses, there is a side of Machiavelli that, in
its ultimate recognition of the limitations placed on human freedom by
the cycles of nature, historical events, and the shortcomings of human
psychology, does share in the moderation of the ancients. It is a slen-
der tendril of a connection, and one that, in Machiavelli’s treatment, is
drained of just about all the teleological content of the classics’ under-
standing of nature aside from its insuperable objectivity. But it is a
connection nevertheless. That point made, I still believe it is fair to say
that Machiavelli encourages the liberation of the project for mastering
Fortuna to an extraordinarily greater degree than any of the classics,
such that his political science cannot be adequately comprehended as a
modification of the classics or indeed even as their simple and complete
reversal.
There is a side of Machiavelli’s thinking, most boldly formulated in
chapters 6 and 25 of The Prince, that promises the conquest of nature
at its most radical; that seems to anticipate an ideal, to be progressively
realized, of the pure mastery of nature by an exertion of will – a sense,
in other words, in which Machiavelli anticipates Bacon, Kant, or even

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Ficthe, that thinker who goes furthest in casting nature as nothing but
sheer fodder for an endless dynamic for the assertion of human freedom,
“the material of our moral duty rendered sensuous.” There is another
side of Machiavelli’s thinking, however, most evident in the Discourses,
that bounds the capacity for the exertion of human willpower within
the surrounding contexts of time, circumstance, accident, human folly,
and the rise and fall of regimes. In other words, the radically voluntaris-
tic, proto-Baconian and proto-Ficthean side of Machiavelli is conjoined
with a more immanentist, organicist approach to the unfolding of his-
tory and the recurrent cycles of events. In this way, Machiavelli might be
seen as anticipating Hegel’s attempt to reconcile the search in history for
both freedom and community (“the unity of subject and substance”),
with the very significant difference that Machiavelli does not propound
a unifying synthesis between these two dimensions at the end of history.

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 VII

the republic in
motion
Machiavelli’s Vision of the New Rome

In this chapter, bringing to a conclusion my focus on the conquest of

nature as the unifying ontological premise of Machiavelli’s political phi-
losophy, I try to show how Machiavelli’s point of departure from the
ancients over the relationship of virtue to fortune leads him to radi-
cally reorient the classical account of the founding of regimes and the
prescription for the best regime. Although appearing to follow classical
typologies like those of Aristotle and Polybius, at the end of the day,
in endorsing the Roman Republic’s dynamic imperial expansionism,
Machiavelli turns virtually every premise of classical political philos-
ophy on its head, from the pragmatic and psychological to the meta-
physical. For, while the classics had maintained that a regime might be
perfected insofar as its politics transcended chance and spontaneity in
the direction of the permanent unity informing the whole, Machiavelli
argues on the contrary that the history of Rome shows how a republic
can be perfected by “chance” and “the aid of events.” In Machiavelli’s
depiction of the progressive historical evolution of the Roman Republic,
moreover, we find a prescription that combines what Plato and Aris-
totle had firmly maintained was not combinable – republican virtue as
the basis for imperial aggrandizement.
Some scholars see a sharp distinction between The Prince as a prag-
matic guidebook for princes (a job application, in effect, submitted by
Machiavelli to a not terribly prepossessing ruler: Tyranny for Dum-
mies: A Guide to Oppression for the Rest of Us!) and the Discourses
as containing his deeper and more heartfelt republican convictions, as
well as more openly philosophical speculation about fortune and the
cycle of human affairs. If that were strictly true, it might appear as
if my theme of tyranny should confine itself to The Prince and leave

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republics aside. There is something to this distinction. But I am going to

try to show that the subject matter and intrinsic political teachings of
the two books converge to a very large degree, bearing in mind that just
as an individual prince can be a tyrant, so, too, can a republic or any
self-governing community that is also imperialistic. As we observed in
Chapter 4 in this regard, Thucydides presents Pericles as reminding the
Athenians that, while they are a self-governing democracy internally,
they are a “tyrant city” in the eyes of their allies and victims abroad.
As we consider in this chapter, Machiavelli integrates the discus-
sion of the “new prince” in The Prince with the founders of republics
in the Discourses. Moses, Romulus, and Theseus, who appear as new
princes in The Prince, also appear as the founders of republics in the
Discourses. In other words, qualities that might be deemed tyrannical
in an individual ruler seeking his own power and glory might, viewed
in another context, be identical to those needed to establish healthy and
vigorous republics.1 So it is essential to discuss Machiavelli’s republi-
canism to see when and how he blurs these categories and also to round
out our understanding of his new teaching on tyranny. In this respect,
although differing profoundly from Plato and Aristotle in his conclu-
sions, Machiavelli does share one of their own points of departure in
viewing the founding of republics as necessarily entailing a considera-
tion of tyranny. For, as we recall, Plato discusses in the Laws how a
tyrant might found a republic, and Aristotle in the Politics concedes
that a despot might conceivably make the best ruler. However, as I
argue in this chapter, although beginning with these traditional rubrics,
Machiavelli completely transforms their content. He conflates what the
classics maintained must be conceived of as separate kinds of authority –
the public realm of the city and the individualistic realm of the house-
hold. His encouragement of individualism extends to both princes and
to their peoples. Everyone is encouraged to maximize their pursuit of
security and well-being. Tyrannical foundings and refoundings are peri-
odically necessary to keep republics vigorous and in fighting trim.
As we have seen in previous chapters, for the classics going back to
Plato and Aristotle, imperial or despotic authority was an extension of

1 As Mansfield observes, Rome could be viewed as having been founded by a foreigner,

Aeneas, or by the native Romulus. It does not matter whether a republic is well founded
or unified by internal founding or by external possession. Mansfield (2001) p. 32.

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the art of household management. It could foster peace and prosperity,

even on a multinational level, as captured by Xenophon’s idealization
of Cyrus the Great. Republican virtue, by contrast, was possible only
within a small, self-governing, nonexpansionist polis where material
wealth took second place to civic virtue. You can have a rational monar-
chy or a virtuous republic, the classics argue, but not both. Machiavelli,
in sharp contrast, argues through the case of Rome that hardy republi-
can virtue and liberty can be the basis for acquiring honor, prosperity,
and stability through imperial expansion. Far from being uncombin-
able, Machiavelli argues, the merits of both household and polis can be
“mixed” within a dynamic, mutating, ever-expanding imperial republic.
I conclude this chapter by drawing some connections between Machi-
avelli’s prescription for a “mixed” republic bent on imperial expansion
and certain strains in the American Founding.

the classical understanding of imperialism

as a mode of tyranny
Before turning to the Discourses, let me underscore with some general
observations the classical approach to empire as a foil for the “untrod-
den path” Machiavelli claims he is opening up (1, preface). The classical
political thinkers did not have a separate category for “imperialism” in
their political analysis. As we recall from earlier chapters, for both Plato
and Aristotle, what we would term an “empire” was an application of
despotike – the rule of a master over subjects who are akin to slaves
inasmuch as they are not called upon or considered equipped by nature
to deliberate as citizens, a form of household management that could be
extended over a vast extent of territory and peoples. Sometimes, as we
see from the example from Thucydides, a polis could be referred to as a
collective tyranny. Aristotle makes a similar observation in the Politics
when he argues that “most people” view all politics as the pursuit of
“mastery,” either by individuals or nations (Politics 1324b20–40). Our
term “empire” derives specifically from the Roman term imperium,
originally the consuls’ power over life and death in their capacity as
the military commanders of the Republic’s armies, later exclusively
attached to Augustus and his successors as the title Imperator, that is, a
field commander acclaimed by his troops, hence our term “emperor.”
Further to my previous observation, then, in viewing imperialism as a

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theme continuous with princely or despotic rule, Machiavelli is in this

respect firmly planted in the classical tradition.
What we call an empire, and which the ancients would have regarded
as a variety of tyranny, despotism, or universal monarchy (pambasileia) –
or, in the Roman tradition, the hated title of regnum, kingship, which is
why Augustus so carefully chose his new title of “emperor” (comman-
der) – was well known to the classical political philosophers both in the-
ory and practice. As we have seen, Plato and Aristotle were well aware
of the alternative to the Greek city-state presented by the Persian Empire
and, in Aristotle’s case, the Alexandrian Empire. Cicero defended the
idea of the res publica against the emerging imperial ambitions of Pom-
pey, Caesar, and Octavius, already bent on replacing the aristocratic
government of the original Roman polis with a Hellenistic-style monar-
chy, open or concealed. Moreover, classical political philosophy was
not simply hostile to the concept of empire. As we observed in earlier
chapters, both the Platonic and Xenophontic Socrates used the Persian
Empire as a foil for the polis, sometimes to the detriment of the lat-
ter. For Xenophon, an idealized Persian empire under Cyrus the Great
provided an alternative version of the best regime to that of Plato’s
idealized polis, the Republic. Aristotle is ambivalent as to whether a
republican aristocracy or a monarchy patterned on oikonomia – the art
of household management – is the best form of rule, and in the lat-
ter case explicitly extends the concept of monarchy to a multinational
authority over many “cities and peoples” (Politics 1285b30–35).2
For all that, however, it cannot be denied that classical political phi-
losophy as a whole has a preference for the small, self-governing repub-
lic. Even Xenophon arrives at the conclusion that the Persian republic
from which the young Cyrus emerged – a blend of real-life Sparta and
something akin to Plato’s best regime – is in some ways superior to
the vast multinational household that he establishes through his con-
quests. Plato’s best regime is of course a polis, and Aristotle ends the
Politics by endorsing his own version of the neighborly homogeneous
republic. What explains this republican preference? Plato, Xenophon,
and Aristotle all identify empire with the elevation of the art of house-
hold management – the production of material goods and the division of
labor – over the cultivation of the moral and intellectual virtues solicited

2 Consider also Plato Alcibiades 1 121–124. See also Newell (1983).

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 the republic in motion

by civic deliberation about the common good. Whereas republics foster

the common good, empires allow individuals to maximize their indi-
vidual security and gain. Whatever their merits, therefore, empires fall
short of the highest human excellence. This is implicit, for example,
in Aristotle’s remark that, if economics were the chief end of politics,
all cities could be united in a single state, as happens with multina-
tional trade agreements (Politics 1280a35–40). Just as important, even
in their relative approbation for empire, the ancient thinkers do not
stress the conquest, bloodshed, and power seeking necessary to estab-
lish it so much as the unity of the finished product. For Xenophon,
Cyrus’s perfected empire embodies the art of household management
that his Socrates establishes as a path to the Good, the conception of
an ordered whole.
Much the same is true of Cicero with respect to the imperial dynasts
and of Tacitus with respect to the Augustan principate: if it is necessary
to accept that the republic has been superseded by the empire, one must
endorse the empire only insofar as it guarantees the settled peace and
the rule of law. Although Cicero never forsook his dream of the repub-
lic, he recognized that Caesar’s dictatorship, a monarchy in disguise,
provided stability and security, especially for the plebs, welcome after
many years of civil war, and conceded that the continuing strife between
the dynasts Antony and Octavius might well portend the likelihood that
the old republic would never be restored. Virgil endows Rome’s founder
Aeneas with Stoic qualities of duty and perseverance that he then trans-
fers to Augustus, divinely appointed to carry out Rome’s divine destiny
of bringing peace to the world. Ronald Syme (2002) notes that many of
Augustus’s apologists airbrushed, so to speak, Julius Caesar and espe-
cially his dictatorship out of the prehistory of the “restored” republic
as an unseemly precursor due to Caesar’s deliberate subversion of the
old regime. The new Augustan regime wanted to emphasize its final
embodiment as the guarantor of peace on earth, not the bloody and
revolutionary means it had employed to get there. Tacitus grudgingly
concedes that the principate was necessary to bring peace after the civil
war years and that it was popular, especially in the provinces.
All the classical thinkers are at one in downplaying and severely
criticizing the kind of dynamic, violent, and expansionist foreign policy
that is needed to establish the path to imperial rule. Bearing this in mind
will enable us better to appreciate what is novel about the specifically

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modern conception of empire that I argue is first theoretically elab-

orated by Machiavelli in his Discourses. That novelty has two main
components that I hope to bring out through a reading of the opening
chapters of Book 1 dealing with the crucial theme of how cities are
founded and ordered. First, Machiavelli denies the classical contention
that the pursuit of wealth and power rank beneath the pursuit of moral
and intellectual virtue on the scale of human excellence. On the con-
trary, he maintains that the honor of success in the pursuit of wealth
and power is constitutive of human excellence itself, as well as benefi-
cial to all. Second, Machiavelli’s endorsement of empire is not limited
to its end state of established peace and law. On the contrary, he focuses
on and praises the dynamic rise of republic to imperial power through
an expansionist foreign policy that enriches all classes. For the classics,
such approbation as could be extended to empire was based on the
degree to which it might mirror the settled orderliness of the cosmos.
For Machiavelli, on the other hand, it is the dynamism of the rise to
empire – embodied in the career of Rome – in response to “chance” and
“the occurrence of accidents” (Discourses 1.2) that achieves whatever
perfection politics can sustain by imitating the flux of Fortuna in its clash
of interests and pursuit of mastery. Little wonder that Machiavelli could
say of his own new science of politics, with a well-nigh millenarian fer-
vor, that “although the envious nature of men has always made it no less
dangerous to find new modes and orders than to seek unknown waters
and lands . . . I have decided to take a path as yet untrodden by anyone”
so as to “bring common benefit to everyone” (Discourses Preface 1).
According to the classics, one must choose between the communal
honor of a republic and the individual security and well-being fostered
under an orderly empire. According to Machiavelli, by contrast, the
ambitious energies bred by the laws of an honor-loving republic can
be harnessed to a project of imperial expansion resulting in individual
security and well-being. This combination of what the classics regarded
as difficult or even impossible to combine is what makes it plausible to
term Machiavelli’s vision a liberal empire, an empire in which republi-
can virtue is the basis for the liberty of the individual. The challenge to
statesmanship is not, as it would have been for the classics, to encourage
the rise of empire to arrive as soon as possible at the peace and order-
liness of its end state but, rather, to embody in the very institutions of
the regime the vitality and ambition of its rise; to unleash recurrently

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the power seeking of individuals in all classes as the mainstay of the

regime’s stability. For Machiavelli, a way must be found of consciously
reenacting the rise of republic to empire that Rome achieved sponta-
neously and unpredictably, so that the new empire to come, a discovery,
he suggests, even greater than that of the new world across the seas that
would become its future home, might be methodically established.3

virtue, necessity, and choice in the founding

of cities
The alternation between modes of princely rule conveyed by the meta-
phor of the lion and the fox that we explored in the last chapter also
extends, as we now consider, to Machiavelli’s discussion of republican
constitutions in the Discourses. The methodical alternation between the
lion and the fox implies that there is no substantive satisfaction avail-
able for the princely character in terms of the wholeness sought through
union with the beautiful and the good in Diotima’s Ladder and other
Platonic images of the soul. The world contains no “middle way” of
unity and peace but is governed by the clash of “bodies” that wells up
into the clash of political bodies in the struggle to survive, aggrandize,
or die (1.7). The prince must let himself be governed selectively by these
chaotic forces, operative through his virtu, so that he can tap these
forces to fuel his own ambitions rather than be swept away by them.
So, too, as we explore in this chapter, must republics let themselves be
governed by chance. They must set aside hopes for the “middle way”
extolled by Aristotle and let their affairs be energized by desire, motion,
and time: “the aim of the republic is to enervate and weaken all other
bodies so as to increase its own body” (2.2). As we will see, this leads to
a new basis for conceiving of the republican constitution as a dynamic
equilibrium between two contending and acquisitive classes – nobles
and people – whose energies are directed outward in a foreign policy

3 See the valuable study by Hornqvist (2004), who argues that the revival of Republican
Rome, with its emphasis on glory and liberality, was at the heart of Machiavelli’s project,
more important than the independence of Florence or the liberation of Italy. This con-
stitutes further evidence, along with works by Rahe (2005, 2009) and Sullivan (1996,
2004), of a solid intrinsic connection between Machiavelli’s own view of statecraft and
the influence later traceable to him over English republicanism, as opposed to a mere
retroactive appropriation or adaptation of his ideas.

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of preemptive aggression and imperial growth. The same alternation of

release and control – following the metaphor of the lion and fox – that
princes are instructed in The Prince to maintain is carried out in the
republican prescription of the Discourses by the common people and
the senatorial ruling class. Thus, although the differences between The
Prince and the Discourses are important, these works do not funda-
mentally contradict each other. Rather, Machiavelli’s new ontology of
denatured and deeroticized statecraft generates the different modalities
of both principalities and republics.
Whereas Plato and Aristotle stress the telos – the substantive idea
of virtue and the civic education needed to breed the disposition suit-
able to it – that each constitution embodies and downplay both its
material preconditions and the threats to it from external aggressors,
Machiavelli dwells exclusively on the origins of the state in necessity
and adversity. He launches the Ship of State rudderless on the shifting
seas of time and invites us to consider where it may head. He goes
much further than merely providing a more realistic fleshing out of the
disorderly preconditions out of which, in the classical conception, the
constitution emerges, as one of his likely sources Polybius had done.
As we saw in previous chapters, Plato and Aristotle, although circum-
spect about the role played by violence and coercion in the founding,
as well as the occasional need to supplement an educational appeal to a
noble character with law, force, and punishment, did not flinch before
these facts. Machiavelli, however, is not merely arguing that virtue can-
not be practiced successfully unless states pay more attention to these
adversities, but that adverse necessity is actually constitutive of virtue.
Concerns with survival, household management, and the entanglements
of foreign policy that the ancients thought might, if properly guided and
restrained, provide the wherewithal or the appropriate milieu for the
pursuit of virtue are now set forth as the very genesis of virtue itself.
It is not so much that, to cite the famous tag about Machiavelli, the
ends justify the means as that the classical means become the modern
ends, unified and given new direction by the project for the conquest of
nature.
We recall from The Prince that, in the case of the greatest founders,
those princes of “outstanding virtue,” the “occasions” provided by for-
tune for them to exercise their talents are in fact terrible instances of
adversity and disorder. Here, too, in the Discourses, using two examples

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(Aeneas and Moses) of which one (Moses) is also in chapter 6 of The

Prince, Machiavelli writes that the founders of cities become “indepen-
dent” when are they “obliged” to flee some disaster, as Aeneas and
Moses were forced to flee their birthplaces (1.1). The kind of adversity
(wholesale peril, violence, and economic scarcity) that Aristotle would
have concluded made it unlikely that any constitution might emerge
in which virtue could be fully pursued – where at most survival and
rudimentary order might be maintained in lieu of a higher fulfillment
of man’s nature as a political, deliberative animal – Machiavelli sets
forth as the very best circumstances for the exercise of virtue either by
a prince or a republic. Generalizing this point, he argues: “Virtue has
more sway when labor is the result of necessity rather than choice.” We
recall from Aristotle that, in classical thought, prohaeresis, or choice,
is what makes us capable of a distinctively human excellence. The need
for material goods and the need to reproduce fall into that realm where
human beings are determined by the same necessities, the same tissue
drives, as we might now put it, that govern all living organisms. The
art of household management provides these necessities so as to equip
human beings with the wherewithal to cultivate virtues that we are free
either to choose or avoid (in order to gratify our passions) and whose
choice therefore confers the greatest merit. For Machiavelli, by con-
trast, the possibility of choice is the beginning of the “effeminization”
of virtue. The hostility of the world forces us to fight back by laboring to
survive, and so, in a perverse way, we have “the malignity of Fortuna”
to thank for compelling us to stay in fighting trim.4
This contrast enables us to understand how Machiavelli radically
reformulates what on the face of it is a traditional question with a pedi-
gree stretching back to Book 7 of Aristotle’s Politics: What is the best
natural environment for the founding of a good constitution? Machi-
avelli poses the choice between a sterile site for a city and a fertile one.
Aristotle had argued that it would be best to have a site that is neither

4 Gilbert notes the paradoxically liberating aspect of Machiavelli’s emphasis on necessity

as the cause of virtue through labor: “In Machiavelli’s view, Necessita is not just a hostile
force which makes man’s actions purely automatic. Necessita may coerce men to take
action which reason demands. Necessita may create opportunities. . . . Thus, according
to Machiavelli, rarely is there a situation which ought to be regarded as entirely desper-
ate. . . . As long as man uses all the capacities with which nature has endowed him he is
not helpless in the face of external pressures.” Gilbert (1984) p. 193.

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sterile nor bounteous, so that the city would neither be absorbed in

struggling for survival nor corrupted by luxury. He chooses the middle
way – a moderately fertile environment reflective of the orderly balance
at the core of the world. For Machiavelli, by contrast, nature oscillates
between extremes of sterility and fertility, necessity and dissolution. Of
these two extremes, Machiavelli takes the sterile mode to be closer to
the truth about nature as a whole because, although nature does some-
times generate bounteousness, its bounty cannot be relied on. Viewing
nature as “soft” and bounteous is the beginning of a deluded trust in the
world that leads one to rely on peace and stability as the normal state of
affairs, themselves reflective of even more perfect and stable “imagined
republics.” The consequent love of ease in a bounteous environment
that begins by corrupting the bodily strength and vigor of citizens even-
tually corrupts their minds as well and leads them to fancy that the
repose at the heart of the world is the prior cause and reward of their
virtue.
Machiavelli thinks it is better for founders and republics to imitate
the necessitous side of nature, to let its hostility goad you into con-
stantly fighting back. Both princes and republics must, in other words,
recognize that their human passions are bestial, that they contain no
potentiality for divine or immortal transcendence. There is no longer a
contrast, as there was for Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, between the
bestial and virtuous sides of the soul, but a series of more-or-less subtle
animal characteristics – from the beast-man Chiron, whose connection
with the primordial force of subhuman vigor made him fit to teach
princes, to the completely bestial modes within the prince of the lion
and fox. By being severed from teleological substance, reason is both
contentless and completely somatic or immanentized within temporal
existence. By embracing their bestial character, princes and republics
can release these passions selectively to empower their struggles with-
out being deluded. Again, we see how Machiavelli’s thought prefigures
the dichotomy between nature and freedom central to German Idealism:
we achieve independence through a consciousness of nature’s hostility.
One might almost say, anticipating Heidegger, that for Machiavelli, the
insubstantial happenstance, the nothingness, of Fortuna is the ground
of the presence of nature’s visible bounty; that being comes to pres-
ence through the battle to appropriate nature to which fortune con-
stantly subjects our existence, but that, once settled, these presences

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can bewitch us, carry us adrift in the pursuit of their stable perfection,
causing us to forget the burden of time on human existence from which
they issued in their original vigor: “For time brings out everything, the
good and the bad” (The Prince chapter 3).
Because necessity and struggle are paramount, Machiavelli con-
cludes, it may be best to choose deliberately a sterile region where
necessity will “compel” people to be industrious, “therefore less given to
idleness . . . more united and less exposed by the poverty of the country
to occasions for discord.” On the face of it, the praise of industriousness
and the disparagement of idleness sounds in accord with both elements
of the Great Tradition in the West, Judeo-Christian revelation and the
pagan classics. Yet to make industriousness the ground of virtue in the
absence of other virtues takes what for the tradition was regarded as
a comparatively low virtue and elevates it into one of the highest. The
Christian and classical traditions did not approve of laziness, but they
did not praise industriousness to any great degree either, and certainly
not as the basis of political order and unity. One need only consider
Plato’s and Aristotle’s strictures on excessive commerce and the unlim-
ited sway of oikonomia, echoed by Thomas Aquinas. Laziness is bad
not primarily because it is unproductive but because it is a sign of a
character falling beneath itself at the most rudimentary level of master-
ing one’s passions, antecedent to higher virtues involving deliberative
choice rather than mere self-repression.5
For Machiavelli, on the other hand, civic disunity or discord stem
altogether from “idleness,” from a condition that, according to the tra-
dition, properly directed, made contemplation possible. What Machi-
avelli calls “idleness” includes the leisure (skole) that, according to
Aristotle, enables us to dwell on what most unifies us, philosophy and
deliberative citizenship (Nicomachean Ethics 1176b–1178b). Indeed,
Machiavelli collapses Aristotle’s distinction between mere relaxation
and leisure into idleness. For Aristotle, idleness might, if properly cul-
tivated, become the leisure that is indispensable for the actualization
of civic virtue through a full-time devotion to public affairs and, at the
highest level, cultivating the contemplative virtues. Far from preferring
labor to idleness (properly improved as leisure), Aristotle argues that

5 Consider, for example, Plato Republic 419a–422a; Aristotle Politics 1252b–1253b,

1255b–1256a; Thomas Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics 13, 31, 38.

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the correct employment of idleness as leisure requires that we not have

to labor for survival. Those who must labor for a living are not capable
of the fullest citizen virtues (Aristotle Politics 1278a20–27). Idleness
is acceptable to the extent that it provides us with the opportunity
to pursue those civic and philosophic ends that are the surest source of
friendship and unity among humans in the city. For Machiavelli, by con-
trast, this drifting away into the contemplation of “imagined republics”
(The Prince chapter 15) afforded by idleness is precisely what is most
likely to undermine a republic’s unity, discipline, and energy.
While both the classics and Christian revelation focus on the ends for
which leisure (perhaps more accurately rendered on the Christian side
as devotion ) is to be employed – contemplating the higher world – for
Machiavelli, leisure to contemplate the higher world is what distracts us
from virtu. Labor compelled by necessity overcomes poverty as a source
of discord. In contrast to Machiavelli making the conquest of poverty
one of the chief aims of politics, all Aristotle could do to ameliorate
the harmful effects of poverty on the common good was to suggest
the “mixed” regime (polity) as a way of mitigating the worst effects of
excessive wealth and poverty while encouraging public virtue (Politics
1293b22–1297b35). For Machiavelli, collective labor itself forges the
unity of the city. Aristotle assumes that the material wherewithal for the
practice of virtue, and the founding of the city to ensure minimal order,
are already largely taken care of when he turns to the prescription
for the best regime (Politics 1258a20–30). Machiavelli uncovers these
preconditions and makes their achievement – and continuing reachieve-
ment – the sole and sufficient basis for the common good. For the
classics, the necessity for physical survival, the realm of oikonomia, is,
because it necessarily individuates, the least likely basis for the common
good. Once the material wherewithal is achieved, we can turn toward
civic virtue and wisdom, which transcend individuation and therefore
unite us in the actualization of our virtues of soul. For Machiavelli, by
contrast, the necessity for material survival that individuates, for the
very reason that its dangers cannot be avoided, drives us to labor in
common with others and so create a bulwark of prosperity and order.
The first stage of Machiavelli’s argument about how to found a
republic, then, is to suggest that a body of citizens working hard together
can convert a sterile spot into one that yields the basic necessities for
everyone, roughly analogous to the City of Sows in Plato’s Republic.

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Unfortunately, Machiavelli goes on, not all men are content with a
modicum of prosperity but want an abundance and also “desire to
exercise command.” Because there are those who want to dominate,
a people cannot rest content with the internal security achieved by a
moderate degree of wealth wrested by collective labor from a sterile
site. They need to become “powerful,” but this requires settling in a
region “where the fertility of the soil affords the means of becoming
great, and of acquiring strength to repel all who might attack it, or
oppose the development of its power.” From first favoring the extreme
of sterility, then, Machiavelli goes to the opposite extreme of favoring
a “most fertile” environment, again avoiding the Aristotelian mean.6
The first stage of the argument, and the objection that Machiavelli
then raises to it, reminds us of Glaucon’s objection to the City of Sows –
that there are some people who are not content with security and the
basic necessities of life. Their “feverish” passions for wealth and mastery
require a city not only to protect itself from external aggression but to
become an aggressor itself. Whereas Plato and Aristotle respond to
this complexity in human nature by prescribing an internal ordering
of the constitution and an education aimed primarily at helping such
people transcend the passions that lead to tyranny and imperialism,
Machiavelli instead proposes to think through what type of constitution
those passions would require if no attempt were made to educate and
sublimate them toward civic and philosophical moderation. He aims
to conjoin the “feverish” soul with a stable republican constitution
and loyalty to the common good, a project that the ancients thought
impossible.
With respect to Plato specifically, this requires a major reorientation
of political psychology. In the pedagogical thought experiment of the
Republic, in which Socrates tries to draw Glaucon away from tyranni-
cal temptation by getting him to think about founding a just regime,
Socrates uses Glaucon’s objection to the City of Sows to introduce an
unrestrained eros for multiple pleasures, the seed of the tyrant’s dis-
ordered personality. However, having introduced eros to necessitate

6 As Mansfield observes, choice and necessity are grounded in an underlying primordial

strife: “Instead of blaming necessity for the limits to human (and thus political) choice,
Machiavelli traces both choice of site and ordering of laws to an apparently unnecessary
human wish to seek to master others. . . . Thus Machiavelli avoids giving the political
lesson that could be shown in the conflict of choice and necessity” (2001) p. 31.

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the introduction of a class of warriors to launch the newly feverish

city’s wars of acquisition, Socrates immediately drives eros out of the
discussion, arguing that the courage and self-control required of these
soldiers is most plausibly rooted in thumos, with its capacity for coura-
geous and honorable loyalty to the common good. Socrates, in other
words, introduces eros briefly so as to expand the scope of the soul
from mere desire for material survival to the grander passions of pride
and glory seeking, but then expels eros from that scope and attempts
to ground civic paideia largely in the thumotic part of the soul, eventu-
ally subordinating that part of the soul, and the honor-seeking type of
man, to rule by philosophers who themselves are erotically motivated.
Viewed in this perspective, Machiavelli can be understood as expelling
eros altogether, implying that the passion for honor is sufficient in itself
for explaining the transition from the City of Sows to the imperial city,
and that the thumotic capacity for self-overcoming and the mastery of
random inclinations can be liberated from the governance of philoso-
phy within the city and the soul and allowed to expand free of all such
philosophical restrictions, launching the virtuous small republic on the
path to empire. To recall the argument of Chapter 6, I would reempha-
size that the draining away of erotic transcendence from political virtue
to leave only cold-hearted dominion already effected by Augustinian
theology greatly aids Machiavelli in this truncation of honor seeking
from an openness to a love of the beautiful and good.
Machiavelli’s argument here also anticipates Hobbes, especially his
argument in chapter 15 of the Leviathan that the difficulties of surviv-
ing in a natural environment of scarcity and danger incline most people
to pursue the arts of peace and productivity, content to renounce their
natural power to invade the lives and possessions of others in exchange
for a modicum of well-being and security from the invasiveness of oth-
ers. The “vainglorious,” however, desire “mastery” for its own sake,
and because they seek power beyond what is necessary for a modicum,
they compel everyone else, including their intended victims, to strive
for the power to dominate as well (in other words, kill or be killed).
The difference is that, whereas Machiavelli turns these “vainglorious”
types outward as the vanguard of the expansionist republic’s wealth and
power, Hobbes thinks they must be crushed and psychologically reha-
bituated to protect the state’s internal stability. Again, Machiavelli leads
to Sir Francis Drake, Hobbes to A Clockwork Orange. Machiavelli

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of course recognizes the danger that the masterful types may turn their
ambitions toward internal political affairs and provoke usurpation and
civil war. But he believes that glory seeking can be turned outward by a
policy of republican imperialism in which such thrusting men will take
the lead, thereby carrying their people to new heights of grandeur and
wealth, protecting them from external aggression and finding in that
duty a justification for their own relentless ambition.
Whereas the psychology of tyranny is largely driven underground by
Hobbes as a theme for extensive and nuanced consideration, Machi-
avelli encourages those whom Callicles termed the “natural masters”
and brings to life their many varieties through his meditations on his-
tory. Indeed, it might be said that while the Platonic Socrates sifts
dialectically through opinions within the city about the Good, Machi-
avelli sifts dialectically through the historical patterns of cities in conflict
with one another to clarify the “effectual truth” about politics. This is
one reason Machiavelli’s writings are a source of much richer specu-
lation about the nature of tyranny and leadership than anything to be
found in Hobbes – a richer historical phenomenology of how states
and their internal parts are subject to the stimulus of external motions
forced on them by competing states. Machiavelli already foresees that
his “new path” will require “unknown lands” comparable to the one
discovered by Columbus, and the founding of a New Rome required
by the international and multinational scope of Machiavelli’s republi-
can prescription. Hobbes’s philosophy, by contrast, envisions politics as
nothing but a mechanism for internal order and control, one in principle
capable of limitless extension but bereft of the full-blooded patriotism,
love of the earthly fatherland, and the exhilarating scope of imperial
conquest and Elizabethan swashbuckling to which Machiavelli gives
rise. This is why, as we consider in more detail in the Conclusion, a
visionary of Atlanticist, Protestant republicanism like James Harring-
ton – a project for commercial imperialism already underway in Tudor
and Stuart mercantilism and exploding in the New World – could extol
Machiavelli’s republicanism while decrying Hobbes as an apologist for
absolute monarchy without any sense of contradiction. Hobbes is a
successor of Machiavelli, but only of a narrow version of his thought.
To resume: The danger of a fertile site is that its “pleasures and
softness” will “make men idle and unfit for the exercise of valor.” Or,
as Machiavell amplifies the point in 2.25, “the dissensions in republics

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are generally the result of idleness and peace, while apprehension and
war are productive of union.” Again, the achievement of the peace and
leisure that, for Plato and Aristotle, provide the milieu for subtler ethi-
cal choices and an interest in philosophy, for Machiavelli represents the
gravest threat to “virtue.” Machiavelli’s solution is not to attempt to
moderate these feverish passions through education (as Plato and Aris-
totle advise) but to incorporate into a fertile natural environment an
artificial replica of the necessity that nature imposes on people in a ster-
ile environment. The replica is “law.” Law takes the place of nature’s
direct compulsion provided by scarcity in a sterile environment. Laws
“offset the pleasures and softness” of a fertile environment with the
“rigors of a strict discipline.” Properly executed, these laws, by imitat-
ing the dire truth about nature – that it is, at bottom, hostile necessity –
not only prevent citizens living in a bounteous environment from being
corrupted, but produce “better warriors than what nature produces in
the harshest climates and most sterile countries.” We might recall in
this context Machiavelli’s preference, considered earlier in connection
with his treatment of Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus as a mirror of
princes, for the disinterested harshness of Manlius Torquatus (more
suitable for republics) in contrast with the generosity and mercy of
Scipio (more suitable for monarchy). As in The Prince, by imitating
nature in political life, we can master nature – improve on our natural
condition by gaining the power to restructure it for our own survival,
aggrandizement, and glory. This requires a new understanding of law.
For Aristotle, law is subordinate to the politeia, which embodies a divi-
sion of offices based on a partial account of justice and virtue. The
content of the law depends on the distinct regime (Politics 1287b15–
20, 1280a7–21, 1276b34–1277b16). For Machiavelli, because nature
is uniformly indifferent to human purpose and supplies no such teleo-
logical ordering, law becomes the abstract regulator of nature as field
of forces or happenstance. Through the “strict discipline” imposed on
their citizens by law, republics can imitate nature’s hostility while dis-
tancing themselves from a reliance on nature’s bounty.
In a fertile environment, the disorderly side of Fortuna flourishes.
Laws enable a republic to replicate consciously the severity that neces-
sity unconsciously produces when nature’s reversals and fluctuations
force a people to fight back through labor and industriousness. “Skil-
ful and sagacious legislators” can provide, through laws, a corrective

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to nature’s bounteous, beneficent dimension – a bounteousness against

which we must be psychologically armed, and ready to combat pre-
emptively, lest we be devastated by its inevitable reversal. The severity
of the legislator cuts back this bounty, tapping its power while pre-
venting it from dissipating republican vigor in the enjoyment of ease
and pleasure. In a striking passage from the second chapter of Book 3,
Machiavelli formulates the statecraft of his heroes, the Romans, as a
kind of human horticulture: “For the Romans wished to act according
to the usage of the good cultivator who, for a plant to thicken and be
able to produce and mature its fruits, cuts off the first branches it puts
forth, so that they can with time arise there greener and more fruitful,
since the virtue remains in the stem of the plant.” Looking ahead to
Machiavelli’s impact on the Elizabethans, one can hardly avoid think-
ing of the allegorical figure of the Gardener in Shakespeare’s Richard
II (act 3, scene 4), whose maxims provide a backdrop for the rise of
the Machiavellian new prince Henry Bolingbroke and the fall of the
flawed Christian monarch Richard: “All must be even in our govern-
ment . . . We at time of year do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-
trees, lest, being over-proud in sap and blood, with too much richness
it confound itself. . . . Superfluous branches we lop away, that bearing
boughs may live.”7
“One prudent orderer,” Machiavelli writes, can provide a corrective
to too much bounty from nature. The severity of such founders cuts back
nature’s fecundity, tapping its power for vigorous labor while keeping it
from dissipating in ease and pleasure. Even though the achievement of
power and pleasure are the goals of virtue, to give in to the enjoyment
of those goals undermines the self-control and fighting prowess needed
to maintain that power. For the most urgent practical reasons, then,
a republic must avoid relying on the delusion of nature’s teleological
beneficence. In general in the Discourses, “the people” are especially
vulnerable to the delusions that come from nature’s bounteous side.
Left to themselves, they tend to turn from the rigors of citizenship in a

7 Machiavelli’s horticultural simile in the Discourses is analogous to his description of the

Romans in chapter 3 of The Prince who, in going to war preemptively to avoid a worse
war later, are like “physicians” who treat a disease in its early stages before it reaches
the incurable stage. Do the similes of horticulture and medicine parallel, respectively,
the communal emphasis of the Discourses as opposed to the princely emphasis of The
Prince?

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dynamic expansionist republic to the enjoyment of their achieved luxury

and adornment. They would like to see in the prosperity and stability
achieved by the force and fraud employed by earlier generations of the
republic the reflection of a higher order of permanent peace, justice,
mercy, and concord, and convince themselves that by cultivating the
qualities of ease, repose, and moderation, they are cultivating the virtues
that bring them the tangible benefits of the republic’s power – when
it is in fact the republic’s pristine and original power seeking that has
achieved over long years of struggle the tangible benefits that now make
it possible to indulge in such idleness and speculation. For these reasons,
the people are especially attracted to men who seem to embody the soft
qualities of peaceableness, mildness, and generosity and who promise
them an end to harsh discipline and struggle. They are always on the
verge of elevating a Scipio, Catiline, or Caesar from leading citizen to
monarch because they see in the predominance of such a monarch the
triumph of the soft virtues that make their own lives easier.
By contrast, a leading citizen who understands Fortune’s recurring
incursion into the apparent calm and stability of the republic’s every-
day existence – a bracing jolt of an underlying but more fundamental
disorder, the perilous necessity from which stable power eventually
emerged because people wrested it from her through their struggle –
can save the republic from corruption. “For it never or rarely happens
that a republic or monarchy is well constituted, or its old institutions
entirely reformed, unless it is done by only one individual” (1.9.2). This
masterful leader restores vigor by overturning these settled appearances,
restoring primitive discipline, crushing monarchical or demagogical pre-
tensions, returning the republic to the pristine anxiety of its origins on
the brink of survival. Machiavelli specifically refers to these refounders
as “princes” (1.18.4), thereby further eroding the apparent distinction
between the subject matter of the Discourses and The Prince.8 For

8 1.18 discusses the grave difficulties of refounding corrupt republics and why princely
natures are needed to do so. Because someone can become the “prince” in a corrupt
republic only by wicked and violent means, you either need that rare good man who
is willing to use wicked means to achieve a good end or hope that a bad man, having
achieved power, will somehow decide to labor for good ends: “From these causes arise the
difficulty or impossibility of maintaining liberty in a republic that has become corrupt.” In
such circumstances, the republic may need to be transformed into a monarchy where one
man will crush the turbulence of the many. In 3.1, Machiavelli returns to the importance of
refounding, employing unusually scientific/alchemical language: “Nothing is more true”

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Machiavelli, Rome is the paradigm of how to combine fertility and

prosperity (with the attendant danger of relying on the spurious and
merely apparent beneficence of nature) with law-bred severity, with the
result that “they maintained it full of as much virtue as has ever adorned
any other city or republic.” The Senate uses the people to fight its wars
and buys them off with land and booty. The people and nobles of the
conquered areas join the Roman people and nobles and press outward
to an ever-expanding perimeter. Like a cell dividing and redividing,
the republic becomes a cosmopolitan empire containing (to borrow a
phrase from chapter 17 of The Prince) “men of all nations.”

the cycle of regimes

The theme of the origin of cities in Discourses 1.1 leads to the theme of
the founder, the constitution, and the best regime in 1.2, a transition that
Machiavelli endows with a subversive new content: how the alternation
we have just considered between prosperity and law-bred severity can
be institutionalized within a single regime.
Some republics, Machiavelli observes, are founded by one man and
never undergo danger because of his prudence. The most illustrious
case, Sparta, founded by Lycurgus, lasted for eight hundred years. The
Spartans had “the great good fortune” to be given “all the laws they
need” in a “single act” at the outset of a prudent and skillful legislator.
Others, most notably Rome, “become perfect” through “the occurrence
of accidents.” Their growth is always accompanied by danger, because
only danger convinces people of the necessity to change.
Does this suggest that a statesman might want to imitate “the occur-
rence of accidents” by introducing seemingly chance stimuli such as the
threat of a foreign aggressor (or the claim that one exists) in order to
keep the danger fresh? As we observed in Chapter 6, Machiavelli does

than that everything, including republics, has a limited existence. However, only those
whose “bodies” do not become disorganized will run the full limit of their existence. In
“mixed bodies” like republics and religious sects, the aim should be to “bring them back
to their original principles.” Better still if they have institutional means for frequently
renewing themselves, or do so in response to “extrinsic accidents” such as war or the
threat of conquest. “It is a truth clearer than light that, without such renovation, these
bodies cannot continue to exist . . . ” The inclusion of religious sects arguably supports
the interpretation of Machiavelli as calling for a pristine, patriotic Christianity, not its
complete abolition.

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suggest in The Prince that a ruler might want to allow domestic con-
spiracies to reach a certain point – thereby deliberately encouraging to
a degree the disorder that Fortuna will try to reap in his affairs in any
event – so that he can then exercise his virtue by cutting them down,
mastering Fortuna by encouraging and then preempting her hostility.
Would the republican version of this policy be to seek out possible
foreign foes, let the danger they pose grow for a time or even goad
them into hostility, so as to galvanize the citizenry into going to war?
However this may be, the main thing to notice in this section of the
Discourses is how Machiavelli supplements the Platonic teaching on
founding. Plato had argued in the Laws that a well-founded regime
might require the good fortune of an ambitious tyrant coinciding with
a wise counsellor. Machiavelli concedes that good fortune might pro-
vide such a founder all on her own, while shearing away the role of the
philosophic counsellor. In other words, Lycurgus was presumably the
source of his own prudence, as Machiavelli advises in chapter 17 of The
Prince, not dependent for his prudence on another. Even more strik-
ingly, Machiavelli suggests that “chance” itself might perfect a republic
bereft of any such genius founder. Indeed, a republic like Rome that per-
fects itself by tapping into the forces of Fortuna will more successfully
surmount Fortuna’s reverses than a regime like Sparta whose internal
strength is the gift of the great good fortune of a single brilliant founder.
Institutions that have evolved over time to shunt, channel, and focus
Fortuna may preempt the role of the uniquely gifted legislator.
In contrast to the security and stability provided by a constitution
like Sparta’s set in place in the beginning without need of change, this
second course is “never effected without danger,” because “the major-
ity of men never willingly adopt any new law tending to change the
constitution of the state, unless the necessity of change is clearly demon-
strated.” A republic “perfected” in this way may therefore have to court
destruction before its citizens recognize clearly the need to change. Of
course this may actually lead to its destruction before the improvements
can take root, as happened, Machiavelli believes, to the Florentine
republic. But we will not be surprised to learn that this is the course that
Machiavelli prefers, successfully exemplified by the Roman republic.
We have already seen that, in his view, although “great good fortune”
of the kind allegedly demonstrated by the emergence of Lycurgus is
not to be spurned, even greater power and prosperity will result when

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men of virtue receive nothing from fortune but a barren, even adverse
“occasion” against which to struggle. We know from The Prince that
what princes achieve in these circumstances is entirely the result of
their own prowess. Their power remains more surely their own than
that of princes who receive even a portion of their authority from good
fortune, as with Cesare Borgia’s good fortune in having Pope Alexander
VI as his natural father. Here, we are given the republican parallel of
Machiavelli’s advice to princes. Sparta, with the great good fortune of
her founding, is an admirable example for republics to emulate, but
Rome is even more admirable. Because she started out with nothing but
bare “chance,” sheer adverse happenstance, the power she achieved by
fighting back against adversity became more surely rooted over time.
Sparta was complete from the beginning, hence inflexible and prone
to shatter when a truly hard blow from fortune finally came. Rome
evolved in an ad hoc manner, incorporating fortune’s unpredictable
impetuosity within her own institutions. By taking the risky course of
dynamic innovation through imperial expansion, Rome deliberately
exposed her institutions to that same dangerous necessity that, when we
are subjected to it by the natural environment, compels us, both princes
and peoples, to fight back by laboring for survival and power. More-
over, as in The Prince, leaders need not wait for fortune to throw up the
danger that will convince the people of the inescapable need for change.
By inspiring terror in the people, thereby tapping into fortune’s capacity
to inspire the fear needed for change by acting consciously as its agent,
leaders can expedite the needed reforms. (Although Machiavelli depicts
Lycurgus as a founder who sprang directly from “great good fortune,”
we are of course entitled to wonder, based on Machiavelli’s own guide-
lines that we considered in Chapter 5 in connection with the life of
Cyrus, to what extent he shaped the Spartans’ generational memory of
him.)
In classical political thought, the purpose of a good constitution and
the civic education it reinforces is to transcend, to the degree possi-
ble within the limitations of human nature, the ravages of “chance” –
not in the sense of fighting nature and mastering it by accumulating
power, but in the sense of immunizing oneself from vulnerability to the
temptations provided by perishable goods, and hence to the inevitable
reverses of fortune, by educating the soul to moderation. To the extent
that the soul’s potentiality for transcendence is actualized through an

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education in good citizenship that stresses deliberation upon the issues

of domestic self-government and avoids warfare and imperial adven-
tures, a political community can insulate itself from the primordial
motions that assault the individual through the passions and assault the
city through the temptation to imperialism, assaults that in turn call for
the elevation of belligerent, tyrannically inclined leaders. (Such a city,
Aristotle observes, might internalize the stability of the Unmoved Mover
[Politics 1325b23–33].) Such perfection, then, as politics can achieve is
a measure of its success in excluding the realm of chance from deter-
mining the goals of statesmanship through spasms of unruly passion.
For Machiavelli to argue that a republic can actually “perfect” itself by
opening itself up to this realm of chance therefore constitutes a breath-
taking reversal of every tenet of classical morality and metaphysics. It
lets in the pulse of history, hardheaded experience, imperialism, and
the strife between the haves and have-nots. The classical thinkers had
seen the primordial realm as a falling away from transcendence into
perishability and disarray. In human terms, as in Plato’s Chariot image,
embracing the primordial realm meant the decline of the soul from
virtue’s approximation of the stability that characterizes true being into
the chaotic disarray of the passions. In diametric contrast, Machiavelli
lets the primordial flood in. For Machiavelli, chance does not consti-
tute a decline from the realm of form, stability and unity, but on the
contrary, energizes and sustains this realm by placing it on a new onto-
logical basis. This new relationship between the primordial and the
transcendental realms of political existence is mirrored in Machiavelli’s
ensuing discussion of the traditional rubric of the types of constitutions
and how they change over time.
Alluding to unnamed “writers on politics” believed by “many” to be
wise (and generally assumed to include Polybius and Aristotle), Machi-
avelli begins with the classical typology of constitutions – three good
kinds of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and popular) that degen-
erate respectively into tyranny, oligarchy, and licentiousness:

So that a legislator who gives to a state which he founds, either of these three
forms of government, constitutes it but for a brief time; for no precautions
can prevent either one of the three that are reputed good from degenerating
into its opposite kind; so great are in these the attractions and resemblances
between the good and the evil.

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Up until the last words of this formulation (“so great are the attrac-
tions and resemblances between the good and the evil”), Machiavelli
remains within the horizon of both classical and Christian teachings
on government. It is the classical political philosophies themselves that
emphasize how unlikely it is that the right circumstances – the right
locale, virtuous citizens, prudent statesmen framing good laws – will
come together to form a good constitution. In setting forth his picture
of an optimal aristocracy in Book 7 of the Politics, Aristotle uses a verb
meaning “to pray” when detailing what conditions would have to be
present for virtue to flourish, for however brief a time, in a political
community (1330a34–1330b8). As we have seen, Plato in the Laws
regards the conditions for a good founding as tantamount to the gift of
a god, while in the Republic he regards the best regime, next to impos-
sible to come about in the first place, to be foredoomed to decay and
collapse (546a–547a). No one is more aware than Plato or Aristotle of
the fragility of even minimally virtuous constitutional arrangements, of
even mere constitutional truces between aggrieved parties that might
allow public life to rise a little above the level of constant wrangling for
power and distrust between rich and poor. So, in stressing the “brief
time” for which all such arrangements last, Machiavelli does not tell
us anything for which there is not abundant acknowledgment in the
classical sources. No one is more informative than Plato and Aristotle
on any specific issue of everyday political circumstance – the difficulty
of getting different parties to agree even on relatively negotiable eco-
nomic disputes, let alone larger issues of justice; the danger that the
need to defend one’s country from aggressors will distract energy from
domestic political life and summon forth tyrannically minded men who
will use national security as an excuse for subverting the rule of law
at home; the temptation to become the imperialistic aggressor one-
self and end the uncertainty about economic scarcity. They are any-
thing but optimists or dewy-eyed idealists. As we have observed, they
are well aware that education and noble rhetoric need the backing of
force. The revenge of Strepsiades against Socrates in the Clouds is a
sign that the Sophists do not understand that passions of anger based
on the love of one’s own cannot always be neutralized by rhetoric.
The Platonic Socrates, however, knows this lesson, just as his com-
panion Xenophon, in his real-life military campaigns, understood the
need for harsh discipline, unlike Proxenus, a follower of Gorgias, who

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could not rule nongentlemen because he relied on rhetorical persuasion

alone.9
As we considered in the previous chapter, and must amplify here
in the context of Machiavelli’s teaching on republics, the Augustinian
strain of Christianity achieved a greatly heightened sense of the dispro-
portion between how it would be best for human beings to live and the
manifest failings and fragility of observable human efforts to do so. To
the extent that Christianity severed the immediate connection between
human nature and its capacity to participate in transcendence through
the political realm posited by ancient political philosophy, Christianity
drove an even more radical wedge between the nunc stans, the eternal
“now” of true being, and the merely “secular” time – the cycles of
decay and desire – to which man was subjected because of his fleshly
limitations and sinfulness. For the ancients, it was possible, in rare and
brief periods, for human nature to rise, with the assistance of a good
constitution, civic education and statesmanship, toward a substantive
participation in this eternal now, the “divine spark” in the human soul
that linked it through the cultivation of the moral and intellectual virtues
to the divine intelligence and perfection knitting the cosmos together.
Machiavelli, in my view, is able to exploit the strain of Christianity that
most heightens the chasm between the secular and the divine by retain-
ing its view of fallen human nature and the subversion of all merely
human aspirations to happiness by the incorrigible ravages of time,
while stripping away and discarding its concept of the relationship of
human nature to the divine. Machiavelli uses the former (the premise
that human nature is fallen) as a weapon against the concern with the
soul’s perfection that Christianity shared with classical philosophy.
St. Augustine had stressed that all merely human attempts to achieve
political justice were worn down and exposed as vain by the flesh-bound
currents of time. Yet although Augustine sometimes wrote as if the pal-
triness of human virtue made it unimportant even to distinguish between
good and bad constitutions on earth, he would never have allowed this
to lead to Machiavelli’s conclusion that this proves how “great are the
attractions and resemblances between the good and the evil,” such that
“no remedy can be applied there to prevent it to slipping into its con-
trary because of the likeness that the virtue and the vice have.” For

9 See Strauss (1989) p. 131.

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St. Augustine, the insufficiency of human virtue in secular time hardly

permits one to collapse good and evil into mere modalities by which con-
stitutions pass into one another as Machiavelli does here. For Augustine,
man’s incapacity to be virtuous and overcome vice without God’s mercy
and aid hardly entitles one to conclude that virtue and vice share a “like-
ness” that leads one to collapse into the other. The distinction between
the frailty of merely human virtue and the transcendence residing with
the divine that Christianity had radicalized in order to heighten our
awareness of the contrast between good and evil, Machiavelli exploits
in order to obliterate this contrast altogether within the realm of human
and political affairs. Because Machiavelli denies that there is a “middle
way” – denies that there is a telos, a stable order of substantive being in
which time participates – he allows all moral distinctions to collapse into
the coming to be and passing away of time. This profane cycle of merely
apparent, shaky and transitory stability collapsing repeatedly into a
more fundamental nothingness may be described as how the saeculum
manifests itself after the Christian path from it to transcendence has
been excised. This secularization of Christian profundity, of its prefer-
ence for the hidden depth to the gleaming surface of life (the preference
for “touch” over sight that we considered earlier), enables Machiavelli
to imply that the ancients were naive in their treatment of the cycle of
regimes. In remarking that the traditional “writers” on regimes (led by
Aristotle) were “wiser according to the opinion of the many,” Machi-
avelli may be suggesting again that “the many” lean to the spurious
moral distinction between good and bad regimes, and that classical
political philosophy panders to the prejudice of the mob, anticipating
Nietzsche’s description of Christianity as Platonism for the people.
In these ways, Machiavelli uses certain strains of Christianity to
deepen our sense of the fragility of human efforts to found good con-
stitutions, already amply demonstrated by ancient thought itself. By
further undermining the possibility of the classical prescription for the
fulfillment of human nature within the best regime by means of a post-
Christian ontology of time-bound decay, while at the same time ignor-
ing Christianity’s account of how the prospect of salvation makes us
capable of a degree of goodness in secular life, Machiavelli thoroughly
demolishes the traditional basis for coping with the fragility of good
constitutions. With that, he begins to set forth what is truly original
about his own approach to this traditional theme: “Chance has given

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birth to these different kinds of governments among men.” Such an

assertion would be unfathomable from within the horizons of either
classical thought or Christian theology. Whatever the insufficiency of
human nature to achieve virtue on its own in Christian theology, it is
nonetheless true that God, the divine author, has endowed man with
conscience. If we turn from Augustine to Thomas, there we find a pro-
nounced narrowing of the Augustinian chasm between the secular and
the divine: much of the content of Aristotle’s teaching about man’s
natural proclivity to political community – as well as the distinction
between good and bad regimes – supplemented by conscience and the
moral content of the Decalogue, is subsumed within the final revela-
tion of Christianity. Although human nature in and of itself leads only
to lust, vanity, and the pursuit of dominion, God has written on that
nature a moral code that the intellect, more akin to the Creator than the
passions, can awaken in the soul by receiving the commandments of the
Old Testament completed by the certain faith of salvation promised by
the New Testament. For Christian theology, in sum, earthly constitu-
tions are fragile efforts to instantiate God’s governance of the universe
because they are merely human, but they are certainly not “born” from
“chance.” On the contrary, to the extent that a constitution is a dis-
tinctly good kind, preferably a monarchy ruled by a devoutly Christian
king, this is because, in Augustinian and Thomistic theology, it has held
fast to that portion of the divine ratio with which the Creator endows
the mere random generational stuff of nature, imparting purpose and
reason to it and thereby sustaining it. For Thomas, the natural law is
unable to stand on its own without the divine law, but the natural law is
nonetheless binding on our conduct. As for the ancient thinkers, it could
never be said that the kinds of constitution are born out of chance, as
opposed to their primitive starting points. As Aristotle argues in Book 1
of the Politics, one can explain the city as genesis, as coming into being
over time, only when one examines it under the aspect of necessity.
Only to the extent that the city is concerned with self-preservation and
economics can it be seen as a genesis from the most primitive associ-
ations of oikos and mastery into more complex clan associations and
finally into a polis. But the city “becomes” only for mere life. It “is”
for the sake of the good life. Its telos is to be a deliberative association
of citizens whose chief purpose is to discuss and debate the meaning
of justice in public affairs. This higher and prior cause always already

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summons into being the lower and more primitive economic and famil-
ial elements that develop into the polis. The “kinds” of constitutions,
embodying as they do permanently valid distinctions between justice
and injustice, as opposed to their mere generational substratum, are
given under the aspect of eternity.
When Machiavelli argues that “chance” is the sole origin of the
visible forms of constitutions, we might recognize an element from the
pre-Socratic argument that Plato and Aristotle were concerned to refute,
according to which, as the Athenian Stranger summarizes it, the appar-
ent stable reality of the world around us is in fact the transitory appear-
ance of a more profound, underlying series of “great motions . . . out
of necessity, according to chance.” The Heracleitean belief that perma-
nence was a mere shell or husk temporarily masking a more profound
mutability led, in Plato’s and Aristotle’s judgment, to the belief that the
passions are the part of human life corresponding to the great motions
that underlie and generate the visible world and that their limitless
gratification constitutes the only natural way to live. Not surprisingly,
Machiavelli does return in part to this pre-Socratic and Sophistical view.
But he does not merely return to it. The pre-Socratics and Sophists had
argued that this primordialist ontology rendered pointless any attempt
to account for intrinsic ethical or rational distinctions among the visi-
ble, completed forms of constitutions. As Thrasymachus puts it in his
general definition of government, behind the facade of the various con-
stitutions, the ruling element pursues its own advantage and designates
this as just, gulling the ruled into going along with it. “Justice” is uni-
versally “the advantage of the stronger”: the specific regime principles
themselves are mere accidental local coloration and custom. At bot-
tom, the pre-Socratics and Sophists think, the natural life of “getting
the better” can be lived without any intrinsic connection to the kind of
constitution. One can get along in a democracy, oligarchy, monarchy,
or what have you by aping the local conventions and taking advantage
of others where one can safely get away with it. The only political way
of life that is in complete harmony with nature is that of the tyrant,
which for Plato and Aristotle amounts to the destruction of all politics
as shared rule or as rule with an ethical responsibility toward the souls
of the ruled. As a kind of antipolitics, tyranny is simply the nature of
man as it was understood by the Sophists showing itself openly in its
pure individuated selfishness.

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It is important to note that the Sophists’ indifference to the dis-

tinctions among regimes is not Machiavelli’s view. Although he does
not account for distinctions among kinds of governments on the same
basis as Plato or Aristotle, he is far from regarding those distinctions as
unimportant. Whereas the Sophists avoided this type of debate over the
classification of regimes on the grounds that they were all merely con-
ventional, and therefore equally arbitrary, Machiavelli immerses himself
in it as fully as Plato, Aristotle, or Polybius. He regards certain kinds
of constitutions as being very much preferable to others, for he does
not believe it is possible for human nature to achieve “virtue” in his
much modified sense of the term in pure isolation from other people in
a political association. Machiavelli is in this sense very much a “classi-
cal” thinker and not at all a “pre-Socratic.” He does not dispense with
the classical rubrics about distinctions among regime principles, but
attempts to place them on a new basis that he thinks more adequately
explains what Plato and Aristotle thought they were explaining, and
points the way to more effective solutions to the political ills of insta-
bility, factional strife, and violence with which Plato and Aristotle had
also concerned themselves.
To recall our earlier discussion, Machiavelli’s project for the con-
quest of fortune assimilates the meaning of virtue to the will. I would
argue that, as a consequence, from Machiavelli’s viewpoint, Socrates
was correct when he argued to Gorgias that, far from being a mere
kaleidoscope of arbitrary local conventions and a trick-bag of rhetori-
cal manipulations, politike was a genuine science to which rhetoric was
merely subordinate (Gorgias 463). The residue of this Platonic elevation
of the art of ruling to rigorous knowledge lurks in Machiavelli’s conver-
sion of statecraft to the effective and methodical deployment of the will.
Whereas Plato saw in the claims of politike to genuine knowledge an
intimation of the objectively enduring cosmic mind that linked the soul
to the wider world, Machiavelli converts statesmanship into a ratio-
nal project for the imposition of order, organization, and control on
a refractory nature. Rightly from Machiavelli’s perspective, Plato and
Aristotle had argued that the Sophists could not address the sources of
disorder in political life because they identified human excellence with
isolated self-preservation and pleasure, abstracting human nature from
the whole welter of relations among citizens and between ruler and
ruled. Machiavelli would agree with the classics that the pre-Socratics

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strayed too far from observable political reality, that they set up too
simplistic a dichotomy between nature and convention, when in truth –
as Socrates tried to convince Callicles – human nature is so constituted
as to find its own prospect for satisfaction in and through convention,
through cooperation with others; that indeed the specific politiea under
which a man lives, or aspires to live, will be mirrored in his very soul
(Gorgias 513). It is not the scope and subject matter of ancient thought
that Machiavelli rejects, but rather its specific philosophical and meta-
physical content. In his own genealogy of regimes, he does not simply
banish the distinctiveness and integrity of the respective constitutions
by reducing their various forms to their origins in the undertow of
chance. Rather, he tries to demonstrate how the distinct forms emerge
phenomenologically through history, action, psychology, and experi-
ence. He conjoins the problem of the form of the constitution with the
problem of its origins in chance and necessity, a synthesis that neither
pre-Socratics nor Socrates would have thought tenable – the emergence
of political form or reason out of chance. What follows is a genealogy
of how regimes rise and decline in a world drained of both classical and
Christian transcendence, a world in which time does not participate in
the eternal, leaving a profane cycle of tenuous stability and more funda-
mental decay. No longer are we to see regimes as solicited into existence
by the final cause or purpose toward which they partially and imper-
fectly arise. The causal priority of the end is replaced by the generative
source in historical happenstance. “These variations of governments,”
as Machiavelli puts it, “arise by chance among men.” The variations
do matter, however, especially when we come to the history of Rome.

Phase One of Machiavelli’s genealogy of regimes resembles arguments

made by Sophists like Protagoras to the effect that human beings lived
at first “like beasts” in a primitive and dispersed condition, coming
together in rudimentary associations for the sake of survival. They
placed whoever was “more robust and of greater heart” at their head
and obeyed him in exchange for protection. At this point, when a crude
despotism has provided enough organization to stave off extinction by
natural disaster or external attack, sentiments of justice and injustice,
virtue and vice, first arise. With the emergence of these first moral sen-
timents, people look for a ruler who is wise and just rather than merely
courageous. When this monarchy becomes hereditary, however, the

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rulers are no longer necessarily the best men but come to “surpass others
in sumptuousness and lasciviousness and every other kind of license.”
The hatred these arrogant libertines provoke in the people leads the
rulers in turn to become more tyrannical. Finally, certain citizens who
surpass the others “in generosity, greatness of spirit, riches and nobility
who were unable to endure the dishonest life of that prince” establish
an aristocratic republic in which “they governed themselves according
to the laws ordered by them, placing the common utility before their
own advantage.”
Now we are at the transition to Phase Two, the transition from the
primitive origin of authority in the prepolitical state of nature to the
cycle of regimes as we know them now, and similar to the typologies
of Plato and Aristotle. The difference is that whereas for Plato and
Aristotle the regimes are present at any time in principle, for Machi-
avelli they are first historically created by those possessing “greatness
of spirit.” In effect, the Platonic and Aristotelian typologies are engen-
dered historically out of the prepolitical state of nature and the primitive
compact. Somewhat as in Book 8 of the Republic, decline sets in after
the original high point of an aristocratic regime devoted to the common
good. However, for Machiavelli, the high point is the regime Socrates
describes as “timocracy” – for Machiavelli, those possessing “great-
ness of spirit.” Socrates’ own version of “aristocracy,” the regime ruled
by philosopher-kings, is absent. Just as Socrates depicts the decline
of regimes as a series of rebellions by less virtuous sons against their
fathers, Machiavelli observes that the children of the aristocracy (his
version of aristocracy, the men possessing generosity, greatness of spirit,
riches, and nobility) succeeded the fathers and turned to “avarice, to
ambition [and] to usurpation of women,” causing the aristocratic gov-
ernment to degenerate into oligarchical oppression. The people rebel
against the oligarchy and institute a popular government. However,
echoing Plato’s strictures against the hedonism and selfishness of popu-
lar government, Machiavelli observes, “it came at once to license, where
neither private men nor public were in fear, and each living in his own
mode, a thousand injuries were done every day.” To escape from anar-
chy, they returned to the government of a prince, starting the cycle over
again.
How does Machiavelli reconcile these accounts? The Sophists usually
stopped at the emergence of laws and government from the dangers of

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the prepolitical state of nature. They had little apparent interest in cat-
aloguing the specific characteristics and institutional arrangements of
various regimes (unlike Aristotle, who collected constitutions) because
all were alike in imposing conventional restraints on our selfish natures,
constraints we only obey because we are more afraid of what others
would do to us if these constraints were removed than we are hope-
ful about what we could achieve for ourselves by harming others. By
contrast, the Platonic and Aristotelian accounts assume first and fore-
most that the defining characteristic of a constitution is the specific end
and conception of justice around which its laws, offices, and mores are
organized, and that human nature cannot fulfill itself entirely unless it is
a part of some political community. To understand Machiavelli’s new
synthesis, we must be attentive to the new content with which he tries
to endow these traditional questions.
First of all, in explaining the decline from aristocracy to oligarchy,
democracy, and tyranny, Machiavelli puts more emphasis on violent
usurpation and revolution than did Plato. In Book 8 of the Republic, it
is the dissatisfaction of the sons with the intrinsic motives of their fathers
for practicing virtue that leads to newer and increasingly more lax defini-
tions of virtue. The sons of the timocrats, for example, rebel against their
fathers’ austerity because they believe that they need a certain degree
of wealth to protect their honor from insult and injury, especially from
the many. They begin simply by relaxing some of the restrictions on
private property that Socrates had prescribed for the best regime; only
gradually do they degenerate from this to an exclusive concern with
wealth accumulation. By contrast, Machiavelli stresses that it is the fact
that the sons of the aristocrats have never faced the terrible dangers that
their fathers faced in overthrowing the preconstitutional tyranny that
allows them to degenerate into idle luxury and softness. In this way,
the dire necessity and peril of the first account of the development of
primitive authority out of the state of nature is carried over into the
ostensibly more Platonic discussion of the distinct ends of government.
The primordial passions operative in a grosser way in the first, more
genetic account (the establishment of a “robust” monarchy to secure
survival and safety from random oppression) become the basis for the
changes in the form of the constitution analyzed in the second, more
eidetic account (the genealogy of distinct regimes). In this way, Machi-
avelli develops the maxim from the previous chapter of the Discourses

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about the need for a bracing dose of peril to restore peoples to the vigor
of their virtue. We can surmise in advance that Machiavelli’s diagno-
sis of the very best kind of constitution will find a way of deliberately
introducing a healthy dose of fear and peril to each succeeding genera-
tion, so that “changes of fortune” and “reverses” will prevent the sons
of the aristocrats from degenerating into libertinage and disorder.
Similarly, whereas Plato chronicles the decline from oligarchy to
democracy as the extension of the oligarchs’ concerns with money-
making to the wider populace, who in turn want to start spending
that money on luxuries and enjoying themselves, Machiavelli depicts
this change as a revolution of the people, who are outraged and dis-
gusted at the overbearing power and arrogance of the moneymaking
elite: “This disposition soon produced an avenger, who was sufficiently
well seconded to destroy them.” Again, Machiavelli does not search
for the causes of decline primarily in dissatisfaction with the intrinsic
way of life under one kind of regime as opposed to another. Instead,
he reaches back into the more primitive emotions of fear and outrage
against despotic oppression that characterized the initial development
of order out of the primitive origins, and shows how these continue to
be operative social forces during much later stages of development. We
also observe here the strong and weak sides of “the people” in Machi-
avelli’s view. At their worst, they want libertinage and luxury. At their
best, led by savage and commanding men, they react with anger against
privilege and oppression, and so lend the power of their numbers to
a restoration of the law-bred austerity and severe order that replicate
within the state the adverse necessities that nature imposes on us prior
to the emergence of the state, thus stimulating virtu. Primordial origins
continue to generate political development.
We should note a final echo of the Platonic understanding in Machi-
avelli’s genealogy, in order to see how, beginning with similar obser-
vations about political phenomena, he proceeds in a new and radically
different direction in addressing the problem of the best regime. The
transition from the genetic account of Phase One, which explains the
evolution of rudimentary political order into a patriarchal monarchy
that tries to extend the natural pattern of family life to a larger clan,
to the typology of constitutions properly speaking in Phase Two is,
as we have observed, signaled by the emergence of a minority of men
characterized by “grandeur of soul.” They are the ones who lead the

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revolution against the first primitive tyranny and establish the virtuous
republic. In their greatness of soul, wealth, courage, and refusal to be
ruled by despots, they contrast with the “feeble and timid,” presumably
the majority who, without the inspiration and leadership of these rare
men, would have continued to knuckle under, hating the tyrant but pre-
ferring to live under him than to risk their lives in rebellion. It is “under
such powerful leaders” that “the masses armed themselves.” There is a
return here to one of the crucial arguments with which Socrates sought
to persuade Callicles and Glaucon of the inadequacy of the Sophists’
account of justice as a compact made by naturally selfish individuals.
Unlike Antiphon and some of the Sophists who, like Hobbes later,
believed that all people are motivated by self-preservation, Callicles
and Glaucon (like other of the Sophists and their followers) tended
to supplement this unedifying version of the social contract by stress-
ing an important exception to it. They focus on the few “real men”
(andres) who would never have agreed to it in the first place, preferring
always to rule than be ruled and willing to court the consequent dangers
(Gorgias 483; Republic 359a–c). We have observed in earlier chapters
that the Sophists were hampered in giving a fully persuasive account of
the qualities of soul that would characterize such a person, the natu-
ral master who is noble by nature rather than by convention. Because
of their dichotomous distinction between human nature as motivated
by prepolitical drives for survival, power and pleasure, and conven-
tion as uniformly artificial and unconnected with any natural need,
the Sophists had little basis on which to account for the observable
qualities and psychological subtleties of superior statesmanship in the
world around them. They admired power, but they tended to depict it
in crude subpolitical terms: in Callicles’ speech, the natural master is
rather like a petty thief, a stealer of cattle, except that he carries off his
thefts on a grand scale. Only an understanding of everyday observable
politics – its laws, its customs, its education, and the kinds of human
character its principle of justice solicits – can explain how this crude
Herculean master could evolve into a subtle and sophisticated ruler like
Pericles.
By making the city prior to the individual and by arguing that, con-
trary to the Sophists, we cannot understand the nature of the individual
until we understand the soul “writ large” as the city, Socrates can pro-
vide this psychological account of leadership in a far more compelling

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way than can the Sophists. Callicles and Glaucon are both drawn to
tyranny, certainly to being the leading statesman. But they want such
political mastery to entail the noble and admirable qualities of a fully
developed and civilized character – skill at governing, generosity to
friends, a degree of philosophical cultivation, an exposure to the fine
arts, cultivated conversation, and the merited admiration of their fellow
citizens or subjects for doing large and good things for their country.
This erotic longing to find a naturally satisfying way of life within fully
evolved conventional political existence, a way of life that unifies and
consummates the talents and virtues solicited by conventional politi-
cal life, is what Socrates plays upon. He wants to convince them that,
instead of seeing convention as an antonym for nature, a realm of prim-
itive passions and conflict standing across a gulf from an evolved city,
they should join Socrates in searching for a specific set of conventions
that, in contrast with defective sets, allows human nature to fulfill itself
within the politiea in a way that it never could in the subpolitical state
of nature.
A part of this argument is for Socrates to reject the very premise of the
Sophists’ genetic account of nature. The Sophists presented tyranny as a
crude natural force, emerging spontaneously from the “great motions”
issuing from nature construed as necessity and chance, a primordial
strife that is covered over by the unnatural constraints of conven-
tional equality, piety, and law-abidingness. In the Republic, Socrates
gets Glaucon and Adeimantus to agree that, even in its most primitive
origins devoted to bodily self-preservation, the city is never merely a
compact among individuals but is from the outset organized by a divi-
sion of labor based on the objective validity of techne (369a–371a). In
this way, Socrates makes genesis coeval with eidos because the stability
and architectonic ranking of the arts already foreshadow the clarity
and stability of the Ideas toward which all generated phenomena are
drawn in fulfilling their ends. Having introduced a reasonably orga-
nized community into even the most primitive origins of political life,
Socrates proceeds to goad Glaucon into objecting that life in this City
of Sows would lack the urbane grandeur of the erotic passions (372a–
373d). In this way, he encourages Glaucon’s implicit dissatisfaction
with the Sophists’ impoverished psychology while compelling Glaucon
to express his erotic longings within an already agreed-on principle
for distinguishing the passions as clearly as possible from one another

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(the division of eros from thumos and desire in the tripartite structure
of the soul) and educating them to find their place within an ordered
community. In sum, Socrates tries to convince Glaucon that his instinct
about tyranny and the greatest passions is correct: they do not come
to light in a primitive prepolitical situation, as the Sophists argued, but
in fact develop rather late, when the political community and its need
for order and rank and its eros for nobility are already fully in place.
This means, however, that in order to clarify his erotic longings, Glau-
con must accept the need for them to be sublimated politically and, if
Socrates is successful, channeled into the service of the common good.
Eros and justice are often enemies, but if Socrates is right, they arise
(“naturally grow”) together enmeshed with nomos (372e).
Machiavelli agrees that only with the emergence of “grandeur of
soul” do we leave the primitive origins and enter the world of developed
political life, statesmanship, and constitutionalism. He also thereby
agrees that grandeur of soul is only inadequately satisfied by the rudi-
mentary authority based on physical survival and security that charac-
terizes the state of nature. Again we see that Machiavelli is aiming for
much higher stakes than merely reverting to the arguments of ancient
Sophistry and materialism. He wants to sketch a new theory of constitu-
tional authority that is complex and refined enough to solicit and satisfy
the fullest political talents and the most subtle sagacity in statecraft, but
without following the Platonic and Aristotelian route whereby the origi-
nal, purely political grandeur of this soul, its pristine vitality and fecun-
dity as it first emerges from the primitive demands of the primordial
origins into the dawning possibilities of consummate might and achieve-
ment, is lured away from these dynamic origins and rich potentiality by
philosophy and moderation. This is why Machiavelli runs together the
constitutions that Plato distinguishes as aristocratic and timocratic – the
rule of philosophers and the rule of the spirited class of warriors – into
his own version of an aristocracy that promotes the common good. With
this he implies that justice and the common good are better served by an
overweening sense of honor and martial prowess than by a moderation
instilled by philosophy or by an education – like that of the Auxiliaries –
that provides a pale imitation of philosophy. Precisely the vigor, even
the belligerence, of the warriors is needed to combat the corruption and
libertinage toward which the people, if left to their own devices, are
disposed.

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Socrates himself concedes this when he makes thumos the engine of

civic morality and the governor of low desires in the best regime, but,
from Machiavelli’s perspective, he shies away from the consequences.
This is another reason from Machiavelli’s viewpoint for rooting the
eidetic account of the forms of the constitution in the genetic, historical
account. If, as Plato argues, the ends of virtue are eternally present, if
peace and stability are the norm, so that people are living according
to nature when they turn away from the perils of war and empire to
cultivate the soul through an absorption in domestic politics, then it
is plausible to crown a typology of regimes with the constitution that
embodies the greatest stability and repose possible for politics: rule by
philosophers. If, however, as Machiavelli contends, the aspiration to
virtue is always underlain by and sharpened by these dangers, then
the best constitution must be one that can recurrently and in its very
structure surmount the perils constantly besetting it, preferably by using
them to its own advantage. For Plato and Aristotle, a well-ordered
political community will assimilate the unruliness of the passions while
granting them their necessary leeway. The polis will circumscribe the
oikos, allowing it to supply gratification for the desires within set limits.
For Machiavelli, by contrast, the very unity of a republic is guaranteed
by the dynamic struggle between passion and order. The goal is not to
sublimate the passions, to draw them off in the service of the telos, but
to find an equilibrium between passion and order – between the lion
and the fox. Whereas for Aristotle, as we saw in Chapter 3, the art of
ruling assists the parts of the city in fulfilling their natural development,
for Machiavelli the art of ruling is a technique that stands outside of
natural forces and manages their combinations in whatever way is most
productive of stability, power, and prosperity.
In connection with these issues, we can see more clearly the impor-
tance of history for Machiavelli as the medium through which to convey
his teaching. In earlier chapters, I have stressed that the pre-Socratics’
and Sophists’ account of nature as motion, although emphatically sub-
political and unable to sustain the elaborately nuanced political psy-
chologies of Plato and Aristotle, nonetheless differed from the modern
physics of matter in motion by accounting for a general kind of human
nobility, grandeur, and justice existing by nature as opposed to con-
vention, demonstrated by the “natural master” whose life of “force”
and “getting the better” mirrored the “great motions” of nature itself

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as genesis. In contrast with the pre-Socratic ontology of motion, the

modern physics of matter in motion, because it is a secularized version
of the Augustinian account of nature as mere random forces drained of
any account of nobility, could account for political virtue as nothing but
an inchoate impulse to dominion. As a consequence, modern thinkers
such as Hobbes, building on Baconian physics, could not follow the
pre-Socratics or Sophists in arguing for a way of life that was noble and
just by nature – all such distinctions are purely conventional, created by
the social contract. By contrast, as we have seen, Gorgias in one of his
fragments grants courage and prudence the status of natural virtues.
In this chapter, I am arguing that Machiavelli, although partial to the
pre-Socratics’ and Sophists’ stress on pleonexia as the best way of life,
would concur with Plato’s judgment about the psychological poverty
of their teachings. Machiavelli wants a much more detailed, subtle, and
robust psychology of leadership than the vague nobility based on brute
force ascribed by Callicles to the natural master. Like Socrates, Machi-
avelli does not see the naturally best way of life as standing across
a chasm from convention, but wants to present it as integrated with
and articulated by life in the various kinds of political communities.
At the same time, however, he rejects the Platonic understanding of
where true human satisfaction resides – the longing for union with the
eternally beautiful and good. He embraces and secularizes the Augus-
tinian account of human nature as reducible to the pursuit of dominion,
a reductionism even more severe than the pre-Socratics’ and Sophists’
account of nobility and justice by nature. By the same token, however,
Machiavelli does not want to take the narrow path from this synthe-
sis that was later taken by Hobbes, a project for the pure manage-
rial control of human nature drained of all natural nobility, grandeur,
and honor. How, then, to account for that nobility without embracing
classical teleology and while resisting the psychological barrenness of
both the pre-Socratic and Augustinian accounts of political life? Only
through history itself. It is through the dynamic unfolding of events
out of chance that the phenomenological richness of scope of Platonic
political psychology re-emerges – or at least Machiavelli’s attempt to
recapture that scope – but now firmly rooted in pleonexia itself, thereby
wholly altering its content.
To crystallize these contrasts, let us revisit one of our core themes,
the harmonious ordering of the passions prescribed by classical political

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philosophy that we first considered in Chapter 1. For Socrates, as we

observed in Chapters 1 and 2, the place of thumos in the city is highly
problematic. He encourages its prominence in Book 2 of the Republic as
the psychological mainstay of the citizenry even as he points to the need
for its sublimation or even eclipse through a civic education grounded
in an orderly and moderate cosmos. Thumos has to be restrained from
serving eros directly – lest it become the means employed by the impe-
rial ambitions of the “feverish” city of excessive longing – but it can-
not serve philosophy directly either, because its own motivation is not
philosophic, and, unlike eros, it cannot be pointed directly toward phi-
losophy. Thumos has to be driven by a love of honor, but must prefer
moderation over ambition and avoid too much severity on behalf of
justice. Again, however, thumos cannot grasp the requirements of this
ordering of the soul and city directly on theoretical grounds but only
through habituation to Socrates’ new cosmology of divine orderliness.
Socrates finally admits, in Book 8 of the Republic, through his depic-
tion of the rebellion of the Auxiliaries against the Guardians, that the
attempt to rehabilitate the bellicose energies of thumos very likely will
not succeed, certainly not reliably or for long.
For Machiavelli, by contrast, thumos can be liberated. That is
because, for Machiavelli, order is the consequence of thumos com-
pelled to fight by Fortuna and kept in fighting trim by the enactment of
severely repressive laws at home and the discipline imposed on it by the
pursuit of imperialism abroad. Socrates had early on in Book 2 almost
given up the quest for the best regime when he reflected that, if the soul
was to be capable of justice, each part of it must perform only one job,
while thumos was required to perform two jobs, being gentle to fel-
low citizens and savage to the city’s enemies. Education, including the
reform of poetry and belief in the gods, was hypothesized as the way of
ameliorating this conflict, but the results in the Republic are ambiguous
at best. Machiavelli’s solution is to liberate the conflict at the heart of
thumos by methodically alternating between its savage and restrained
modes, not subordinating the former to the latter. So whereas Socrates
stigmatizes timocracy in Book 8 of the Republic as the beginning of
the decline from the common good into self-interest – kicked off by
the honor seeking of the timocrats – Machiavelli identifies precisely this
type of constitution as the one that best serves the common good. It will
be made up of the aggressive men of “grandeur of soul,” the type whom

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Callicles and Glaucon admire before they are subjected to the Socratic
elenchus and its attempt to implant an education in moderation in their
characters. For Plato, restraint can come only to the extent that the
savagery of thumos is tamed by civic education or by an eros ultimately
devoted to philosophy. For Machiavelli, restraint is maintained by the
general necessity, the overwhelming peril, at the heart of existence,
which can be replicated by severe laws that admit of no exception to
their discipline. In this way, moderation becomes lawfulness, a deeroti-
cized kind of control. It is not, as in Platonic statecraft, the orderliness
that the pursuit of substantive satisfaction confers on the soul as its pas-
sions are drawn off from grosser objects of satisfaction toward higher,
more lasting ones, but the general necessity imposed on the passions by
the overwhelmingly powerful primordial genesis in which the passions
themselves are rooted, the Godlike singularity of Fortuna.
Moreover, to recall our general thesis about Machiavelli first
broached in Chapter 1, to the extent that Machiavelli fully liberates
thumos as a passion, he presupposes its rigorous subjection to the impo-
sition of order on nature by the will. Whereas Plato attempts to restrain
thumos within the harmony of the affects ordered by reason so that its
openness to honor and the divine might flourish, Machiavelli liberates
it only after entirely bestializing it.

the republic perfected by chance

Because republics are “destined” to go through this cycle repeatedly,
Machiavelli concludes, “all kinds of government are defective.” He then
proceeds to propose that instead of looking for a single constitutional
principle such as monarchy, oligarchy, or democracy with which to
order the political community, the best solution to the cycle of decline
may lie in a “mixed” constitution:

Thus prudent legislators, knowing the vices of each of these modes of gov-
ernment by themselves, have chosen one that should partake of all of them,
judging that to be the most stable and solid. In fact, when there is combined
under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people,
then these three powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check.

On the face of it, Machiavelli is taking us back to the famous Aris-

totelian prescription for the mixed constitution. As we saw in Chapter 3,

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this is the constitution that can best achieve the minimal requirements
for a stable political association, ameliorating the explosive tensions
between rich and poor that tend to cause the greatest civil unrest.
By mixing the principles of two defective constitutions, oligarchy and
democracy, Aristotle sketches a constitution that combines the inclu-
siveness of the democratic claim to authority with the meritocracy of the
oligarchical claim, while weakening the one-sidedness of each party’s
claim (for, although democrats are right to say men are equal, they are
not equal in all respects, and although oligarchs are right to say they are
unequal, they are not unequal in all respects, nor is superiority in wealth
tantamount to superiority in all virtue). A moderate middle class of the
least rich and the least poor will elect magistrates based on merit with
perhaps a small property qualification, leading to a deliberative govern-
ing body that may in the course of time deserve to be called aristocratic
(Politics 1294a35–b14). Aristotle identifies this particular constitution
by the generic term “constitution” (politeia) because it is the pattern for
reform that most existing cities have a chance of actually implementing.
It takes care of stability by reducing class conflict and allows a relatively
high degree of public virtue to emerge. Machiavelli’s remark that “all
kinds of government are defective” is a direct gloss on Aristotle’s intro-
duction to the discussion of the mixed constitution in Books 3 and 4
of the Politics, for Aristotle observes that each of the six archetypal
constitutions, even the good ones, tends to define authority too sharply
and exclusively, limiting it too narrowly to one portion of the body
politic and thus provoking indignation and a feeling of being exploited
in those who do not share in it. From the viewpoint of including as
many people of sufficient virtue (if not the highest degree of virtue)
for self-government as possible, “all such constitutions,” Aristotle also
concludes, “are defective” (1283a23–29).
Once again, Machiavelli’s employment of a traditional rubric of
statecraft is a carapace under which he radically alters its content. For
it must be stressed that Machiavelli’s illustration of a successful mixed
constitution is not Aristotle’s “polity,” but Lycurgus’s constitution for
Sparta, a constitution that Aristotle criticizes as being on the whole
wrong-headed (Politics 1270a29–1271b20, 1324b5–15, 1333b5–20).
When Aristotle recommends mixing and blending antagonistic political
forces, this is because he believes the debate between democrats and oli-
garchs implies, even at its most heatedly partisan, an implicit possibility

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of agreement, because human beings at their best fulfill their natures

through participating in such debates guided by logos. For both parties,
as he says, “lay hold” on a “part” of the meaning of justice, bending the
principle of equal treatment for equals and unequal treatment for the
unequal to serve their own self-interest and justify their indignation at
the prospect of being ruled over by the other. For Aristotle, as we saw
in Chapter 3, justice in politics is a distribution of offices in accordance
with the respects in which people are equal to each other through the
virtues they contribute to the political community but also in accor-
dance with the respects in which some are superior to others. Aristotle
believes that if authority can be spread around to the most moderate
and sensible elements of both parties in such a way as to make each side
cease feeling that it is threatened with domination or expropriation by
the other, it will be possible, as the most compulsive kind of self-interest
thereby calms down, for the citizens and their magistrates to rise to the
deliberative freedom to sift fairly among the different claims to equality
and inequality in reasoned debate (the chief task, he says, of “political
philosophy” [1280a7–21;1282b14–23]).
Machiavelli, by contrast, does not believe that the clash between
hostile parties implies any such supervening discursive unity or
common good to be actualized through reasoned deliberation. The
goal of politics is to maximize security and well-being for both princes
and peoples. Even the survival of the constitutional order is secondary
to this goal. So much is this the case that he can even recommend that
a republic perpetually racked by partisan strife might be better off by
becoming “subject after a while to some neighbouring state that is
better organized than itself.” Aristotle, much as he is against a political
community becoming imperialistic, would never argue that it could
actually benefit by being absorbed by a more powerful foe itself, which
is in any case an endorsement of imperialism from another perspective.
The only exception to the prohibition against waging a war that is not in
self-defense is a just war aimed at freeing an unjustly oppressed people.
But that would preclude absorbing it into one’s own domain (Politics
1333a30–35, 133b37–1334a11; Nicomachean Ethics 1177b9–11).
Among the classics, only Xenophon in the Education of Cyrus comes
close to Machiavelli’s proposition, when he has the young Cyrus wax
indignant at the follies of neighboring countries and their governments
and claim that conquering and absorbing them would improve them.

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For Aristotle, only a small and neighborly polis, independent of foreign

domination, eschewing empire, and self-sufficient enough to look
inward, can approximate the wholeness that orders the cosmos. A
multinational state, however prosperous and powerful it may become,
cannot do this. Its size, diversity, and the absence of civic deliberation
shared among a self-governing citizenry prevent it from being a whole
within the whole. Indeed, as we observed in Chapter 4, for Aristotle
such an empire would not really form a political community at all.
Generally devoted to maximizing the material goods produced by
the art of household management, it would more closely resemble a
contractual commercial relationship like trade alliance. By contrast,
Machiavelli is concerned above all with how political “bodies” can sur-
vive, regenerate, and expand their power. If this is better achieved by a
multinational empire that, like Rome, absorbs its former foes and adds
them to the forces it turns outward on the next enemy, that is all to the
good. To be the secure and prosperous ally or even province of such an
empire might be preferable to an impoverished and constantly imper-
iled independence. It is in this ironic sense that Machiavelli discusses
what he terms the “mixed principality” in chapter 3 of The Prince.
Despite the superficial nod to Aristotle in the chapter title, he extols
the success of the Roman republic in making republican self-sufficiency
of the Aristotelian kind impossible for all she came into contact with,
absorbing them like a cell that continually divides itself and grows so as
to absorb further nourishment. Even in the contemporary parallel, in
which Machiavelli usually contrasts faineant contemporary rulers with
the ever-successful Romans, King Charles XII of France is described
as aiming to create a “mixed” principality by annexing parts of
Italy.
Machiavelli gives his qualified endorsement to Lycurgus’s constitu-
tion for exactly the same reasons on which Aristotle based his critique
of it: instead of attempting to mix the three powers of government
in the service of the common good, according to Aristotle, Lycurgus
let them clash, each retarding the other precisely through the vigor of
its ambition, but forced to cooperate to the degree necessary to keep
their helot population under control and to stave off their external ene-
mies. Aristotle concedes that this clash and check of powers held Sparta
together. But in the case of each of its institutions, he criticizes Lycurgus
for allowing its partisans to pursue their own ambition and self-interest

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and for thereby abandoning from the outset any hope that these con-
tending factions could be educated to transcend their passions so that
they could deliberate in common according to logos about the meaning
of the just and unjust, thus fulfilling their natures as political animals:

And because the [ephorate] was too powerful, and equal to a tyranny, the
kings were also compelled to cultivate popular favor, so that in this way
too the constitution was jointly injured, for out of an aristocracy came to be
evolved a democracy. (1270b6–17)

In other words, for Aristotle, pitting several conflicting principles

against each other within a regime is not the same thing as mixing them
to promote their common ground. For Machiavelli, however, the fact
that the ephors or the representatives of the other two powers might
be motivated by selfish ambition or love of money and luxury is not
objectionable in itself. The clash of these powers will prevent any one
of them from winning out and bringing the struggle to an end, and the
perils of the clash will keep each power in fighting trim, unable to relax
its guard and sink into effeminacy. For Aristotle, on the other hand, it
is precisely Lycurgus’s belief that it makes no sense to try to educate
statesmen to moderate these passions that is so objectionable.

[The] lawgiver clearly does the same here as in the rest of the constitution: he
makes the citizens ambitious and has used this for the election of the elders,
for nobody would ask for office if he were not ambitious; yet surely ambition
and love of money are the motives that bring about almost the greatest part of
wrongdoing that takes place among mankind . . . (It) would be advantageous
that kings should not be appointed as they are now, but chosen in each case
with a regard to their own life and conduct. But it is clear that even the
lawgiver himself does not suppose that he can make the kings men of high
character: at all events he distrusts them as not being persons of sufficient
worth. (1271a9–26)

What Aristotle deplores about Lycurgus, Machiavelli extols. At bot-

tom, the fact that Lycurgus does not trust human nature enough to
believe it capable of being educated to moderation, so that he premises
his constitution on conflict, is rooted in the fact that Sparta’s whole rea-
son for existing is to sharpen the aggressive passions and turn them out-
ward against external foes and inward against the helots. “The entire
system of laws,” Aristotle observes, “is directed toward one part of

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virtue only, military power, because this is serviceable for conquest.”

For Machiavelli, the internal clash of powers, checks, and balances crit-
icized by Aristotle is precisely what is admirable about Sparta, earning
Lycurgus “the highest praise” for providing Sparta with “over eight
hundred years (of) the most perfect tranquility.” We recognize, of
course, an anticipation of the modern constitutional theory of checks
and balances in the mode of such students of Machiavelli as Mon-
tesquieu, arguably the chief philosophical influence on the American
constitution, one of whose framers endorsed it for enabling “ambition
to counter-act ambition.”10
The constitution of Lycurgus, Machiavelli goes on, was in every
way superior to Athens, which ran through the entire cycle of regimes
because it tried to set up a distinct regime each time, as if imitating “the
writers on republics” who maintain that regimes must serially embody
the specific claims of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy rather
than, like Sparta, containing them all within one regime and allowing
them to clash and check. Athens behaved as if what the traditional
authorities on statecraft had argued was true: that each constitution is
distinct from another, because each constitution is to be ranked accord-
ing to how successfully and in what way, given the limitations of human
nature and circumstance, it instantiates the orderliness and repose at
the heart of the cosmos. Because Athens tried to set up one distinct
constitution each time – popular, tyrannical, oligarchical, and so forth –
those who were excluded from authority bided their time until they
could overthrow it. This was because the original laws drawn up for the

10 I substantially agree with Sullivan’s argument (2004) that Machiavelli’s prescription for
institutional checks and balances within a republic so as to preserve the liberties of both
the common people and the great, while harnessing their competitive energies for the
mutual aggrandizement of all, is central both to the English Republicanism of the sev-
enteenth century and to more explicitly liberal thinkers like Locke. For reasons I discuss
at greater length in the Conclusion, I have a more difficult time reconciling Hobbes with
either stream, especially the republican one, because his theory of absolute sovereignty
would rob political life of the republican dynamism Harrington and others admired
in Machiavelli’s view of Rome, while his defense of individualism on the grounds of
mere self-preservation eschews any need for a self-governing commonwealth, the brunt
of Locke’s critique. As Mansfield observes with respect to Machiavelli’s republicanism,
but in a way that could also anticipate the proceduralism of the prescription for the
American founding, “The business of government is not so much positive legislation to
benefit the people as the negative exchange of accusations that entertains the people.
While making use of ambitious princes, republics must take care to appease the popular
fear and dislike of ambition.” Mansfield in Machiavelli (1996) p. xxix.

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Athenians by Solon were unable to “temper the power” of the people,

the prince, or the nobles and chasten their “insolence” and “license.”
Thus, Athens was doomed to suffer what Aristotle himself observed
was the bad consequence of distinguishing too rigidly among the
regime principles – provoking the anger and rebellion of those excluded
from a share of offices. For Aristotle, however, as we saw in Chapter 3,
this bad consequence stemmed from a failure to appreciate how the
goal of establishing a unified and homogeneous magistracy must bend
and compromise with the necessities of ordinary political tension. The
unity of virtue and of the best regime extolled by Plato must, according
to Aristotle, be diluted by the heterogeneous and composite nature
of cities as we really find them. When the most rigorous standards of
virtue and public service were diluted sufficiently to make the citizen
body large enough that a majority would not feel excluded, the polit-
ical community would have a better prospect for achieving whatever
deliberative harmony it could without destabilizing the very basis of all
civil order. The goal of “polity,” in other words, was still the common
good – Aristotle was simply willing to loosen the standards relatively
speaking. For Machiavelli, however, it is the pursuit of Aristotle’s goal,
whether rigorous or diluted, that necessarily undermines order and
results in civil strife. Solon was unable to curb the insolence and power
seeking of the hostile strata of the populace precisely because he tried,
through his laws, to inculcate in the Athenians a virtuous disposition.
Only if, like Lycurgus, he had allowed the insolence and power seeking
of those strata to clash with and neutralize each other might his laws
have stood some chance of preventing these traits from reaching the
extreme point where they destroyed public order.
“But let us come to Rome” (1.2.7). With this, Machiavelli breaks
through the traditional rubrics and reveals just how much he has rev-
olutionized their content. Rome is even better than Sparta because
Rome let in the full sweep of chance. Rome became a “perfect repub-
lic” through “disunion.” This constitutes a complete reversal of clas-
sical metaphysics and the grounding it provided for classical politi-
cal philosophy, whereby perfection comes from the degree to which
the regime participates in unity and rest (the inward-looking deliber-
ation on domestic public affairs) and avoids disunity and motion (the
outward-looking tyranny over other peoples enflamed by selfish pas-
sions at home [Aristotle Politics 1325a15–1325b30]). As Machiavelli

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observes of Rome, “so many accidents arose in it through the dis-

union between the plebs and the Senate that what an orderer had not
done, chance did.” A founder can be great, but the power of chance,
the pulse of Fortuna, is even greater when harnessed to energize the
republic’s institutions. Lycurgus institutionalized conflict, but only to
maintain inner stability and resist further evolution. Unlike Sparta, on
the one hand, Rome developed historically. “Fortune was so favor-
able to Rome” because she opened herself up to the shifts of history.
Unlike Athens, on the other hand, Rome did not change regimes serially
from one principle to another but let the claims of people, nobles, and
monarchy clash and check.
Altogether, therefore, Rome’s historical success defied those “who
have written on republics” by combining what they decreed could not
be combined: a mixed regime capable of imperial expansion. Dynamic,
dialectical, and flexible, Rome retained whatever was useful from the
regime’s previous evolution and incorporated it in a new response to
necessity. The cycle of regimes in Phase Two that we discussed earlier
is now shown to be contained within one evolving mega-regime, a pro-
gression in which one regime principle is never entirely superseded by
the next. The monarchs became the consuls answerable to the Senate,
while the Senate’s arrogance was restrained by the tribunes of the peo-
ple. Remaining class conflicts were submerged in the joint project of
imperial expansion, which gave scope for honor and brought land and
wealth to all strata.
For Machiavelli, the career of Rome is the unique case of how a
regime can deliberately open itself to Fortuna so as to let Fortuna pro-
voke the necessary new modes of statecraft. The law-bred internal sever-
ity praised in the initial discussion of foundings can be supplemented,
we now learn, by the regime’s recurrent self-exposure to the prospect
of conquering or being conquered. The ensuing chapters illustrate this
premise through a discussion of the conflict between the Senate and
People. Machiavelli begins by observing that men are only “good” – by
which he means orderly and disciplined, and therefore able to acquire
power – through being subjected to some external compulsion (neces-
sity, fear, danger, the hostility of Fortuna [1.3]). Freedom without the
stimulus of compulsion degenerates into the disorder and confusion
produced by too much ease, comfort, and the relaxation of vigor. This
brings us to what is possibly the central and most difficult paradox

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of Machiavelli’s new political science: the republic’s achieved goal of

power, wealth, and security through its rise to empire is precisely what
at length causes it to unravel into effeminacy and laziness. Its virtu is its
own gravedigger.
Rome provides the best model for statecraft to date because dur-
ing her rise to empire, the ceaseless struggle between the People and
the Senate imposed necessity on each, keeping each strong and orderly
through mutual opposition and thereby preventing degeneration. This
enabled each to get what it wanted as the regime expanded outward.
Rome, however, by Machiavelli’s own admission, did undermine the
vigor of its original virtue by the enjoyment of its material results.
The empire’s achievement of unprecedented wealth, security, and peace
sapped the capacity for honor seeking and ambition, destroyed all local
traditions of national independence, and at length generated a spiritual
longing for a permanent kingdom of peace on earth, the seed bed of
Christianity.11 Much as he praises the ruthless dexterity of Rome’s lead-
ers, that praise is conspicuously absent when it comes to Julius Caesar
and Octavian, who began the transition to a permanent peace and there-
fore the effemination of virtue.12 Is there a way around this seemingly

11 Brilliantly analyzed by Cantor (1976) in his treatment of Shakespeare’s Roman plays,

particularly Antony and Cleopatra.
12 There are two references to Octavian, later Augustus Caesar, in the Discourses, both of
which clearly connect him to Rome’s eradication of the spirit of republican liberty as
she grew into an empire, and with that “effemination” of Roman virtue that set in with
“the long peace that was born into the world under Octavian” (I.I.3), a metaphor that
reminds us of the prediction made in Virgil, and later widely associated with Christ,
that during the reign of Augustus a child would be born who would bring peace to
mankind. The second reference, at 1.52.3 is more explicitly hostile. Here, Machiavelli
recalls how “Tully” (Cicero) convinced the Senate to back the young Octavian so as
to undermine the soldiers’ support for Mark Antony, owing to the power of the name
“Caesar” that Octavian now claimed. It all came to nothing, however, for Octavian went
over to Antony, and “this affair was the destruction of the party of the aristocrats,”
that is, tantamount to the death of the old republic. The fault was Cicero’s for having
deluded himself that “that name” Caesar could bolster the republican cause when in
truth, it should not “have been believed that, either from his (Caesar’s) heirs or his
agents anything could ever be had that would conform to the name of freedom.”
There could hardly be a more withering summing up of the failures of the ancient
“writers.” Ironically, in trying to conscript the ruthlessly ambitious young Octavian
against Antony, Cicero was behaving in a superficially “Machiavellian” way, choosing
as an ally the younger, apparently less formidable foe of the republic over the more
established one, a lesser of evils choice in which the greater evil (Antony) would be
neutralized and the lesser one (Octavian) coopted. At bottom, however, Cicero remained
vulnerable to the allure of Caesar’s name and reputation for “glory,” believing it could

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inevitable decline? While Machiavelli extols a republic’s pursuit of pros-

perity, his endorsement of this aim is not unqualified, especially when
balanced against his praise of honor seeking. Machiavelli often makes
clear his ranking of honor and austerity over commercial expansion-
ism and wealth, a priority that was relaxed by authors later influenced
by him like Montesquieu. He praises the Germans for their lack of
commerce with other countries, their self-sufficiency and eschewal of

be harnessed to the “aristocrats’” cause, when in truth it represented the unvarnished

and irreversible triumph of tyranny over the republic. Given Cicero’s portrait of Scipio
the Younger as prizing the life of the mind over even civic honor, Machiavelli would
appear to be implying that, just as Cicero was deluded in believing that monarchical
virtues like those displayed by Scipio and his namesake the elder Scipio, follower of
Xenophon’s Cyrus, could ever be compatible with republican equality before the law,
so in real life Cicero delusionally saw in the young Octavian a real-life Scipio whom he,
like the philosophic counsellor to the young tyrant with an eros for the city described
in Book 4 of the Laws, would guide away from any lurking tyrannical ambitions to
becoming the servant of the republic, under Cicero’s wise guidance. The example shows
how Machiavelli’s allegedly amoral teaching could arguably be viewed as both a more
principled and a more clear-headed defense of republican liberty than that of Cicero.
Machiavelli’s strictures on Julius Caesar (1.10, 1.37.2) are also quite severe. Do not
believe in Caesar’s “glory,” he warns us, because he either bribed those who wrote
about him or they were afraid of him. The scorn heaped on Catiline by Cicero and
Sallust reveals what they would have said about Caesar himself if they had not been
afraid. Hypocritically, they excoriated after the fact the man who had merely attempted
to become tyrant, while whitewashing or omitting to censor the “much more detestable
Caesar,” who actually succeeded. Even the widespread praise of Brutus was somewhat
insincere, “as though, unable to blame Caesar because of his power, they celebrate his
enemy.” The truth is, “Caesar was the first tyrant in Rome, such that never again was
that city free.” Given that the Romans lost their liberty under the empire founded by
the Caesars, Machiavelli argues that, comparatively speaking, their best government
thereafter took place under the “Good Emperors,” from Antoninus Pius to Marcus
Aurelius, who held office through election rather than by hereditary descent. During
the Antonine period, Rome experienced “a secure peace in the midst of secure citizens,
and the world full of peace and justice” (he omits to say liberty). On either side of that
era, first the Julio-Claudians who ruled by hereditary descent and after the return to
hereditary descent with the accession of Commodus, Rome is “all rancor, all license, cor-
ruption, and ambition eliminated.” Whereas many historians might view the Antonine
era as the developed and institutionalized perfection of the original Augustan principate
begun by Caesar’s heir Octavian, to be followed by a dark age of autocrats like Severus,
Machiavelli lumps together the era before and the era after the Antonines as the joint
consequence of Caesar’s original tyranny, treating the period of the good emperors as a
fortunate but temporary interlude in the despotic and corrupting despotism founded by
Caesar. Someone surveying this entire history, therefore, “will then know very well how
many obligations Rome, Italy and the world owe to Caesar.” Caesar’s overthrow of
the republic, and his heir’s creation of the empire, were one enormous ghastly mistake
which should have been avoided and that the founders of the new Rome must at all
costs avoid: “Truly, if a prince seeks the glory of the world, he ought to desire to possess

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imported goods: “Thus they have been prevented from adopting either
French, Spanish or Italian customs, and these nations are the great

a corrupt city – not to spoil it entirely as did Caesar but to reorder it as did Romu-
lus.” True glory comes from reshaping and reinvigorating the fallen matter of nature.
However, as long as princes long for the glory of the “imagined republics,” of “the
writers” like Xenophon and his depiction of Cyrus, they will choose the path of Caesar
and corrupt the people. What era could be more corrupt, on Machiavelli’s arguments,
than Machiavelli’s own, the nadir of effemination? The new prince will have his work
cut out for him but also a perhaps unprecedented prospect for achieving “the glory of
the world.”
In chapter 19 of The Prince, there is a parallel discussion to the one in the Discourses
of the good emperors. Whereas in the Discourses he stresses that the Antonines were
good rulers compared with the fallen period before and after them inaugurated by
Caesar, in this context, in which the focus is more on the virtue of the singular prince
than on republican statesmen, he is less critical of their successors, especially Septimius
Severus, whom he praises for astutely embodying the qualities of the lion and the
fox. Severus was able to keep the soldiers, the nobles, and the people in line through
a judicious mixture of terror and rewards, leaving them “astonished and stupefied,”
similar to the words (“satisfied and stupefied”) he used to describe Cesare Borgia’s
effect on the Romagna by using Remiro d’Orco to crush disorder and then executing
him and leaving his dismembered body in the public square, thereby terrifying the people
through an intermediary and satisfying their hatred of that intermediary by killing him
(as Stalin did with successive secret police chiefs). Moreover, Severus recognized that,
if forced to choose between satisfying the soldiers and the people, one must choose the
soldiers, because one needs their power more, whereas today (in Machiavelli’s own era)
rulers must please the people because they are more powerful than the soldiers, who
are often mercenaries. It might appear from this praise of Severus that Machiavelli is
qualifying his remark in the Discourses that the people form the soundest basis for rule:
“As regards prudence, I say that the people are more prudent and stable, and have better
judgement than a prince; and it is not without good reason that it is said, ‘the voice of
the people is the voice of God’” (1.58). However, we must bear in mind that, in that
particular context in the Discourses, he is offering a prescription for a healthy republic
like early Rome. Here in The Prince, by contrast, he is talking about a ruler’s need
to be cruel when “the body which you choose to maintain you . . . is corrupt.” Corrupt
republics and principalities both need founders or refounders who can reinvigorate them
through a jolt of harshness and terror. Hence, in the context of the corrupt period after
the end of the Antonines, a terrifying ruler like Severus was best. The main foil for the
cruel and cunning Severus in this chapter is the gentle Marcus Aurelius, who, because
he came at the end of a comparatively uncorrupt era, was able to satisfy the people,
nobles, and soldiers without such harsh measures.
Putting the discussion of the Antonines in The Prince and the Discourses together,
then, we arrive at the following rank order: the ancient Roman Republic was the least
corrupt of the Roman regimes, the principate founded by Caesar and Augustus the
most corrupt, and the Antonine emperors an interval of relatively less corruption –
more corrupt than the republic, but less corrupt than Caesar’s principate – after which
the Caesarian era’s corruption resumed and required much harsher measures.
In a moment of wry humor in chapter 19 of The Prince, Machiavelli refers to Marcus
Aurelius as “Marcus the Philosopher.” When we recall that Marcus broke the chain of

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corrupters of the world” (1.55.2–3). Similarly, in 2.19, he writes:

“Acquisition sometimes proves most injurious even to a well-regulated
republic, when they consist either in a city or a province that has been
enervated by pleasures and luxury, for these indulgences and habits
become contagious.” How might the new Rome keep republican virtue
keen and prevent it from degenerating into the longing for peace, ease
and enjoyment? We return to this conundrum of too much success at
the end of this chapter.
Machiavelli is aware that the traditional writers on politics tended to
look askance at the “extraordinary and almost wild” means by which
Rome gained her empire in comparison with the standards set by the
best regimes of Plato, Aristotle, and their followers. He entertains this
viewpoint but quickly abandons it: “One should blame the Roman
government more sparingly,” for its internal tumults are “frightening
only to those who merely read of them” as opposed to the men of action
who achieved Rome’s success (1.4). Thought and action may not have
a common end. But could Rome have achieved its greatness without the
ongoing dissension between Senate and People? To consider this fully,
Machiavelli argues, we have to return to the two alternatives posed by
Rome and Sparta. By implication, the traditional typology of regimes
discussed initially in 1.2 has now been disposed of, superseded by these
two archetypes that combine all regime principles within themselves –
people, nobles, monarch – as powers that “watch and keep each other
reciprocally in check” (1.2.5).
By summarizing his discussion of the genealogy of regimes with a
gloss on Aristotle’s remark about the defectiveness of all the archetypal
constitutions, Machiavelli signifies his agreement about the seriousness
of a problem analyzed by classical political philosophy. He also signi-
fies his judgment that the solutions to this problem available within the
horizon of classical thought and experience could never be fully actual-
ized – both the Athenian attempt to institute one distinct constitution
after another and the attempt of Lycurgus to institutionalize within

elected emperors that Machiavelli saw as the Antonine age’s finest feature and returned
to the Julio-Claudian practice of hereditary emperors, destroying the interval of peace
and security by allowing his own worthless son Commodus to inherit the throne, we
realize that even a philosopher is not capable of doing what the ancients always say we
should do, that is, placing the good of the political community over the love of one’s
own, especially love of family.

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one system the hostilities that the good regimes in Aristotle’s typol-
ogy sought to transcend. Of the two approaches, however, Machiavelli
prefers Sparta, for “Athens lived a very short time in respect to Sparta”
(1.2). Aristotle had judged the Spartan constitution to be worthwhile
only at a relatively low level of human merit. In the Nicomachean Ethics,
courage, Sparta’s chief virtue, is one of the two lowest-ranked virtues of
character (along with bodily continence), because courage stems from
the compulsion to survive when faced with the threat of death and so
cannot not be chosen, whereas higher virtues lacking in Sparta such as
liberality are not compelled by self-interest and involve a greater degree
of choice as to how they are actualized (Nicomachean Ethics 1119a20–
b13, 1111b1–1112a11). For Aristotle, Sparta’s longevity and stability
certainly entitled it to a measure of commendation, if rather sparse.
Characteristically, what for the ancients represented the lowest level of
political virtue that they could admit into the discussion of the proper
aims of government represents for Machiavelli the only element of their
pragmatism that is worth salvaging. Hence Lycurgus merits discussion
and high praise in Machiavelli’s consideration of the various regime
principles, whereas Aristotle is not even mentioned by name.
Machiavelli’s preferred solution to the defectiveness of all the regime
principles lies in a new direction, a combination that could not be envi-
sioned by the classical tradition regardless of whether it was talking of
high standards or low ones: “The disunion which existed between the
Senate and the people produced such extraordinary events that chance
did for her what the founder had failed to do” (1.2.7). Rome was per-
fected by “her” disunity. The very forces of change and strife, the strug-
gle for power, prestige, and wealth, that the ancients had thought made
political unity (to say nothing of perfection) difficult if not impossi-
ble become, in Machiavelli’s prescription, their only sure basis. Unlike
Sparta, the Roman constitution developed over time, so that it was
not cut off from the shifts of fortune. Unlike Athens, Rome did not
fruitlessly substitute one type of constitution for another. It retained
whatever proved useful from past experience and incorporated it into
the new forms that necessity prompted. Thus, to expand on an ealier
observation, after the monarchy was overthrown, “those who expelled
it immediately appointed two consuls in place of the king.” This pre-
vented the senatorial class from wielding absolute power. Similarly, the
people extracted from the aristocracy the creation of the office of the

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tribunes: “The nobility, to save a portion of their power, were forced

to yield a share of it.” The tribunes could veto acts of the Senate, thus
providing a check against the overweening arrogance of the patriciate,
but they could not initiate laws themselves nor usurp the executive
and military functions of the consuls. The Roman constitution, then,
was dynamic and dialectical in its response to adverse circumstances.
Its negations of past forms were, to use a Hegelian term, “determi-
nate negations” that preserved a residue of what they had superseded –
monarchy, as Machiavelli observes, was “never entirely abolished,” and
the nobles were “never entirely deprived” of their authority over the
common people. One distinct form of constitution need not succeed
another. Instead, unity can result from diversity; being can be main-
tained by difference and becoming.13
Rome thus shows how the Spartan internal prescription for “powers
in check” can be combined with an expansionist, imperialistic foreign
policy. For the ancient thinkers, the cycles of rise and decline that Machi-
avelli set forth in the previous chapter, a cycle disastrously illustrated by
the history of Athens, showed that only to the degree that a constitution
could embody the stability of the nunc stans, of the eternality of true
being approximated in the soul by the pursuit of moral and intellectual
virtue, might one transcend, in some degree and for some period of
time, this cycle of disarray. For Machiavelli, by contrast, Rome’s daz-
zling success demonstrates how a single constitution can contain this
whole cycle of changes traditionally thought to result in the decline of
good constitutions or limit their prospects for success. There is no need
to hope for breaking out of this cycle by transcending the primordial
passions and the base material and bodily necessities they entail. On the
contrary, by opening itself up to these primordial underpinnings, the
generative power out of which the distinct constitutional forms come

13 For example, the Romans turned the Tarquinian kingship of pre-Republican times into
the purely ceremonial “king of the sacrifices,” so that the people would not have to miss
the old rituals. Republics should preserve a semblance of traditional forms even when
their content has changed, “so that it may seem to the people that there has been no
change in the institutions, even though in fact they are different. For the great majority of
mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often even
more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are” (1.25). The phraseology
recalls the maxim from chapter 18 of The Prince: “Everyone sees how you appear, few
touch what you are.” On the character of the Hegelian historical dialectic, see Newell
(2009a).

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into being and back into which they pass away, a republic like Rome
can survive its own dissolution again and again, gaining new strength
each time. For the primordial underpinnings out of which these legal
and institutional forms emerge and into which they eventually collapse
is the life force of the acquisitive, expansionist republic itself. By tapping
into the disorder at the heart of existence, by letting itself be energized
by the clash of natural and political bodies, such a republic cannot be
undone by a reliance on any permanent form. Rather than attempt to
approximate the stable unity of the whole, such a constitution leaps into
the void of its own untutored impulses, developing itself in response to
perilous necessity by continual self-division and supersession. It opens
itself up to Fortuna, lets Fortuna provoke it to develop new techniques
and institutions: “Fortune favored her” because Rome’s virtues always
arose fresh from the crucible of the direst necessity. In this sense Rome
took the same stance toward Fortuna collectively that, as we discussed
in Chapter 6, Machiavelli prescribes for the individual prince.
Aristotle had criticized Lycurgus for assuming that people were inca-
pable of voluntary goodness. Machiavelli now states that one must
always “start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to dis-
play their vicious nature.” In this way, the Christian doctrine of original
sin, one of whose consequences is that perfection cannot be aimed for
through participating in political life, is now secularized so that, once
drained of its otherworldly orientation, it can be used as human material
for a new kind of political perfection, not through the teleological flow-
ering of the soul but, on the contrary, through its suppression. “People
are good,” as Machiavelli has told us, “only upon compulsion.” The
freedom to choose without compulsion – for Aristotle, what chiefly
distinguishes the human telos from that of other biological organisms
(Nicomachean Ethics 1097b25–1098a15) – always leads to “confusion
and disorder.” Summing up his earlier advice, Machiavelli reminds us
that, where the hostility of nature manifested by “poverty and hunger”
does not directly force men to become industrious, “the law immediately
becomes necessary” to replicate artificially nature’s spontaneous sever-
ity. The division and clash of powers within the Roman Republic kept
the law’s capacity to compel virtuous behavior constantly fresh and vig-
orous. The Senate and the People, the one constantly vying to dominate
and the other constantly struggling not to be dominated, imposed neces-
sity on each other recurrently through their ongoing struggles. Each thus

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kept the other strong and orderly, preventing either one from lapsing
into luxury, enervation, and laxity, and thereby kept each other’s pas-
sions keen. Disciplined repeatedly by this internal battle, the ambitions
of each class expended themselves on foreign conquest, not on each
other. The Senate led the people into war, recompensing them with a
share of land and riches, albeit frequently extracted from the aristocracy
by the people under threat of insurrection or desertion. Swollen with
new allies and tributaries, the Republic’s increased numbers pressed
outward to a new perimeter of expansion, vitality maintained by the
ongoing domestic class struggle.
Machiavelli is emphatic that he does not make these arguments
because he is in favor of mindless, widespread violence and bloodshed
for their own sake. On the contrary, he observes that during the three
hundred years in which the nobles and people fashioned the division
of powers among Senate, consuls, and tribunes in a series of truces in
their struggles for predominance, only a handful of people were exiled
or put to death. In Machiavelli’s view, letting ambitions contend with
one another is the likeliest way of preventing them from destroying the
republic. They check each other’s success internally and bring power,
stability, and prosperity to the weaker states that are absorbed. The
chaos, violence, and partisan hatred is much worse, he maintains, in
states like Athens precisely because each party believes that the con-
stitutional ordering it wants represents an approximation of the final,
unchanging truth about the universe. It therefore places an intolerable
burden on the self-interest and honor of those whom it excludes, and
in the course of time on the repressed ambitions of the ruling class itself
(as we saw so vividly illustrated by the rebellion of the young aristocrats
in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus).
As we have observed, Machiavelli notes that the traditional writers
on government have always criticized the example of Rome for its “tur-
bulence and disorder,” claiming that only “extreme good fortune” pre-
vented these defects from destroying her. Machiavelli suspects that “all
these things can only alarm those who read of them” – that what really
scandalizes the traditional-minded critics of Rome is not the violence of
the republic’s actual history, which was minimal, but the way in which
the actual basis for Rome’s success so manifestly contradicts their belief
that political life must reflect the stability and repose divined in the order
of the cosmos by philosophy and philosophical morality. Machiavelli

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agrees with the ancients that a republic needs “good education,” which
depends, in turn, on “good laws.” Good laws, he continues, spring in
turn “from those agitations which have been so inconsiderately con-
demned by many,” rather than, as the ancient philosophers would have
prescribed, mirroring the eternal orderliness and moderation of the cos-
mos. In truth, he concludes, “every free state ought to afford the people
the opportunity of giving vent, so to say, to their ambition.” For “the
demands of a free people are rarely pernicious to their liberty.” Whereas
the ancients hoped an education in virtue would teach people to tran-
scend to some degree the necessities operative on human nature through
the passions, Machiavelli believes that the best education for statecraft
is an experience of how the passions clash and how these clashes might
be harnessed to maximize security and prosperity for the state.
Still, however much Machiavelli might appeal to hard-headed com-
mon sense and an experience of the real world, this rhetorical stance
should not lead us to overlook the fact that a kind of theoretical guid-
ance and character formation for princes and statesmen is as crucial
to Machiavelli’s new science of politics as it was to that of the classics,
albeit with a radical transvaluation of content from ends toward means,
or from the teleological fulfillment of nature to its methodical control.
As we have previously seen at some length in Machiavelli’s diagno-
sis of the ills of politics, people in fact are often more spontaneously
inclined to the deluded belief in the “imagined republics” of classical
and religious morality than they are to a clear-headed assessment of
how to achieve their own self-interest. Before Machiavelli’s successors
can appeal to Realpolitik, or to the “real world” as opposed to the
mere “ideals” of justice and community extolled by the ancients, the
real world first has to be completely altered in how it is perceived by
statesmen and citizens. Machiavelli is a “writer” who aims to undo
the spell of the traditional “writers.” “Reality,” the observable world,
has to be theoretically reconstructed so as to yield the proper theory
of politics from observation. Otherwise, the siren song of Platonic eros
and Christian otherworldliness will continue to beckon, which to its
adherents is every bit as much observable from experience as is the
reality of self-interest. Here we can anticipate a famous conundrum of
early modern rationality: does Bacon derive his project for the mastery
of nature from his observations about nature, or does he arrange his
observations about nature to justify and render possible our mastery of

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it? Does Hobbes derive his teaching on power and the social contract
from the new physics of matter in motion? Or does he append the new
physics as a preface so as to ground in natural philosophy an approach
to politics primarily derived from observation and history but further
buttressed by this theoretical reconstruction of observable reality? We
explore these issues in the Conclusion to this book.
To recall Machiavelli’s question: Would it have been possible for the
Romans to have established a government that, following the classical
prescription, put an end to this constant struggle between nobles and
people? Machiavelli explores this question in order to sum up the results
of his cumulative undermining of the traditional rubrics of political
philosophy. Again we are presented with the two alternatives of Sparta
and Rome. As Machiavelli presents Sparta here, it embodies the closest
historical approximation of the classical prescription for the best con-
stitution that both Plato and Aristotle advanced: She was strong enough
to defend herself, but not so powerful as to provoke her neighbors. Her
laws discouraged commerce and encouraged an austere equality, which
helped make her unattractive to foreign aggressors seeking riches, in
turn keeping the internal temptation to war and glory-seeking at bay.
If, he writes, such as state

remains quiet within her borders, and experience shows that she entertains
no ambitious projects, the fear of her power will never prompt anyone to
attack her; and this would even be more certainly the case if her constitution
and laws prohibited all aggrandizement.

Machiavelli fully understands the appeal of such a model – unified

and homogeneous, free from violent disturbances, at peace and at rest:

And I certainly think that if she could be kept in this equilibrium, it would
be the best political existence, and would insure to any city real tranquility.

Life, however, does not permit us this degree of tranquility, however

eagerly we can imagine it:

But as all human things are kept in a perpetual movement, and can never
remain stable, cities naturally either rise or decline, and necessity compels
them to many acts to which reason will not influence them . . . (1.6.4).

As the use of Sparta as his example reveals, Machiavelli will not even
grant that the ancient thinkers were able to grasp what kind of republic

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would in actual practice embody their own prescription, untenable as

it was. For, although Plato and Aristotle criticize Sparta for falling far
short of the best regime, Machiavelli sees it as the closest any state could
come in reality to what these philosophers admired. Sparta was stable;
her laws discouraged the acquisition and the enjoyment of luxury. But
the only notably successful instance of this type of constitution in history
came about, Machiavelli argues, for reasons the very opposite of those
endorsed by the classical writers. Spartan economic austerity stemmed
from the law-bred severity that Machiavelli recommends for replicating
fortune’s hostility within political life. Its stability resulted chiefly from
the fact that its monarchs restrained the nobles in order to preserve
their own power, which thus made the common people their allies – the
essence of the advice Machiavelli gives to princes who wish to found
their power on the people at the expense of the nobles in chapter 9
of The Prince. Both princes and peoples are likelier to achieve stability
through an alliance with one another than by relying on the aristocracy,
on whom Plato and Aristotle pinned their chief hopes. Hence, a “tran-
quil” republic, the “best” republic, does not result from the pursuit of
the moral and intellectual virtues, as the ancients held – the cultivation of
our natural telos through deliberation and statecraft. Instead, it is gen-
erated by the repression of human nature by laws that imitate the harsh
necessity with which Fortuna in her hostility tries to overwhelm us.
Sparta and Rome appear to embody respectively the alternative
modes of approaching Fortuna prescribed in chapter 25 of The Prince –
caution and daring. As he puts it in Discourses 3:9: “Whoever desires
constant success must change his conduct with the times.” The con-
stancy lies in one’s resolve, not in the objects of one’s pursuit. Fur-
thermore, as we also know from The Prince, although caution and
daring can both succeed in certain circumstances, where one is uncer-
tain and the situation perilous, it is better to be daring. Both modes
are useful, but impetuosity more closely mirrors the inner dynamism of
Fortuna herself.14 Rome could have taken the cautious path of Sparta,
Machiavelli concedes. She could have avoided foreign entanglements

14 Sometimes, though, caution is better. Whenever any extrinsic or intrinsic danger to

a republic arises, according to Machiavelli, it may be better to temporize rather than
attempt to extirpate it lest one only increase its power. Most such dangers arise not from
external threats, but are intrinsic, such as the rise of a “noble youth” of extraordinary
merits who becomes the cynosure of all men’s eyes, so that they raise him so high that

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and conquests, limiting herself to self-defense or at most a secure perime-

ter of allies, on the grounds that, as Sparta thought, to arm the masses
and to add new peoples to one’s constitution will necessarily lead to
popular upheavals at home and destabilize the republic’s internal order.
However – and for Machiavelli this is the heart of the matter – she would
never have become immortally great:

If (Rome) had been more tranquil, it would necessarily have resulted that
she would have been more feeble, and that she would have lost with her
energy also the ability of achieving that high degree of greatness to which
she attained; so that to have removed the cause of trouble from Rome would
have been to deprive her of her power of expansion. (1.6.3)

To draw these points together, let us look at Machiavelli’s compar-

ative assessment of the merits of each regime. Sparta with its equality
of poverty and martial rigor is the perfection of that law-bred severity
and institutionalized necessity set forth in the modes of founding in
Discourses 1.1. This is not the equality of citizens who, as Aristotle pre-
scribes, rule and are ruled in turn, engaging in a common deliberation
about justice and injustice that solicits the cultivation of our moral and
intellectual virtues through open discourse and the leisure to reflect.
Machiavelli prefers the taciturn Spartans to the chatty Athenians, who
lived out the Aristotelian typology in their fruitless lurching from one
exclusive regime type to another in a ceaseless din of public disputation.
Sparta instead embodies as a regime type the repression of our natural
longing for happiness, and therefore degeneration, by an abstract gen-
eral necessity. Antagonism and repression galvanize the lawfulness that
holds the forces and clashing bodies of nature in a dynamic equilib-
rium. The monarchy restrains the nobles on behalf of the people. The
citizens are few in number in order to maintain neighborly cohesion.
To reiterate, for Machiavelli, Sparta is the only possible real-world ver-
sion of what Plato and Aristotle idealize but render fanciful by adding
their own superfluous and dangerous concerns with ethical choice and
public deliberation. There is no “middle way.” You cannot combine a
small, austere, self-governing republic with “grandeur of soul.” As sug-
gested in chapter 16 of The Prince, you can have an austere and orderly

when they regret their error it will be too late to bring him down (1.33). This could be
a description of Xenophon’s Cyrus.

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small republic or an empire that provides the scope and wherewithal

for grander virtues of pride and liberality. It is impossible to combine
the cultivation of liberality with a moderate political order that eschews
imperialism, because it is only by conquering other peoples that a prince
can gain the wherewithal to be generous toward his own. Therefore,
one must choose between, on the one hand, internal stability with fiscal
austerity or, on the other hand, imperialism with liberality. The middle
way or golden mean of Aristotle, in which the grander virtues can be
exercised within a small orderly polis, does not exist.
At bottom, then, one must decide between Rome and Sparta. Rome
could not have been great without the disorder, class conflict, and selfish
ambitions that the classics regarded as political vices. Moreover, there
is no infallible choice as between Sparta and Rome, only the least bad
choice under the circumstances. One or the other may best suit the times.
Regimes such as Sparta (or the Venice of Machiavelli’s day as he views
it) are undermined by the external shock of war and the compulsion to
conquer or be conquered, because war invites masterful personalities
to assert themselves at the expense of republican equality and unravels
collective discipline and social cohesion through the prospect of greater
riches and power. Yet as we know from chapter 1 of the Discourses, the
rise to empire cannot be avoided: Even if you choose a sterile environ-
ment in order to breed toughness through labor, the world will crash
in on your orderly small republic in the form of external aggressors.
Sparta is the best example of a regime that resisted the compulsion to
empire, and it is, to repeat, the real-life version of the “best regime”
of the classics: Machiavelli cannot even endorse its partial virtues
without reformulating it and dispensing with the classical original. A
regime such as Sparta is neither too weak nor too strong. It does not
threaten others and therefore avoids to the degree possible being men-
aced by others. It remains quiet at home and the laws forbid expansion
abroad.
Such “balance,” Machiavelli grants, would be the best political way
of life, but it cannot last, because “one cannot balance . . . this thing
nor maintain this middle way exactly” (1.6.4). The only fundamental
alternatives are rise or decline. Necessity compels a republic – even
an inward-looking one like Sparta or Venice – either to expand or go
under. Reason has no influence on this cycle. It cannot be transcended
by choice, leisure, deliberation, contemplation, or prayer. A republic

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must recurrently undermine its own constitutional foundations by

imperial expansion in order to survive and prosper, as did Rome. If a
small republic remains at peace for a long time, this can only be because
“heaven” is “so kind that it did not have to make war.” To rely on this
peace to last forever is to rely on Fortuna in the bad sense of disarming
oneself literally and psychologically. Hence the fervor of Machiavelli’s
mission: he wants everyone to “know how much more (the Romans’)
virtue could do than fortune in acquiring that empire” (2.1). Even when
a regime is so fortunate as to enjoy long-lasting peace, it commonly
leads to internal dissension and is “effeminating”: we recall from
Book 1, chapter 1 of the Discourses that the flourishing side of nature
in a fertile spot makes men soft, vain, and unruly (the beginning of
Aristotelian leisure is the end of public virtue). In another parallel to
his advice in chapter 25 of The Prince that, in a pinch, impetuosity is to
be preferred to caution, Machiavelli here concludes that because there
is no exact “middle way” between the archetypes embodied by Sparta
and Rome, one must choose “the more honorable part,” the course
of imperial expansion, wealth, and glory enacted by Rome. Sometimes
rest or moderation is better than motion or impetuosity, but rest is
only the temporary pause in an underlying and ongoing motion, so
when unsure, leap boldly toward honor. We are reminded of those men
possessing “greatness of spirit,” the prepolitical great men of the state
of nature, who began the cycle of regimes. Rome was the one regime
that might constantly breed and employ them. In this way, Machiavelli,
as it were, encourages the decoupling of prudence from contemplation.
This brings us to the core of Machiavelli’s critique of the ancients.
A small, neighborly and austere republic may be stable, but it cannot
achieve a “high degree of greatness.” As we saw in the earlier chapters
of this book, the whole premise of the classical therapy for tyranny
rests on this: there is an optimal ordering of the political community
that mirrors and instantiates the harmony and moderation character-
istic of the cosmos. In serving this kind of community, and actualizing
the virtues of character that civic life requires, a person achieves such
a degree of satisfaction, honor, and repose that tyranny is no longer
attractive. Socrates deliberately encourages Callicles and Glaucon to
dwell on their most intoxicating expectations from political eminence.
He goads them into exploring their dissatisfaction with mere bodily
hedonism and encourages their yearning for a political order that would

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call for and honor their best talents of enterprise and command, a city
whose love would be worth possessing and whose nobility would be
worth loving. Having stimulated an erotic longing for union with the
beautiful and good through political eminence, Socrates then attempts
to convince them that only a moderate political order mirroring the
cosmic order glimpsed by philosophy will offer their eros an approxi-
mation of the repose and dignity for which it yearns – a public philia
complementing the moderation of private friendship, a reciprocal bond
between honorable equals rather than the all-consuming passion of the
tyrant to possess one’s country as a triumphant lover would possess his
beloved. In the very best instance, these lovers of the city will be led by
their eros for the beautiful and good through civic virtue toward the
philosophic life itself, the noblest of all.
It is precisely the instinct for “grandeur” characteristic of men like
Callicles and Glaucon that Machiavelli denies can ever be conjoined
with such a moderate political ordering. As we have seen, however,
the root of the problem lies in the potential for misunderstanding this
grandeur that exists in the “princely” type of men themselves. Because it
is human nature to seek satisfaction and tranquility, to follow the erotic
longing for completion, it is all too easy to persuade oneself that the
world has already provided such a safe haven; that one must only mod-
erate one’s passions and bring one’s own behavior into accordance with
this eternally preexisting unity and harmony in order to be successful
and happy. The princely men must therefore be taught not to let them-
selves be taught about this promised ascent from bodily desires to noble
pleasures, a hierarchy of goods mirroring the order of the world. They
need method rather than eros; self-consciousness rather than the elab-
orate civic pedagogy suggested by the Republic, Nicomachean Ethics,
and other traditional writings. They must reach deeper into the primor-
dial underpinnings of their first, unmediated impulses for success and
glory. They must learn that this vital potentiality for grandeur springs
from the dynamism and the creativity of disorder, not from the enerva-
tion of a delusory success, and so come to see that their best prospect
for achieving it is conjoined with an imperial republic whose achieve-
ments are constantly fueled and invigorated by its capacity to tap into
the disorder of nature through its institutionalized strife. That is why
“the greatness of its empire could not corrupt it for many centuries,
and (Rome’s lawgivers) maintained it full of as much virtue as has ever

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adorned any other city or republic” (1.1.5), including, of course, the

City of God and the Republic of Plato.
Because there is no prospect for lasting equilibrium and tranquility,
no potential for unity through shared deliberation, politics becomes a
matter of making a decision for the least bad alternative. But on the
whole, it is better for a republic to be like Rome than Sparta, just as
it is better on the whole for princes – who for Machiavelli can dou-
ble as founders or refounders of republics – to be daring than cautious.
Even if necessity, operative through foreign aggression, does not compel
an austere republic to expand (a prospect so unlikely that Machiavelli
characterizes it as a favor from heaven), her very success in remaining
stable would undermine her. Because people are “good” only when act-
ing under compulsion, “continued tranquility would enervate her, or
provoke internal dissensions.” Just as in his teaching about princes, for
Machiavelli it is better for republics to imitate the deeper, underlying
hostility of the world than to rely on fortune’s occasional beneficent
intervals, which make us soft and unruly. In sum, because the best con-
stitution of the ancients is existentially impossible, Machiavelli encour-
ages, as it were, the revolt of the Auxiliaries in Plato’s Republic and
their conversion to a new historical project. Whereas the philosophic
truth of the Idea of the Good had to be concealed from these warriors
through a mediating education in correct opinion, Machiavelli’s war on
nature can be offered to them openly and directly as a project worthy
of their own ambitious energy. He severs the delicate connection traced
by Aristotle between the prudence of practical statesmanship and the
contemplative virtues. Phronesis as a link between praxis and nous by
way of an architectonic art of statesmanship collapses into the will to
master nature.

the rise and fall of the new rome

For Machiavelli, a prudent founder can provide a corrective to too
much bounty from nature, turning statecraft, as I suggested earlier, into
a kind of human horticulture that cuts back nature’s fecundity so as
to reinvigorate its roots. Even though power is the goal, to give in to
the enjoyment of the rewards of power undermines the vigor and self-
control needed to acquire and maintain that power. We must therefore
avoid the illusion of the world’s beneficence. Here we might detect a

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connection between what came to be known as the “worldly asceti-

cism” of the bourgeois virtues – the deferral of gratification – and the
inwardness and self-denial sought by the Reformation’s repudiation of
“the theology of glory” (Luther’s derogatory term for Thomism), a
synthesis arguably indispensable for the emergence of modern liberal
democracy.15 In revolving the comparative merits of a sterile and fer-
tile environment for the founding, Machiavelli is arguing that although
nature can be either sterile or bounteous, the sterility is more funda-
mental. Chance and disorder are the substance, he is arguing, peace
and bounty are the accidents, reversing classical metaphysics. To imi-
tate the bounteous side alone must lead to the teleology of the “imag-
ined republics” and the delusion that the passions possess an immanent
potentiality for virtue leading us to peace, the eternal, the divine, and
their instantiation in a just republic. Therefore, it is more prudent to
imitate the hostile and necessitous side. As in his advice to princes in
The Prince, so, too, in republics, he counsels, founders and statesmen
must let the hostility of Fortuna fuel their actions so as to be able to turn
the tables on “her” treacherous reversals and fight back. Recognizing
that the passions are not a mixture of beast and soul, but all beast, lion
and fox, will enable a leader to alternate methodically between their
release and control for the sake of maximizing security and well-being.
The classical search for the middle way reflects the orderliness and
moderation supposed to be at the core of the world. For Machiavelli,
by contrast, nature as Fortuna oscillates between sterility and fertil-
ity, necessity and dissolution. Sterility is closer to the truth, which is
that the fertility cannot be relied on. We achieve freedom through our
consciousness of nature’s hostility, which engenders in us the will to
fight back. We imitate nature’s hostility by distancing ourselves from a
reliance on nature. This denaturing or abstraction of self from nature
is necessary for mastery. Law, accordingly, far from being subordinate
to the regime as it was for Aristotle, supersedes the regime as the core
of statecraft. Constitutions are the most useful and efficacious arrange-
ments of political “bodies” subject to the uniformity of law as the con-
troller of hostile chance or, on the other hand, its deliberate reinjection

15 Consider Tawney (1950) and Grant (1991). The complex debate about the meaning
or existence of Machiavelli’s religiosity is discussed in the Interlude at the end of this
chapter.

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into the body politic to jolt it out of the enervation and complacency
of too long a period of success. In this way, the regime becomes a local
historical modality of the law, and the distinction between good and
bad regimes is replaced by the criterion of legitimacy.
To collapse the distinction between good and bad regimes as Machi-
avelli does might seem to restore ancient conventionalism. Although
there are similarities between Machiavelli’s argument and ancient con-
ventionalism, there are, as we have seen, more important differences,
and as we reach the conclusion of this book, it will be useful to sum-
marize them schematically.
According to the Sophists, one can react to the meaning of nature as
chance by 1) private vice and the manipulation of convention through
rhetoric to create a public appearance of virtue, 2) the defense of con-
vention as a bulwark against the chaos of the state of nature, or 3)
embracing tyranny as the most natural way of life. But because the
Sophists tend to see nature as the upsurge of spontaneous motions,
they doubt that it can be methodically controlled on the political level.
Those who claim that it can run into difficulties. Hence, for example,
Thraysmachus’s search for a techne of injustice is frustrated by Socrates’
demonstration that techne is self-forgetting, not self-aggrandizing, and
leads to order, harmony, and beneficence. Protagoras, more insightful,
doubts that statecraft is rigorous knowledge at all, seeing it as more
akin to a local “way,” like picking up a language, analogous perhaps
to Burkean “prejudice.”
Machiavelli is after much bigger stakes than any of these varieties of
ancient conventionalism. In his new science of politics, the disorder of
nature is the source of political power, stability, and rationality. It can
be tapped and channeled by correctly designed institutions. By imitating
the impetuosity of Fortuna, we can gain methodical control over “her”
reverses by anticipating them, preempting them and fighting back. It is
the belief in fixed conventions – in political order – that leads to decay,
chaos, and weakness and does not, as Protagoras maintained, act as a
bulwark against them. So chance (tuche) does not have to be fenced
off or concealed under a rhetorical guise that preserves nomos. Instead,
Machiavelli says: Let chance in; let selective spurts of chaos invigorate
and set in motion the levers of power. Statecraft will be more methodical
and more consistent if we allow politics to be empowered by disorder.
We need not be helpless in the face of the rise and decline of regimes

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because we will undertake no mistaken search for permanence in the

first place whose inevitable failure could disillusion us or catch us off
guard. This calls for a new notion of techne – not, as it is for Socrates, an
intimation of, and path toward, the taxis and sunounia of the cosmos,
a harmony of proportions that grounds subject and object, lover and
beloved, citizen and citizen, polis and cosmos (Plato Gorgias 506d–e).
Instead, techne is to be seen as the imposition by man of form on
matter, the conquest of nature for the sake of power, the act of resolve
whereby a prince, like God, can “introduce into matter whatever form
he pleases” (The Prince chapter 6). Had Thrasymachus and the other
Sophists possessed this concept, they could not have been defeated by
the Socratic elenchus based on the craft analogy.
I would like speculatively to suggest that Machiavelli’s revaluation
of the relation between virtue and nature has three main stages:
1. Nature is viewed as hostile and alien to man. Reason is seen as
anthropocentric with no immanent link to nature.
2. Having alienated yourself from the world, you must also let the
disorder of the world empower your desires while remaining conscious
of how the intoxication of those passions can undermine your self-
mastery. In the terms of The Prince, you must know how to alternate
methodically between the lion (allowing the world to empower you)
and the fox (reasserting your alienation from the world and from your
own passions).
3. A certain strain of Christianity – more Augustinian than Thomistic,
arguably more Protestant than Catholic – has paved the way in several
senses:
i. It supplies the concept of a radically pure will that is able to create
out of nothing and oppose itself to all natural limitations. This power
to alienate the will entirely from nature so as to aim at its complete
mastery is transferred from the Abrahamic God to the secular prince.
ii. The Abrahamic God’s ability to uproot Himself from nature, once
transferred to human agency, fortifies man’s ability to assert freedom
and mastery over nature by treating it as an alien other, as a foe. Clas-
sical philosophy could not provide this fortification even if the claims
of philosophy were dismantled from its defense of civic virtue because
classical philosophy, strictly speaking, has no conception of a pure anti-
natural will that parallels that of the Abrahamic faiths. For the ancients,
virtuous acts derive from (while bolstering) the proper ordering and

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balancing of passions like eros and thumos, while vicious and tyranni-
cal acts stem from (while aggravating) their disharmony. Both virtuous
and vicious acts take place within the boundaries of nature. You can be
educated to pursue eros toward its highest objects, civic virtue and phi-
losophy, thereby directing eros away from tyrannical excesses, but you
cannot extirpate it or step outside of nature. Thumos can be kept at bay
through laws and education, but not overcome or jettisoned. The thu-
motic man of Platonic psychology is angry, moralistic, self-righteous,
and prone to religious zealotry. For Machiavelli, therefore, he is not
cold-blooded and focused enough; too much lion, not enough fox. He
requires, not paideia, but the correct method.
iii. By draining the natural world of transcendental purpose and plac-
ing it in the otherworldly Beyond, a certain strain of Christianity already
reduces nature to Fortuna. Once we part ways with our loyalty to that
otherworldly kingdom, we can allow the natural world of purposeless
happenstance already drained of teleological purpose by Christianity
itself to empower us with its sheer force and impulse. These passions
contain no immanent potential for transcendence. Not only can we aim
to control the external world, but we can treat our own inner passions
as pure other, pure foe, or energy to be imprisoned until needed.
In these ways, then, Machiavelli prepares a new synthesis. Reason
can and should still govern the city, just as Plato and Aristotle main-
tain. Viewing nature as genesis does not require us to view politics as
tragic in the sense that chance and necessity must doom the reason of
the statesman, as in Oedipus Tyrannus. The assimilation of reason to
willpower promises to free man altogether from nature, or at least to an
extraordinarily greater degree than anything envisioned by the classics.
The rational clarity of the Platonic Ideas becomes the goal to be imposed
on nature by the willpower of the Abrahamic God’s efficient cause, the
power to create ex nihilo, transferred to the secular prince. Because
Machiavelli is not simply seeking to restore classical wisdom, even
its strictly pragmatic political wisdom in contradistinction to its tran-
scendentalist leanings, but is calling for a wholesale transformation of
human and political life and how we understand them, he cannot in my
view be strictly termed an Averroist. More on this later in the chapter.16

16 Lukes (1984) makes the simple but telling observation that, despite his admiration for
Roman courage as opposed to modern pacificity, and for the Romans’ always being

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The foregoing discussion of the Discourses scarcely constitutes a full

appreciation of Machiavelli’s teaching, but it does, I hope, uncover
enough of its basic premises so that we can make some broader obser-
vations about the theme of empire with which we began this chapter.
Machiavelli claims that his Discourses open “a path as yet untrod-
den by anyone,” paralleling the exploration of “unknown waters and
lands,” very likely an allusion to the discovery of the new world. It
is an eerie and prophetic parallel because it can certainly be argued
that the greatest imperial republic since Rome emerged in the new
world and enacted many of Machiavelli’s prescriptions. America was
indeed a regime founded on the checks and balances among branches
of government that deliberately harnessed and played off against one
another the power of the people (House of Representatives), the nota-
bles (Senate), and the chief executive (Presidency). Its pedigree through
Montesquieu, Locke, and Harrington back to the original “Machiavel-
lian moment” (as Pocock termed it) is well documented. The American
republic, from its origins, and in keeping with Machiavelli’s account
of Rome, harnessed the ambition of the common people for a better
life and projected it outward so as to forestall internal class strife and
a popular assault on the remnants of Old World gentry (the origi-
nal Whig-Federalist ruling class) while furthering the interests of that
class as well. The first object for expansion was the American conti-
nent itself through the displacement of the aboriginals and the develop-
ment of agriculture and commerce through successive waves of immi-
grants (recalling Machiavelli’s description of Hannibal’s and Cyrus the
Great’s capacity to unite “men of all nations”). With the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries came the projection of economic and military power
throughout the world, accompanied by the crusade to extend the indi-
vidual’s liberty to achieve a better life to all peoples on earth.17 In all
these ways, America embodied Machiavelli’s claim that one need not

ready to go to war as opposed to his contemporaries’ avoidance of it, Machiavelli

nevertheless does, in The Art of War, endorse the invention of modern artillery as
an improvement over ancient and even Roman warfare. Just as he is not against all
forms of Christian-era warfare, Lukes argues, he is not necessarily against all usages of
Christianity. More generally, I would argue that the project for the mastery of nature
guarantees progress in military technology among many new modes of power, and in
this sense outstrips the guidance of either pagan political practice or philosophy.
17 Consider the discussion in Newell (2009) part II.

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choose, as the classics had maintained one must, between a virtuous

self-governing republic and imperial oikonomia; that, on the contrary,
the ambitious energies of the people and their love of liberty could be
the vehicle for a republic’s expansion into an empire in which all classes
would benefit.
Whether and to what degree one would assess the American crusade
to extend its version of republican liberty to the rest of the world as ide-
alistic, as a justification for power, or some blend of the two is beyond
the scope of this book. Clearly it has been all three in varying propor-
tions from one event to another. My task is to offer a judgment about
whether and to what degree it is a Machiavellian crusade. The central
paradox of the Discourses, illustrated by the career of Rome and already
implicit in the segments of Book 1 we have considered, is that eventually
the expansionist republic has nowhere left to expand, at which point
those cravings to enjoy the settled peace sap the vigor of the empire,
leading to a disenchantment with honor and war and a longing for the
otherworldly peace. Christianity thus emerged as the spiritualization of
the universal safety promised by the Augustan principate at its zenith in
the Antonine age. It is not clear to me that Machiavelli believed he had
found a way whereby even his prescription for a consciously reenacted
duplication of Rome’s “chance” career could in the long run avoid
this inner degeneration and the longing for a counterfactual utopia of
permanent peace and safety.18
I offer the following inferences in support of this assertion. In the
preface to Book 2 of the Discourses, Machiavelli depicts the world’s
virtues as first arising in Assyria, then migrating to Media and Persia,
then to Italy and Rome. Greece, the home of philosophy, is omitted,
as is Jerusalem.19 However, after the Roman Empire and its fall, this
complete set of virtues finds no new home. We find only fragments of
them scattered among France, the Ottoman Sultanate, Germany, and
the Saracens. Something about the Roman Empire’s rise and fall pre-
vents all the virtues from migrating intact to a new empire. What is
that something? It can only be Christianity, a religion that developed

18 For a thoughtful discussion of the paradox whereby Rome engenders its own subversion,
consider Coby (1999).
19 As Strauss comments, the omission of Jerusalem reveals the rhetorical quality of Machi-
avelli’s reverence for antiquity, because the “Mosaic laws and orders” are arguably “of
the most ancient antiquity.” Strauss (1969) p. 93.

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under the empire and inhabited its dead husk when it fell, replicat-
ing its universal political order as a universal eccleisiastical order (The
Prince chapter 12). In Discourses 2.2, Machiavelli begins by making
a sharp distinction between the pagan religion of Rome and “our”
religion: the Roman religion promotes glory, whereas our religion pro-
motes humility. (He had earlier observed in 1.11 that “whoever reads
Roman history attentively will see in how great a degree religion served
in the command of the armies, in uniting the people and keeping them
well conducted, and in covering the wicked with shame.”) He qual-
ifies the contrast between Rome’s religion and “ours” by going on
to suggest that it is a false interpretation of Christianity to conclude
that it must inevitably make us effeminate and unable to defend our
country: “And although the world appears to be made effeminate and
heaven disarmed, it arises without doubt more from the cowardice of
the men who have interpreted our religion according to idleness and not
according to virtue” (2.2.2). He then suggests another reason for this
effeminization, which shows that there is a link between Rome and the
humility-saturated version of Christianity he decries. Through her con-
quests, Rome extinguished republican liberty everywhere (“eliminated
all republics and all civil ways of life”). By extinguishing the spirit of
liberty everywhere, the Roman Empire effeminated itself and prevented
the world’s virtue from finding a new imperial homeland. Finally, in
Discourses 3.1, Machiavelli remarks that all religious republics will
decay with time unless returned periodically to the vigor of the orig-
inal rise by recurrent refoundings. Although the notion of a religious
republic might seem to refer exclusively to modern Christian states,
Rome, too, was a religious republic – religion was essential to its suc-
cess, according to Machiavelli – and the examples he uses to illustrate
the need for re-founding are drawn from Rome as well as from modern
times. In 3.17, in remarking that officials could commit outrages even
during the early republic when Rome “was still uncorrupt,” he con-
cludes that “it is impossible to order a perpetual republic because its
ruin is caused through a thousand unexpected ways.” Although every-
thing possible should be done to return a republic to the vigor of its
origins, there is nothing more true than that “all the things of this world
have a limit to their existence” (3.1).
Altogether, then, Machiavelli appears to concede that all republics
will eventually wane. Even the best-founded republic of all, Rome,

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whose religion was subordinate to, and a means toward, civic vigor
and patriotism, eventually succumbed to its own inner decay. How
likely is it, then, that any virtuous republic founded now, in a world
already under the sway of Christianity, which for Machiavelli not only
does not support citizen virtue and patriotism but actively undermines
it, could avoid this eventual decay, if indeed it could ever be founded in
the first place?
Machiavelli’s writings do contain one possible response to this
dilemma, an adaptation of certain strains of Christian political theory
and especially that of the emerging Reformation. Machiavelli’s stric-
tures against Christianity are abundant and well known: it has effem-
inated man, subverted his loyalty to the earthly fatherland in favor of
the heavenly beyond, and extolled unarmed prophets who fail instead
of armed ones who succeed. Yet clearly Christianity was in some sense
“armed.” As an institutional religion, it had been a great success. As
Machiavelli sardonically notes in chapter 11 of The Prince, only eccle-
siastical authorities “have states and do not defend them; have subjects
and do not govern them; and the states, though ungoverned, do not
care.” Yet rule they did. Christ’s teaching might have been “unarmed,”
and thus brought the unarmed prophet Savanarola to ruin, but could
one really characterize it altogether as a political failure, given its enor-
mous authority over the centuries as the civilizational conglomerate of
Christendom? In The Prince, Machiavelli diagnoses the rise of institu-
tionalized Christendom as the church slowly replaced the decaying husk
of the Roman world state with a spiritual world state of its own, pri-
marily based on moral authority but nonetheless equipped with some
worldly force.
The crucial element in the Christian spiritual world state’s power was
its psychological hold over the faithful. This insulated it against many
of the dangers of its otherwise feckless pursuit of worldly power and
allowed ruthless popes like Alexander VI – arguably one of the most
successful statesmen of Machiavelli’s era, the master pulling the strings
of his son Cesare – to operate free of censure or a candid grasp by
others of what they really were. Christianity’s psychological hold also
undermined the effectiveness of men like Cesare, who would have been
capable in the ancient world of any iniquity, yet whose capacity for
“well-used” cruelty was rendered fickle and inconsistent by his residual
vulnerability to a belief in Christian morality. Similarly, the King of

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France failed to consummate a successful invasion of Italy because he

needed a divorce, his half-measures as a conqueror accruing to the
pope’s strategic advantage.
So, in envisioning a new Rome on the rise, it is tempting to see Machi-
avelli as looking for a new psychological teaching that will compete with
Christianity’s inner hold on the psyche while maximizing rather than
minimizing the new creed’s hold on worldly power and success. Might
one find a new universal political teaching that was spiritually rigorous
but also psychologically “armed”? The very notion of the “modern,”
a contraction of the Latin phrase meaning “the way of today” (modus
hodiernus), already gaining currency in the Renaissance, was that one
belonged to a party of the like-minded that crossed borders, an emerg-
ing new world order based on a belief system in parts both secular
and religious bent on transforming Christendom from within, just as
Christendom had once transformed the Roman Empire from within.
Looking ahead to the unfolding of the Renaissance into the Reforma-
tion and the Age of Reason, we might detect here a further conjunction
between Machiavelli’s own psychology of the inward mastery of nature,
and especially of eros, with the rising Protestant demand for a purified,
interiorized faith not reliant on the appearances of the world (the “the-
ology of glory”) but on God’s direct entry into the innermost recesses of
the self, paralleling Machiavelli’s preference for “touch” over “sight.”
Aided by the influence of Luther, the self-professed devotee of Augus-
tine in the battle with Thomism, Machiavelli can further draw on the
Augustinian extremism of the divide between the City of Man and the
City of God, which as we have seen is conceptually so crucial for his
new science of politics. In the conjunction between Machiavelli’s sec-
ular psychology of interior self-mastery through the conquest of eros
and the interiorized religious psychology of emergent Protestantism, we
can see the outline of the coming alliance between the forces of Protes-
tant reform and the forces of secular modernity (not always clearly
distinguishable from one another), launching, as one scholar has sug-
gested, the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as
essentially wars on behalf of Machiavelli and Bacon by their Puritan
Republican allies to rid first England and then all of Europe of “kings
and priestcraft.”20

20 Impressively chronicled and analyzed by Rahe (2008).

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A new psychology of self-repression for the sake of future gain, the

deferral of gratification, is the new spiritual teaching to replace the uni-
versality of the original Christian world culture. A part of the genius of
modernity is that it is both a concept of the state – the social contract –
and a new stateless psychology of individualism that is universal, the
product of enlightenment. On the basis of our discussion of Machi-
avelli’s new method for internal self-mastery, we are entitled to call
this blend of secular and religious inwardness that first emerges with
the Reformation a spiritual or psychological teaching, because it is
not reducible to mere appetitive hedonism or materialism. It requires
an inner deepening and internalization of the encounter between For-
tuna and the will purified of its illusions. The “methodism” implicit
in Machiavelli’s prescription for the internal mastery of eros is there-
fore arguably not unrelated to the “methodism” of Puritan meditative
exercises for purging the soul of its reliance on the world of fleshly
appearances – a fateful conjunction that explains the birth of political
modernity coevally with the spread of the Reformation.
In sum, the conquest of one’s own inward nature, the conquest of
eros, was common to both Machiavelli’s new science of politics and to
the Reformation, albeit for radically different motivations – in the first
case, to maximize worldly power and wealth, in the second case, to
maximize our abstention from such worldly goods, including the cele-
bration of nature in its God-infused teleological richness crowned by the
Imitatio Christi.21 Historically, however, as has been widely observed,
the withdrawal from the world that had originally motivated Protestant
spirituality became in time a method for mastering it through commerce.
Just as in Machiavelli’s psychology, the first step to mastering the world
around one was to radically alienate oneself from it and its snares of
delusion about the world’s natural beneficence. The “bourgeois” virtues
of thrift, probity, hard work, and the deferral of gratification, extolled
on religious grounds because they might confirm one’s position among
the chosen or the elect, also happened to be exactly those character

21 According to Tinsley, Luther “became convinced that the ‘imitation’ of Christ conflicted
with the essence of the Christian gospel as he had come to interpret it. He found himself
unable to reconcile the presuppositions of the practice of the imitation of Christ with
his doctrine of justification by faith. The imitation of Christ he believed must inevitably
involve a denial of grace and conceal an incipient doctrine of works.” Tinsley (1972)
pp. 45–67.

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traits most required by a market economy. Hence Tawney’s summation

of those traits as “worldly asceticism.” Although commercial enterprise
was not the whole or even the most important of Machiavelli’s aims
for political life in comparison with the pursuit of honor and liberty, it
certainly was one of his aims, and a source of honor in itself.
Still, whatever hopes Machiavelli might have entertained for this new
spiritual teaching as the creed for citizens of republics, it would appear
to be trumped by his own more fundamental observation, clearly appli-
cable to all places and times, that “all the things of this world have
a limit to their existence.” We might further observe in this connec-
tion that Machiavelli appears to adopt Lucretius’s teaching (without
its apolitical corollaries) that countless worlds have emerged from the
atoms and passed away, worlds stretching infinitely into the past and
future that will never be known to us, just as our world will disappear
unremembered.22 Although the eternal substratum of the atoms is so
thin and empty of structure or content as to be almost nonexistent, and
for this very reason capable of generating an infinite variety of worlds –
thereby directly contradicting Aristotle’s teaching about the eternity of
the completed, visible cosmos just as we now experience it – that sub-
stratum is a limit, however evanescent, on man’s complete power to
re-create the world. As I have argued in this chapter, Christian theology
had recognized that even the most minimalistic account of a substra-
tum of unshaped matter still placed too great a set of limiting condi-
tions on God’s untrammeled power of creation ex nihilo: although mere
inert fodder, it was still something given prior to God’s action on it.
Therefore, Thomas Aquinas concluded, we must believe that God cre-
ated unformed matter out of nothing as well, before shaping it in specific
ways. In contrast to this teaching about the limitless creative power
of God, Machiavelli’s endorsement of Lucretius’s cosmology of the

22 For a discussion of the influence of Lucretius on Machiavelli and other Florentine

thinkers, see Brown (2010). Brown shows how Lucretius’s materialistic philosophy was
of assistance in criticizing religious superstition and a belief in the afterlife. She also
connects what she see as his pre-Darwinian theory of evolution to a dynamic history of
the rise of states, and relates the Florentine thinkers’ praise of free will to Lucretius’s view
that the world came about by chance – the same paradoxical relationship I have explored
between the prince’s freedom to reshape Fortuna by tapping into “her” spontaneity.
Still, we must bear in mind that Lucretius’s atomism led to a profoundly apolitical stance
toward life, whereas his modern followers use the materialistic theory he originated as
the basis for political engagement, an enormous transvaluation of values.

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underlying atomic structure, and how the clash of atoms generates infi-
nite, utterly irreconcilable worlds, introduces an undertow of insupera-
ble necessity and limitation to his view of the world and an insuperable
limit on man’s power to master Fortuna absolutely, however much he
might radically reshape it. The new prince may indeed be able to intro-
duce form into matter, but not create or re-create matter itself. He may
be able, through the introduction of “new modes and orders,” to trans-
form the conditions of political existence right down to the ground, but
not of existence per se.
Returning to the relationship between Machiavelli’s republican pre-
scription and America, might it not be the case at present that, as
America extends its power, influence, and economic might to the fur-
thest reaches of the globe, two challenges are emerging to the empire’s
sway that Machiavelli would immediately recognize? On the margins
of the empire, hardier and angrier peoples who have either not tasted
the promised material benefits or despise them are stoking the fires of
communal honor and a fear of being overwhelmed. These are motives
that, as we have seen, Machiavelli certainly appreciates as preconditions
for the continued rise of healthy and vigorous republics into a greater
historical sphere. More significantly, within the population of the impe-
rial heartland itself, there is arguably growing an ever more powerful
counterfactual longing for a global peace, a universal society “beyond”
politics with its unedifying compromises and clash of interests – the
parallel of that “effemination” that Machiavelli was obliged to concede
was inevitable even for Rome. Within today’s imperial republic, during
the apparently endless sunny noon of its Antonine age, with the legions
securing the borders and unprecedented wealth and relaxation enjoyed
within them, the citizens grow ever more bored with the republican
hardhihood of their origins, ever more enervated through their hedo-
nistic satiation, and ever more attracted to the dream of that coming
global paradise when all conflict will end forever.
So there is a sense in which Machiavelli not only showed the route to
the new Rome but foresaw its downward spiral. Machiavelli thought
that Rome had contained “as much virtue as has ever adorned any other
city or republic” and hoped that the rise to such greatness could begin
again. However, he knew that even Rome would have to atrophy due to
her very success and that even the methodical and conscious imitation of
her spontaneous career would carry the danger of this same long-term

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inner decay. Although Machiavelli argues that the mastery of Fortuna is

possible to an extraordinarily greater degree than anything entertained
by the classics, he also appreciates that it is ultimately limited and that
all things, including the peaks of human greatness, must pass. Life is so
structured as to provoke endless desires that are largely foredoomed to
dissatisfaction. As he observes in the Discourses in a characteristically
pseudo-Augustinian tone that nevertheless bespeaks his true conviction,
“as human desires are insatiable (because their nature is to have and do
everything while fortune limits their possessions and capacity of enjoy-
ment), this gives rise to a constant discontent in the human mind and a
weariness of the things they possess.”23 Insofar as he recognizes that all
human excellence is impermanent, he remains at one with the classics
and offers a sobering reminder that, whatever may be the comparative
merits of empire and republic, human or even political perfection is not
available on this earth.

interlude: machiavelli and religion

The diversity of perspectives on Machiavelli’s stance toward religion
deserves its own discussion. Let us begin with what might be taken as
examples of Machiavelli’s deeply blasphemous impiety.
In Discourses 1.25–26, he argues that when a republic reforms itself,
the semblance of the old institutions should be maintained, but when
one ruler aims at absolute power, “such as the ancient writers called
a tyranny,” he must “change everything,” using modes that are “very
cruel.” This is in keeping with the godlike scope to create new modes
and orders attributed to the most outstanding princes in chapter 6 of
The Prince. Because Machiavelli has already in the Discourses identified
such founders (Moses, Romulus) as the founders of republics as well as
principalities – indeed, one could say that the republic of the Romans
grew out of the principality of Romulus – by implication, they may
found republics through the same godlike transformations, in contrast
with already-established republics reforming themselves gradually and
preserving the old forms. As Mansfield observes about Machiavelli’s

23 Compare Augustine’s description of the man who is totally immersed in the City of
Man as opposed to the man who lives on earth preparing for the City of God (1958)
pp. 87–88.

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conflation of the prince with the prophet of godlike will with respect to
his discussion of the “one prudent orderer” exemplified by Lycurgus:
“If Machiavelli had not specified one man so prudent, he could have
been speaking of a divine beginning at one stroke” ([2001] p. 33).
Such a “prince” (the ancients may have called him a tyrant, but
Machiavelli will not) like David or Philip of Macedon (a typical Machi-
avellian equation of a divinely anointed ruler with a pagan one) will
raze everything and build everything anew, make the poor rich and
the rich poor, and resettle populations like a herdsman moving his
flocks. The biblical quote Machiavelli uses to describe David is actually
a description of God himself: “(He) filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away hungry” (Luke 1.53). This appears both to con-
firm the godlike scope of the most virtuous prince and to imply that
God himself is a tyrant. Whoever does not have the stomach for ruling
in this godlike and “very cruel” way, Machiavelli recommends, should
remain a citizen reliant on the rule of law and established institutions.
Few are wise enough to do so, however, becoming either ineffectual
tyrants or lukewarm citizens, because “men generally decide upon a
middle course, which is most hazardous, for they know neither how
to be entirely good nor entirely bad.” This choice between civic virtue
and tyranny reminds us of the contrast between Sparta’s caution and
Rome’s boldness, the only true alternatives in contrast with the illu-
sion of the “middle way.” If the citizen as described here might parallel
Sparta in the earlier discussion, might the godlike tyrant parallel the
Roman Republic? For although good to its own people and those taken
on as allies, did not Rome, in addition to being founded by just such a
tyrant, in conquering others perform many of the same acts of destruc-
tion, resettlement, and the transfer of wealth attributed here to David
and Phillip of Macedon?
As another instance of almost cavalier blasphemy, let us take Cesare
Borgia’s use, praised by Machiavelli in chapter 7 of The Prince, of his
brutal lieutenant Remiro d’Orca. After employing Remiro to suppress
civil disorder, allowing Remiro to attract the people’s hatred while
insulating himself from it, Cesare, peace having been restored, acts
as the people’s avenger against his own enforcer: “He had (Remiro)
placed one morning in the piazza . . . in two pieces, with a piece of
wood and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of this spectacle left
the people at once satisfied and stupefied.” Is a bizarre pantomime of

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Christianity implied here? That is, God, the source of so many woes and
disappointments for his people, distances himself from them through
an intermediary who then dies for “their” sins, but tacitly satisfies the
people by allowing them to take revenge on him through the crucifixion
of his intermediary.
But we cannot leave it at pronouncing Machiavelli an atheist and
blasphemer, for there is still the question about whether and to what
extent he recognizes an important role for religion in political life.
Moreover, as we have seen throughout this book, Machiavelli’s critique
of Christianity is shadowed at all times by his revaluation of aspects of
its own ontology. Not only is the founder presented in a prophetlike,
millenarian light, but so are what I have termed the princes of thought,
best exemplified by Machiavelli himself. The divinization of politics
is not the equivalent of out and out atheism because it battens off
the experience of revelation and recognizes and attempts to fashion a
simulacrum of its psychological power.
The preface to part 2 of the Discourses gives us a further sense of
what it would mean to call Machiavelli a prince of thought. Employing
his rhetorical invocation of antiquity, Machiavelli writes that he will
“boldly and openly” (perhaps like the Columbus of thought treading
an as yet untrodden path in the preface to part 1) compare the virtu-
ous past with the inadequate present, so as to “excite in the minds of
young men” the desire to imitate the ancient virtues whenever “for-
tune presents them with the occasion.” In other words, Machiavelli
will “excite” the “desire” of potential young statesmen and princes to
restore ancient virtue (but not ancient philosophy). He will replace the
intermediary role of “the writers” with his own new way of writing,
in which historical events take the place of dialectic. In this way, he
will prepare them for whatever “occasion” that fortune will present
them with, just as he says in chapter 6 of The Prince that princes of
“outstanding virtue” make use of the occasion Fortuna offers them.
It could seem as if, whereas Plato argues that the Idea of the Good,
suitably interpreted by his Socrates, might excite the erotic longing of
potential statesmen, Machiavelli is arguing that he himself will be the
source of their excitation, the fashioner of their image of nobility, draw-
ing upon not ancient philosophy but the direct unvarnished experience
of ancient nobility. This of course inevitably entails an act of reflection
and the projection of something new upon the ancient past, for we

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cannot actually enter into how the ancients understood themselves and
their virtues if we fully jettison their concern with philosophy. More-
over, because Christianity is arguably a valid continuation of aspects
of ancient philosophical transcendentalism, and even of the pagan reli-
gious longing in late antiquity for the One God, Christianity can claim
as readily as Machiavelli’s image of ancient virtue to have preserved
something fundamentally important from the ancient world and its
heritage. Insofar as Machiavelli makes himself a more direct source of
inspiration to the young than the ancient writers and reshapes their
access to the ancient past, is not his role vis-à-vis these potential new
rulers and statesmen not more interventionary, more Godlike, in the
Abrahamic sense, than Plato’s role as a medium through whose writ-
ings the immortally and changelessly true might be glimpsed? Is he
not a new kind of prophet? However this may be, whereas Plato and
especially Aristotle try to draw young men toward maturity by means
of the cultivation of their initially spontaneous longings for nobility,
Machiavelli offers to help them directly, as they are right now; to fur-
ther enflame them with the glories of the past. (The counterpart to his
advice in The Prince that Fortuna prefers a hot-blooded young wooer.)
This willingness to excite the passions of young men to restore ancient
virtue stands in sharp contrast with Hobbes, who particularly fears the
effects on young men both of ancient authors like Aristotle and of the
ancient exemplars of virtue, who in his view flatter their vain conceit
that they are fit by nature to rule, only one instance of the narrowing
of Machiavelli that Hobbes undertakes in his pursuit of pure political
method.
Several representative passages from the Discourses further illustrate
the complexity of interpreting Machiavelli’s stance toward religion. Let
us consider them by stages.
1. In the preface to Book 1, he writes: Despite “the general respect
for antiquity,” it (antiquity) is often “more admired than imitated, or so
much neglected that not the least trace of this ancient virtue remains.”
Readers take pleasure in reading about the ancients, he argues, but
do not try to imitate their “noble actions” because they are believed
“impossible, as though heaven, the sun, the elements and men had
changed . . . and were different from what they were in ancient times.”
But for Christians, of course, they had changed (particularly “heaven”
and “men,” inasmuch as God had become a man and through his

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death and resurrection saved all men from death). Thus, Machiavelli’s
appeal to reverence for the ancients (including at 2.5.1 a not disparaging
reference to Aristotle’s view about the eternity of the visible universe
while indicating his own preference for Lucretius) masks an attack on
Christianity’s claims to have transformed man from an honor seeker
into a peace lover worshiping the Creator God and Savior.
2. Discourses 2.2 discusses the difference between the ancients’ edu-
cation and religion and ours, issuing in a withering critique of ours.
Machiavelli writes that ours “causes us to attach less value to the hon-
ors and possessions of this world, while the pagans, esteeming those
things as the highest good, were more energetic and ferocious in their
actions.” This is the counterpoint to the preface to Book 1, where
Machiavelli argued that we can imitate the ancients because nature has
not changed. For as he writes here, what “our religion teaches as the
truth and the true way of life” is a mere addition or overlay to a more
constant underlying natural leaning toward honor and possessions, a
leaning distorted by ancient philosophy as well. The fact that such a
teaching can hold us in its grip despite our underlying and constant
natural disposition toward honor and gain points to the enormous
power of man to re-create appearances, to the point of almost blotting
out nature, through the “imagined republics.” Machiavelli continues in
the same withering vein: “The pagan religion glorified only men who
had achieved great glory, such as commanders of armies and chiefs of
republics, while ours glorifies more the humble and contemplative men
than the men of action. Our religion . . . places the supreme happiness
in humility, lowliness and a contempt for worldly objects, while the
other . . . places the supreme good in grandeur of soul and body, and
all such other qualities as render men formidable; and if our religion
claims of us fortitude of soul, it is more to enable us to suffer than to
achieve great deeds.”
3. Reading on, however, we learn that our religion is but a distortion
of the original and true Christian teaching, a seemingly more virile
and worldly Christianity that perhaps dovetails with the Reformation’s
invocation of the pristine origins of the faith (on which more below):
“Although it would seem that the world has become effeminate and
Heaven disarmed, yet this arises from the baseness of men, who have
interpreted our religion according to the promptings of indolence rather
than virtue.”

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4. So far, then, we have been presented with the view that Chris-
tianity has irreparably distorted the ancient love of honor, although
that love of honor is still underlyingly true about human nature, sup-
plemented by the view that a more honor seeking and patriotic core
of the original Christianity might be salvaged, its current distortion
owing only to human baseness. Another passage from 2.30.5 com-
pletes the dynamic. Here, Machiavelli observes that, owing to the dif-
ference between today’s republics and ancient republics, we now careen
between extraordinary defeats and extraordinary victories with no con-
sistency of purpose, because “where men have little virtue, Fortune
more signally displays her power.” Then the language becomes mil-
lenarian. These fluctuations in events will continue until “some ruler
shall arise who is so great an admirer of antiquity” that when he rules,
Fortune will not be able “to display her influence and power . . . with
every revolution of the sun.” Precisely because Fortuna is so muta-
ble and unpredictable, she cannot even be relied upon to thwart the
return of ancient valor. Indeed, the new prince may “arise” from her
very fluctuations and, armed with Machiavelli’s teaching, tap into her
power and force her into equilibrium. First, Machiavelli argued that
we should restore the ancient and enduring natural love of honor as
against the wild distortions introduced into human conduct by Chris-
tianity. Then he argued that we might salvage a pristine Christianity
closer to that natural and enduring stalk, to fortify us against these wild
fluctuations. Now he is arguing that the wildness of those fluctuations
might occasion the rise of a prince who would transform nature again,
but this time in a healthy way. (His preference for Lucretian cosmology
over Aristotelian may stem from Lucretius’s belief that innumerable
entirely different worlds have existed in the past and will exist in the
future.)
Putting together these passages, then, we arrive at the following
stages of Machiavelli’s argument: 1) Today’s men, however much dom-
inated by Christianity, are wrong to think they cannot restore ancient
virtue, because nature has not changed. He silently avoids the fact that,
for any believing Christian, nature has been fundamentally changed by
the death and resurrection of God. 2) Failing this restoration of ancient
virtue, they could at least restore a manlier version of “our” religion.
3) The fluctuations of Fortuna restore on a secular level the transfor-
mative dynamic of Christianity by which the death and rebirth of God

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did change nature, so that Machiavelli can now openly argue that a
new prince may emerge who will further transform nature for the sake
of man’s security and well-being. The stages show how Machiavelli’s
rhetorical appeal to antiquity, initially couched in the view that nature
has not changed, gradually drops its mask to reveal a new scope for
the transformation of nature prefigured by revelation itself (cosmolog-
ically, Aristotle gives way to Augustine, with the place of the Creator
God taken by the new prince).

Bearing these permutations in mind, as well as our whole consideration

of Machiavelli’s relationship to Christianity throughout this book, let
us turn to some major interpretative rubrics, including the question
regarding Machiavelli’s endorsement of the political use of religion.
I agree with Sullivan’s view (1996) that Machiavelli criticizes Chris-
tianity for sapping worldly patriotism on behalf of otherworldliness.
I also agree with her insight that, for Machiavelli, the problem with
Rome was that it eventually led to the Caesars, the craving for perma-
nent peace and, therefore, to Christianity. However, I see Machiavelli’s
prescription for the new Rome of the future rather differently. Sullivan
thinks it will avoid religion altogether. As I suggested in this chapter, I
think it will provide a new psychological teaching based on the conquest
of nature and human nature that will be “armed” where Christianity
was “unarmed,” but also take advantage of the world-scale politics
created by Christendom rather than return to the polis that was the
original Roman republic. Certainly Machiavelli does fear that the rise
of republic into empire may make a universal state inevitable, and there-
fore some degree of effemination. But for a republic not to rise to empire
would consign it to being stagnant like Sparta. So the new Rome will
have to rise to empire, but equipped with a new teaching about the
self, to a degree coeval with the spiritual interiority promoted by the
Reformation, that will stave off effemination. In the long run, though,
decline is probably unavoidable for any future Rome, for the reasons I
have observed in the conclusion to this chapter.
In contrast with Sullivan, Viroli (2010) argues that Machiavelli pro-
motes a virile Christianity that supports patriotism and worldly success.
Many scholars see a connection between this side of Machiavelli and the
blend of enhanced secular state power with a purified and individualis-
tic Christianity espoused by the Reformation, such that one could view

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Oliver Cromwell, for instance, as both a Machiavellian patriot and a

Lutheran man of God (a “godly republican,” to use Rahe’s term [2008]
p. 207). Carty (2006, 2010) sees a connection between Machiavelli
and Luther in that both attack the Church and defend the autonomy
of the secular state (for very different reasons, of course). Is Machi-
avelli interested in reforming Christianity? Is he looking for a new,
more civically robust version of the faith? My avenue into this debate
is Machiavelli’s emphasis on psychological interiority and the exercise
of the will, desacralized versions of themes so prominent in Augustine.
Augustine was, of course, central to Luther and the Reformation alto-
gether in its rejection of Thomism’s Aristotelianism-saturated worldly
teleology.
Aristotle’s political philosophy had become a major force in Europe
in the late Middle Ages. It took the form of Thomas Aquinas’ adapta-
tion of Aristotle’s natural philosophy to Christian revelation, to which
it was meant to be seen as squarely subordinate. But it also took a more
controversial form as the “Latin Averroism” thought to have influ-
enced Marsilius of Padua, the transmission from Islamic philosophy of
an unqualified preference for philosophy and reason over revelation and
faith that led Marsilius to argue for an early version of the secular state.
The degree to which Machiavelli partook of Latin Averroism is difficult
to assess. While no doubt something of Marsilius’s endorsement of sec-
ular political authority informs Machiavelli’s stance, because of what I
see as Machiavelli’s emphasis on willpower and the conquest of nature –
a concept of the will that is, in my view, unintelligible without the
Abrahamic concept of God – I cannot view Machiavelli as an Averroist
strictly speaking, because he is not simply advocating a return to ancient
rationalism. Given what I see as Machiavelli’s adaptation of Augustine’s
view of political existence as dominion (while rejecting his concern with
the City of God), combined with his call for the liberation of the human
will from the constraints of nature, I do not believe it can be argued that
Machiavelli would have settled for the purely worldly, pragmatic side
of ancient political rationality even if its most transcendentalist, proto-
Christian side could be jettisoned. For even that pragmatic teaching
would, from Machiavelli’s perspective, still be too confined by the tele-
ological order of nature. Schram (1987) provides a useful discussion of
how Strauss and Voegelin lined up on this issue: Strauss argued that the
Averroist strain in Machiavelli cast doubt on Voegelin’s association of

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Machiavelli with Joachism, whereas Voegelin believed Averroism itself,

by sundering reason from faith, paved the way for modern totalitarian-
ism along with the gnosticism he sometimes located in Machiavelli.
In his interesting book, Parel (1992) argues that we should see Machi-
avelli less as a founder of modern political science and more as a follower
of the astrological cosmology of the Renaissance, as evidenced by his
belief in the “occult” forces of humors. According to Parel, this premod-
ern astrological cosmology was more important for Machiavelli than
either the classical or Christian worldviews. For Parel, the determinism
of astrological cosmology also affects Machiavelli’s view of virtue and
fortune. Because this astrology has no place for a cosmic mind like
that of classical cosmology or for a sovereign God, humans are free
to pursue their desires for riches and glory through their own resolve.
Machiavelli’s political anthropology, according to Parel, is influenced
by the idea that a person’s character is fundamentally shaped by bodily
“humors,” a composite of passion-driven autonomy and spiritual ratio-
nality that can be extended from the individual to the larger political
bodies of republics, principalities, and empires.
Parel makes many sound points about Machiavelli’s anthropology,
particularly about the importance of “humors,” which combine body,
mind, and will in an organic immanentized whole, and therefore consti-
tute, in my terms, a primordialist rather than a transcendentalist concep-
tion of nature. However, I do not see how this proves that Machiavelli’s
anthropology was therefore premodern. For would not many scholars
argue that Renaissance astrology was itself a forbear in part of modern
natural science? During the Renaissance, arguably, a form of “scientific
astrology” began to develop in which court astrologers would blend
their forecasts based on horoscopes with actual empirical discoveries
about nature. Thus, figures such as Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes
Kepler, credited with having overthrown the old order of astrology and
Aristotelian cosmology, were practicing astrologers and scientists at the
same time.
Roger Masters (1996) covers similar territory as Parel with his argu-
ment that Machiavelli was influenced by Leonardo’s ideas about the
use of science and technology to benefit human life, but he draws from
it the opposite conclusion – that Machiavelli’s political science, and
that of his successors, is deeply connected with the evolution of modern
science and its study of nature. Just as one might observe about Parel

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that some of his exemplars like Galileo were to some degree already
scientific moderns, one might observe about Masters that Leonardo
was to some degree still a premodern in his study of astrology and
alchemy. My own view is that, although Machiavelli’s understanding
of nature probably does owe something to Renaissance astrology, and
especially to the ancient medical concept of “humors,” whether one
regards these bodies of knowledge as premodern or (as I am inclined to
think) protomodern, his own political ontology is not wholly reducible
to any of these influences, but is, in its desacralized Augustinian view of
politics as dominion and his emphasis on the will to master nature for-
merly attributed to God, a unique new synthesis of ancient and modern
themes and of reason and revelation.
In an interesting variation on these quandaries, Lukes (1984),
although rejecting as self-evidently ridiculous the idea that Machiavelli
was a conventionally believing Christian, also argues that the spiri-
tual power of Christianity was one that Machiavelli wished to enlist
in his own cause, and not merely reject, which meant that, much as
he might have admired the pagan civil religion of the Romans, he
neither could nor wished entirely to return to it. Lukes sees in The
Mandragola a formula by which religious leaders could assist political
rulers in spreading the new political science while, precisely because they
are religious leaders, they could assist the prince in this way without
being “accused of temporal aggrandizement when secretly promoting
the aims of the armed politician through careful manipulation of church
doctrine. . . . Savanarola’s mistake is not that he remains unarmed, but
that he does not form a secret alliance with a capable prince.” In other
words, precisely the apparent otherworldly focus and detachment from
power politics of the Christian spiritual leader could be a powerful
weapon in promoting the new politics, in contrast with the blatant
politicality of the Romans’ civil religion. This very much comports with
my own view of how Machiavelli wants to make use of the univer-
salism of Christianity while endowing it with new content. If Lukes
is correct (and I think he is), then there is a more direct and fungible
connection than is sometimes apprehended between Machiavelli and
Hobbes’s later, more forthright attempt to assimilate the authority of
the Church and its teachings to the Sovereign’s needs in maintaining
the social compact. Of course one should add in the case of Savanarola
that, were he to form a secret alliance with a capable prince, the content

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of his own teaching would have to change as well, presumably in a more

Lutheran direction according to which the secular political sphere could
be accommodated rather than thundered against for its moral turpitude.
Going to the core of Machiavelli’s probable intention, Germino
(1966) takes issue with Strauss’s interpretation of Machiavelli as a
covert “blasphemer,” although he does not deny that Machiavelli pre-
ferred to focus on the concrete world of the here and now rather than
on the world of the hereafter. He relies to an extent on Machiavelli’s
Exhortation to Penitence, an admittedly anomalous work in that it
takes the form of a sermon. Now, of course, if one viewed Machiavelli
as sensing a possible congruence between his own new science of poli-
tics and the side of the rising Reformation that stressed the renunciation
of worldly teleology, the enhancement of secular political authority and
called for inner self-mastery and the purification of the will, he might
well have believed it salutary to associate himself rhetorically with calls
for the Church in Italy to reform. His argument in the Exhortation
that the Church has encouraged “sloth” is certainly in keeping with his
praise of labor and strictures against sloth in the Discourses, which, as I
suggested earlier, although superficially endorsing traditional morality,
arguably undermines faith rather than bolsters it by making the labor
for material survival more important either than classical contemplation
or religious devotion. As for Machiavelli’s reminder in the Exhortation
that nothing in this human realm is lasting – which Germino stresses in
order to suggest that Machiavelli is not a rank atheist or blasphemer –
that, too, is a theme sounded throughout the Discourses and is one that
is compatible with any number of secular or pagan philosophies ranging
from Plato to Lucretius, as well as with elements of Christianity.
There is certainly a valid debate as to whether Machiavelli is rejecting
all forms of religious faith altogether (especially that of his own era),
calling for the restoration of a Roman-style civil religion, or calling
instead for a return to the spiritual purity of Christianity in its earliest
form, deemed by Viroli not to be incompatible with worldly patri-
otism. Pellerin (2006) provides an interesting twist on Machiavelli’s
qualified receptiveness to some versions of Christianity with his argu-
ment that Pope Alexander VI is favored by Machiavelli as the kind of
religious leader who might reunite Italy. My own view is that Machi-
avelli is attempting to provide a new, psychologically “armed” teaching
to replace the “unarmed” teaching of Christianity, based on the inward

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and outward struggle to master nature. It is a teaching that possesses

the universality of Christianity while eschewing its unworldliness and
pacifism and is at the same time compatible with the spread of com-
mercial materialism and self-interest, the liberation of the secular state
from ecclesiastical interference, and with the emerging trend of the Ref-
ormation to seek to purify Christianity by turning away from worldly
teleology and its celebration of the visible splendors of nature crowned
by the Imitatio Christi and returning to the inwardness often associ-
ated with Augustine. The conjunction between Machiavelli’s secular
promotion of inwardness and Luther’s spiritual promotion of it is, as
a long and varied literature testifies, a watershed moment in which
the growth of secular political power, the expansion of market soci-
eties, and of religious Protestantism unfolded in tandem, captured by
Tawney’s phrase “worldly asceticism.” Two recent, somewhat but not
entirely complementary books have contributed fresh perspectives on
this debate. Gillespie (2009) takes the view that modernity did not seek
to eradicate religion but to evolve a new understanding of its place in
society. Although he makes this case with respect to Ockham, Petrarch,
Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, and Hobbes, I believe it could be made with
respect to Machiavelli as well, in the qualified sense I am arguing here.
Beiner (2010) takes the more familiar view that modernity regarded
revealed religion warily, as a source of zealotry and intolerance, but
also recognized its value for a civil religion and code of culture that
would ground liberal individualism and elevate it above mere material
self-interest.
I have no quarrel with de Grazia’s argument (1994) that religiously
derived motifs run throughout Machiavelli’s writings. Machiavelli cer-
tainly does present a speculative cosmology within which are ranged
the forces of fortune, virtue, the rise and fall of states, the limitations
placed by time and fortune on human aspiration, and the meaning of
virtue and vice. I have argued specifically that Machiavelli adapts and
reconfigures Augustinian conceptions of dominion and will. But the
point is that they are religiously derived, not religious in their intrin-
sic content. If I am right that Machiavelli’s political science is based
essentially on Augustine’s City of Man bereft of the City of God, then
it would not be surprising that he shadows the theologian in multiple
ways. This is not tantamount to Machiavelli himself writing from the

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stance of religious revelation, however. Moreover, some of his cosmo-

logical speculations draw much more forthrightly from pagan thinkers
such as Lucretius than from any element of recognized Christian theol-
ogy. I agree entirely with Nederman (1999) who, in adding to the line
of argument begun by de Grazia, emphasizes Machiavelli’s focus on
freedom of will as a religiously derived theme. Again, though, I would
argue that Machiavelli extracts the power of the will from the Augus-
tinian conception of God so as to transfer it to the secular prince in
a way that no form of religious belief or earlier theology could have
advocated.
Finally, turning to the issue of the specific connection between
Machiavelli and Luther, Maddox (2002) argues: “From quite differ-
ent motives, both set out to deconstruct the political authority of the
Church of Rome and both adopted an appeal to antiquity over the head,
as it were, of the medieval Christian establishment.” A similar position
is taken by Figgis (1960), who, in Maddox’s words, saw in Luther
“an accomplice to Machiavelli’s aggrandizement of the secular prince.”
Although Luther was appealing to the pure origins of Christianity and
Machiavelli was appealing to the pure origins of ancient republicanism,
they could make common cause in their critique of the contemporary
Church. Was this a conscious alliance? Carty (2006, 2010) believes
that, although we can be fairly certain Machiavelli knew about the
Lutherans, there is no explicit evidence that Luther knew about Machi-
avelli. Guicciardini, Machiavelli’s contemporary, wrote sympathetically
about Luther, symptomatic of Florentine anticlericalism. Viroli (2010)
believes that Machiavelli “knew about Luther and the Lutherans” but
that he was not interested in their specific program for reforming the
Church, wanting instead “a God who would help the men of his own
time, and those of times still to come, to rediscover their love of liberty
and the inner strength demanded by a free way of life.” Many scholars,
of course, would see the Reformation as more fertile ground than the
Church of Rome for this new view of Christianity as an ally of the
love of liberty, and I share that leaning. I am not primarily dwelling
in this book on the detailed connections between Machiavelli’s and
Luther’s respective defenses of the autonomy of the secular state (for
Luther’s side, see Carty op. cit.), but instead on this psychology of
“inner strength” that both extol.

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Gilbert ([1984] p. 193) makes an intriguing observation about the

kind of modern leadership “elect” envisioned by Machiavelli. Whereas
the traditional view of Fortuna, he writes, was that she chose her
favorites capriciously and that nothing could alter her choice, “in con-
trast to the static quality inherent in the belief in the existence of For-
tuna’s elect, Machiavelli’s formulation presumed the dynamism of a
constantly changing scene in which sudden action can bring about the
existence of Fortuna.” This would also be an important way in which
Machiavelli’s “elect” of princes or would-be princes successful in impos-
ing their will on nature would differ from the “elect” of Lutheranism
or Calvinism, a preordained conferral of grace that no worldly action
can alter, although, as Tawney observed, in the sheer vacuum opened
up by the Reformation between the sole individual and a distant God,
with the world in between drained of Thomistic teleology and natural
order, in practice those who were successful, particularly in commerce,
came to view that as some kind of marker for their presumed member-
ship in the Elect. I add some further observations about Machiavelli’s
envisioned leadership Elect in the general Conclusion.

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Tyranny Ancient and Modern

the many faces of machiavelli

As we have considered throughout this book, Machiavelli has many
faces, and attempting to detect the true or truest one has generated a
highly stimulating interpretive literature. An early response to Machi-
avelli saw him as a teacher of evil, lending Satan the name “Old Nick”
for “Niccolo,” while the stage Machiavel became a familiar figure in the
dramas of Marlowe and Shakespeare, whose Iago says he will follow
and improve upon “Machiavel’s murd’rous intent.” From the outset,
however, the evaluation of Machiavelli was mixed. Francis Digby, in his
1685 translation of the Education of Cyrus, recommended Xenophon
by stressing his resemblance to “Machiavel” and the wisdom of his
“Florentine Prince.” In other words, he reversed the trend we noted
in Chapter 5 with regard to Machiavelli himself: whereas Machiavelli
lent his own cause respectability by invoking the ancient Socratic, Digby
praises the ancient thinker on the basis of his resemblance to the Renais-
sance modern. As we earlier observed, Bacon and Spinoza admired
Machiavelli’s political realism and the benefits this worldly approach
might confer. James Harrington in Oceana extolled Machiavelli’s pref-
erence for republican liberty in contrast with Hobbes’s endorsement of
an absolute monarchy indistinguishable from tyranny, which calls into
question the tendency to see Hobbes as Machiavelli’s direct and most
systematic successor. By the same token, state-building despots ranging
from Henry VIII (whose future eminence grise, Thomas Cromwell, was
said to have discovered Machiavelli’s Prince while living in Europe) to
Hitler and Stalin have all been alleged (probably apocryphally) to have
kept Machiavelli’s handbook for tyrants close by for consultation.

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Given his range of influences, one scholar has understandably been

prompted to ask: Will the real Machiavelli please stand up?1 Through-
out The Prince and the Discourses, we find Machiavelli extolling both
principalities and republics; exhorting Florence to reassert her ancient
republican love of liberty; urging other states to do the same, frequently
at one another’s expense; advising foreign princes how Italy might be
reunited through conquest; and criticizing the French invader Louis XII
for his mistakes in attempting to do so, as if to suggest someone else
should have another go at it. He advises tyrants on how to crush their
opponents and republics on how to avoid or overthrow tyrants. He
presents the same men under one aspect as the founders of principali-
ties and from another perspective as the founders of republics. He also
suggests that republics, following the model of Rome, might institu-
tionalize periodic refoundings by princely personalities in the garb of
leading statesmen so as to restore republican vigor and combat effem-
ination. If security and well-being are the aims of all statecraft, the
means to achieve them can be many and various – princely or repub-
lican; through self-liberation or liberation from without. What matters
above all is that politics be this-worldly. Hence Machiavelli’s invocation
of the love of the fatherland meant to encourage an attachment to the
earth, to the love of one’s own, as the prerequisite for any successful
version of statecraft, whether its outcome is republican, princely, or
imperialistic. The Prince and the Discourses examine different modali-
ties embodying this same underlying purpose.
Reconciling these various dimensions of Machiavelli’s new science of
politics shows, in my view, why political theorists should perhaps pay
more attention to the ontological underpinning of an argument, rather
than assessing it purely in terms of its positive, pragmatic advice – that
is to say, to trace these dimensions back to an underlying ground, a
fundamental characterization of reality, beyond which or behind which
there is no antecedent premise. In this book, I have suggested that
Machiavelli’s political ontology has at its core the proposition that
Fortuna might be mastered. As we have also seen, this capacity of a
secular prince to strive to stand outside of nature entails, paradoxically,
the complete immanentization of sound statecraft within nature as a

1 Matteo (2007) p. 245. For a detailed discussion of Machiavelli’s reception through his
earliest translators, see Anglo (2005).

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time-bound process of existence. For once nature has been drained

of teleological transcendence, first by the more Manichean strain of
Augustinian (as opposed to Thomistic) Christianity, and then in purely
worldly terms by Machiavelli, all that remains is temporal existence.
In this sense the “new prince” can be seen as incarnated in nature and
launched on a project to bring power, prosperity, and liberty to the
world, reanimating what Machiavelli hopes is the declining world state
of Christendom just as Christianity had originally reanimated the world
state of Rome.
There is a paradox here that bears a family resemblance to theol-
ogy. Machiavelli is arguing that the prince must strive to stand outside
of nature so as to master it. But insofar as there is no transcendental
ordering of the whole, everything, including the will of the prince, falls
within time-bound existence. The will of the prince is meant to master
the primordial realm of origination by means of methodical rationality,
yet will and reason are entirely immanentized within the primordial
realm of genesis, chance, and motion. This paradox is akin to the dif-
ficulty of distinguishing between the notions that God “creates” and
“reveals.” In the first case, God stands outside of the world and fab-
ricates it. In the second case, something issues through God or from
God. From the second perspective, applied to Machiavelli, one might
say that the entire world, human and nonhuman, including the will of
the prince in its interior dance with time, is Fortuna, which may shed
some further light on the intriguing remark of Leo Strauss discussed
in Chapter 6 that Fortuna “reminds one in some respects of the Bib-
lical God.” We might already detect how Machiavelli’s successors try
to resolve this theological paradox in exclusively this-worldly terms by
embracing and intensifying one side or the other of it: Hobbes’s radical
bifurcation between will as fabrication and nature as purposeless spon-
taneity, on the one hand, and, on the other, Spinoza’s view of nature
evolving continuously into a life-world that contains will and reason
within its temporal fold.
If, to reiterate, the aim of Machiavelli’s new political science is secu-
rity and well-being for both princes and peoples, that aim can involve
any or all of the apparently contradictory means and policies that can
be attributed to Machiavelli. More fundamentally, just as the ontol-
ogy of the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition – the priority of rest over
motion – can radiate in many directions (the best regime as monarchy

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or aristocracy, an education in civic virtue, a private life of well-ordered

pleasure, happiness through philosophizing), Machiavelli’s reversal of
it into the priority of motion over rest (whereby political “perfection”
can be achieved through “chance” and “the aid of events”) can radi-
ate in many directions as well. The difference is that, in Machiavelli’s
political ontology in contrast with that of the ancients, there is no over-
arching transcendent unity – the One or the Good. As a consequence,
each modality of statecraft must stand side by side with the others in its
own existential space. Machiavelli’s ontology is, so to speak, horizontal
rather than hierarchical. Not until Rousseau, when the modern ontol-
ogy of motion is conjoined with the pursuit of erotic fulfillment, is there
a similarly rich flowering of alternatives out of the same fundamental
vision.
Hence, there is no single “real” Machiavelli whom we can expect to
stand up. Machiavelli is at once the Florentine patriot and the cham-
pion of Italian unification, but also the amoral advisor to whoever seeks
power, including a foreign conqueror. Machiavelli is the champion of
republican self-government – the antecedent for the vision of an expan-
sionist, Atlanticist commercial republic – and first formulated the theory
of checks and balances later transmitted by Montesquieu to the Ameri-
can Founders. But he is also the defender of the social contract between
an absolute princely ruler and the ruled based on self-interest and the
protection of property, anticipating the doctrine of the Sovereign in
Hobbes’s Leviathan. At the same time, Machiavelli’s view that every-
one, the common people included, has a natural desire for survival and
prosperity leads away from Hobbesian-style political absolutism and
toward the notion that governments can be representative, based on an
appeal to voluntary assent by citizens to ensure their own well-being
as individuals, the classical liberalism of Locke. However, a dark cor-
ridor also runs from Machiavelli’s endorsement of force and fraud in
the act of founding new modes and orders to Hobbes’s Sovereign with
his capacity to inflict terror and on from there to Rousseau’s Legislator,
and thereby in a sense to modern totalitarianism, inasmuch as human
nature must be thoroughly transformed and provided with entirely new
ways of life at the expense of all previous loyalties. Still, for reasons I
will explore in this Conclusion in due course, although totalitarianism
does partake of an element of Machiavelli’s summons to the conquest

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of nature and human nature, no truly millenarian and utopian vision

of revolution of the kind necessary to explain the Jacobins, Bolsheviks,
and Nazis appears until Rousseau. Or, as we might put it, Machiavelli
is open to brutality, but not to sentimental brutality. His more direct
heirs among the tribe of despots are not revolutionary fantasists like
Robespierre, Hitler, or Stalin, ushering in by means of genocide the
global nirvana of absolute equality and collectivism, but modernizing
despots like Kemal Ataturk, the last shah of Iran, or Vladimir Putin –
Hobbesian Sovereigns in practice.
For Machiavelli, then, it depends on the situation whether security
and well-being can best be maximized by republican liberty, princely
control, an expansionist empire, or even by conquest and unification
from without.2 Any of these are preferable to the effeminacy and insta-
bility created by Christianity and the Church, the only institutions
Machiavelli consistently criticizes in every context, although, as we
observed in Chapter 7, the universal (albeit psychologically “unarmed”)
state created by Christianity does up the ante for the scope of

2 Machiavelli does not always favor republics over principalities, or the overthrow of
principalities in order to establish republics. Although some republics like Rome were
for a time capable of being restored to liberty from an interval of corruption (“los-
ing the head while the trunk was still sound”), some peoples under princely rule
have been so thoroughly corrupted that it would be better for the current prince
to be replaced by another prince than for them to try to live as a republic (Dis-
courses 1.17). As Gilbert observed in a still valuable work (1954), quoting Ranke, it
is arguable that Machiavelli thought Italy’s condition to be so desperate that even con-
quest and unification from without was an acceptable cure. A good example of Machi-
avelli’s indifference as to whether Italy is unified by a prince or a republic is chapter
4 of The Prince, in which Machiavelli segues from Pope “Alessandro” in chapter 3,
patron of Cesare and a master manipulator, to “Alessandro” (the Great’s) conquest
of Asia. Unification faces two challenges: centralized states like that of Darius or the
Ottoman Sultan that, although hard to conquer, pass intact into your hands and are
easy to maintain, and decentralized states like France, which are easy to conquer but,
owing to their many feudal statelets, and hence their memory of independence, are hard
to hold until the local noble bloodlines are extinguished, as the Romans demonstrated.
Machiavelli’s Italy is both decentralized because of its many small states (like France) and
centralized owing to the Church’s authority (like “Asia” or “the Turk”). A new “Alessan-
dro” will have to find a way of combining both modes of occupation – perhaps by being
less of an otherworldly ruler like the pope and more of a worldly one like the sultan,
who combines secular and religious authority, an expansion of secular state power that
was already emerging in the sixteenth century owing to Luther and the Reformation and
was to some extent a return to the Caesaropapism of the early Christian and Orthodox
emperors.

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Machiavelli’s own envisioned new modes and orders. The “desire to

acquire,” guided by a psychology of internalized method for the mastery
of nature, most easily combinable with the interiority of Protestantism
as opposed to the celebration of nature crowned by the Imitatio Christi
found in much of Catholicism (and we may recall that, in parting with
Thomism’s “theology of glory,” Luther saw himself as returning to the
ascetic purity of Augustine), may generate a new teaching that is both
spiritual inasmuch as it spreads through the influence of modern ideas
and, psychologically speaking, is not “unarmed” because it is free of
the delusions that lead us to relying on Fortuna.
That all said, however, I believe that, among these various alternative
modes of rule, there is a definite preference on Machiavelli’s part for a
vigorous republic that is able to resist encroachment from without by
being able to expand and absorb other regime principles in a flexible,
dynamic mixture of powers, the model of which is Rome, the city that
contained “more virtues than any other republic,” including, of course,
the republic of Plato and the republic of God. “Rome” comes closest
to combining, within its dynamic evolution, all of Machiavelli’s other
endorsements of princely, republican (in the small-scale Spartan sense),
and imperial rule, whereas no single one of those other modes can like-
wise be said to embrace all the others. The teaching on republics in the
Discourses is, accordingly, more comprehensive than the teaching on
princes in The Prince, because the teaching on republics can compre-
hend the teaching on princes – they are in the best instance the founders
or refounders of republics, while their vigor can resurface in leading cit-
izens like Manlius Torquatus defending the rigor of the law – whereas
the reverse is not the case, although this does not mean that in certain
circumstances a lone prince who can establish internal order would not
be the preferable alternative to a republic less adroit or more corrupt
than Rome. Altogether, because princely personalities emerge period-
ically in republics as refounders, the Discourses has, as it were, the
best of both worlds, the comprehensive teaching on both republics and
princes. Moreover, because it is more comprehensive, the Discourses is
in my view a more overtly philosophical work than The Prince, and, as
we have earlier observed, contains speculations about fortune, human
nature, and time in more explicitly philosophical terms than does the
shorter work. It is also more speculative because, whereas The Prince
is addressed (at least ostensibly) to an established ruler, the Discourses

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is addressed to potential princes, the two young men to whom it is

dedicated. (“I . . . do not address myself to such as are princes, but to
those who by their infinite good qualities are worthy to be such”).3

Having made these general observations about how, in my view, the

many influences of Machiavelli flow from a core ontological stance, I
now want to consider some of those individual pathways. Let us begin
with the best known and the most accessible, the tradition of the “stage
Machiavel.” It is most directly identifiable in Marlowe’s The Jew of
Malta, where Old Nick himself opens the play with the remark: “I count
religion but a childish toy/And hold there is no sin but ignorance.”
Although the first line is an oversimplification – Machiavelli regarded
the psychological hold of religion as truly formidable, not a childish
toy – the frankness with which it portrays Machiavelli as an atheist
must point to a widely held view of him some sixty years after his
death. The second line, “there is no sin but ignorance,” which implies
an antithesis between wisdom and religious faith, is more interesting.
For the reverse would be “there is no virtue but wisdom,” which is to
that faith is not a virtue; that wisdom can be achieved without faith.
As I observed in Chapter 6, the line is arguably a gloss on Machiavelli’s
remark in chapter 12 of The Prince where, alluding to the preaching
of Savanarola to the effect that Italy was easily invaded by the King
of France because of its sins, he sardonically writes: “He who told us
that our sins were the cause of it told the truth, but they were not the

3 Strauss’s judgment about the comparative merits of The Prince and the Discourses is
nuanced. He begins by arguing that it is “prudent” to assume that Machiavelli’s “teach-
ing in either The Prince or the Discourses is all-comprehensive.” However, he qualifies
this by observing that whereas The Prince is a “call to action” to liberate Italy, the
Discourses is “leisurely” because it is aimed at the development of “potential princes,”
particularly through a meditation on “the spirit of antiquity.” Leisure is the precondi-
tion for philosophy, and, in this sense like the Republic, the Discourses is aimed toward
potential leaders, not actual ones. In this regard, therefore, its scope would appear to
be both broader and more contemplative than that of The Prince. Finally, as Strauss
observes, although “we find in the Discourses a number of statements to the effect that
republics are superior to principalities, we do not find in The Prince a single statement
to the effect that principalities are superior to republics.” This would comport with my
view that the teaching of the Discourses is both more philosophical and more republican.
Finally: “Princes are superior to peoples as regards the founding of states, peoples are
superior to princes as regards the preservation of states.” Assuming that preservation
(which includes refounding) is even more important than founding, this would put the
Discourses ahead of The Prince. Strauss (1969) pp. 22, 25.

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sins he imagined, but those which I have related. And as they were the
sins of princes, it is the princes who have also suffered the penalty.” In
other words, the sin of princes is ignorance about the “effectual truth”
of statecraft, specifically of the chapter’s general maxim that, because
there cannot be good laws without the enforcing power of good arms,
we should omit the discussion of good laws entirely and focus only on
how to acquire the arms. This maxim constitutes another reversal of
the classics, for whom military policy, if discussed at all, should only
be a subordinate factor in a city’s just constitution because focusing on
it too prominently might elevate the aims of foreign policy, warfare,
and conquest over those of internal self-government.
Living in the wake of the Enlightenment, where we might view the
maxim of Marlowe’s Machiavelli (“there is no sin but ignorance”) as
a droll drawing room quip savoring of Metternich or Kissinger, we
need to reimagine how shocking many people would still find it in early
modernity. In stark contrast with classical philosophy, which held that
wisdom was the highest human aim, the Abrahamic faiths uniformly
proclaimed it the height of pride and folly to suppose that the study
of nature by the unaided human intellect could achieve wisdom in the
absence of divine authority. Indeed, human observation and learning on
their own were likelier to compound one’s ignorance, like one who mis-
takes a stick bent by its reflection in the water for the real thing. As the
Ecclesiast wrote in a sentiment that might be admired by pious Jews,
Christians, and Muslims alike: “My son, be admonished: of making
many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
This is the end of the matter; all hath been heard: fear God, and keep
his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.” For the biblical
faiths, reliance on any merely human wisdom about nature virtually
summed up the meaning of sin, whereas a disavowal or avoidance of
such knowledge, far from being (as Marlowe’s Machiavelli would have
it) the only sin, reflected a humility appropriate to man’s fallen con-
dition in contrast with the vainglorious pursuit of knowledge without
obedience to God. Hence, the maxim placed by Marlowe on Machi-
avelli’s lips would truly have been a Count Floyd moment for many
theater-goers – very scary! Its shocking quality becomes clearer when
we recall that man was expelled from Eden for wanting to eat from
the tree of knowledge. In this acute sense, from a religious perspec-
tive, ignorance, or at least ignorance about philosophy, far from being

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the only sin, is arguably the only virtue, and the pursuit of knowledge
absent a submission to God the only vice. Of course, we must bear in
mind at the same time that the Marlowe Machiavelli’s implicit defense
of wisdom over ignorance is of the new wisdom of man’s capacity to
master nature, in this respect as alien to the classical understanding of
wisdom as it is to the biblical faiths.
Machiavelli is mentioned by name in several of Shakespeare plays
(“Am I politic? Am I subtle? Am I a Machavel?” asks the Host in
The Merry Wives of Windsor), perhaps most notably when Richard III
claims that, in his capacity for deceiving others, he can outdo Machi-
avelli himself (“set the murderous Machiavelli to school”). Richard’s
ability to “frame (his) face for all occasions,” to “add colours to the
chameleon” and change “shapes with Proteus,” certainly does recall
Machiavelli’s maxim in The Prince that one must appear to cultivate
all the virtues for their own sake while not actually doing so, because
“all see you, few touch what you are.” Still, the capacity for deception,
ruthlessness, treachery, and murder does not in itself add anything fun-
damentally new to our understanding of human behavior that is not
found either in the Bible or the classics. People were well aware of this
side of human behavior before Machiavelli appeared to openly endorse
it, and aspiring tyrants and glory seekers had always acted on it and
were known to have done so. In my view, the deeper and more dis-
tinctively Machiavellian portrayal of the new prince in Shakespeare’s
plays is not Richard III but Henry Bolingbroke in Richard II. This play
captures as perhaps no other of Shakespeare’s plays does so clearly the
passing away of the old politics of the classical/Christian conglomerate
and the emergence of the new prince called for by Machiavelli, even
though that transition is set anachronistically in the fourteenth century
(not the only time Shakespeare uses the past as a way of commenting on
the Tudor and Elizabethan present). Old John of Gaunt depicts the clas-
sical/Christian conglomerate rooted in the soil of the island kingdom:
“This seat of Mars/This other Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built
by Nature for herself . . . This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings”
(2.1). Nature is beneficent, orderly, and self-regulating, producing kings
by hereditary descent whose Christian legitimacy prevents corruption
and usurpers from arising. We might recall Machiavelli’s brief depic-
tion of hereditary principalities in chapter 2 of The Prince – one emerges
much like the last, like one brick being laid upon another in a wall.

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Richard II, by contrast, is a prime example of Machiavelli’s obser-

vation in the Discourses that men in general “do not know how to
be either altogether wicked or altogether good,” preferring to “take
certain middle ways that are very harmful” (1.26). Richard is neither
entirely good nor entirely bad, and this ambivalence invites his over-
throw. He insists on his divine right and the absolute obedience to which
it obliges his subjects. Yet by ordering the Duke of Gloucester’s death
and stripping Henry Bolingbroke of his inheritance because he fears that
Bolingbroke aims to expose his guilt for this political murder, Richard
undermines his own legitimacy and the principle of hereditary right. It
is Richard himself who subverts the beneficent teleological order eulo-
gized by John of Gaunt, sealing his own doom. As the Duke of York
laments, when a king undermines the just treatment of subjects and the
hereditary principle he is pledged to uphold, all authority is thereby
subverted from the crown on down (2.1.195–200). From Machiavelli’s
perspective, we might say that Richard is riven by the same vacillation
and inconsistency as Cesare Borgia – while capable of ruthlessness, he
at the same time clings to the very morality he has undermined. Like
Richard specifically, Cesare as depicted by Machiavelli uses deception
and violence against opponents yet relies on hereditary descent, in this
case his peculiar legitimacy as the natural son of Pope Alexander. He is
thus, in Machiavelli’s depiction, an unsuccessful halfway house in con-
trast with Hiero of Syracuse’s “well-used” cruelty in slaughtering the
entire nobility at one go. Richard, too, from Machiavelli’s perspective,
should either have ruled justly – for the reputation for justice, we recall,
can be a source of power – or have been much more consistent in his use
of force and fraud, throwing off the veneer of divine right and the feudal
obligations to primogeniture until his power was absolutely established,
at which time he could have history rewritten so as to reinstate his legit-
imacy in terms of the traditional virtues. Instead, he is “Machiavellian”
only in the superficial sense that he has parted with a sense of shame
over political murder and treachery, but has not parted with his reliance
on Fortuna as the source of his throne by hereditary descent. He is half
evil: the Duke of York complains that Richard is addicted to “fash-
ions in proud Italy/Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation/Limps
after in base imitation,” a slightly anachronistic reference given that the
play is set in 1327, but for its Elizabethan audience with its still awak-
ening exposure to the Renaissance, perhaps a suggestion that Richard’s

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addiction to this more sophisticated foreign culture has helped corrupt

him and rob him of the stalwart decency of old England.
It is Bolingbroke who grasps Machiavelli’s new princely methodol-
ogy of the lion and fox, the cold-blooded alternation between force and
fraud. Even before he sends Bolingbroke into exile, Richard voices the
suspicion that he has been courting the common people. When Bol-
ingbroke returns to lead a rebellion that has already broken out, his
advance is relentless and silent, like a shark speeding beneath the water.
He claims that he only wants his inheritance restored, but we know
that others like Northumberland already see him as a future king. Ini-
tially, he neither encourages nor discourages them in this expectation.
Soon after, however, he begins referring to himself as a “prince” whose
bloodline is as legitimate as that of Richard, upping his claim from mere
nobility to royal competitor. While professing that he has returned to
rescue Richard from the rebels, perhaps with some implication of a
new entente between crown and nobility, he executes Richard’s cap-
tured ministers as if he were already king himself. He maintains this
outward ambivalence about whether he will restore Richard or depose
him until the very end, when, having methodically stripped Richard of
his allies, he is in a position to depose him without opposition or risk,
a perfect example of Machiavelli’s recipe for the alternation between
the lion (in this case, an outward profession of loyalty to a just cause,
the “rescue” of Richard) and the fox (an inner calculation of pure self-
interest). As Bolingbroke makes his steady headway, Richard careens
between overconfidence and despair. He relies on Fortuna in the form
of the armies and allies he deludedly believes are coming to save him,
then is absolutely crushed when Fortuna betrays him in the form of their
desertion to Bolingbroke, driven at length to the mad excess of believ-
ing that he can summon a host of angels to his rescue. As his power
slips away, he is increasingly captive to the delusion of the “imagined
republics,” specifically the divine right of kings that he himself has sub-
verted, a phantasm of principle that is entirely, to use Machiavelli’s
term, “unarmed.”
Especially striking is the contrast between Bolingbroke and Richard
in the use of speech and rhetoric. Bolingbroke is terse in issuing orders
and taking counsel, saying only what is necessary to advance his cause.
Although he will justify himself in public to his followers, he indulges in
no lengthy private soliloquies about the meaning of his life, emotions,

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and beliefs. In this, I believe he is a more profoundly Machiavellian

portrayal by Shakespeare than those superficially more recognizable
and widely regarded as such, including Iago and Edmund, both of
whom revel privately at length in their treachery and cynicism, and
relish the revenges they are plotting against the mighty. Bolingbroke
best exemplifies Machiavelli’s new prince because he will not allow
himself to become enthralled by the spell of his own rhetoric, to fall
in love with claims about the justice of his cause, or to blind himself
with moral zealotry over the evil of his opponent. Cold at the core, he
projects his rhetorical effects to his followers like a movie on a screen.
As Machiavelli advises, the prudent prince will not fall prey to believing
in the nobility and beauty of his own claim to rule: he understands the
need to purge from his inner motives this erotic longing for the kind of
immortality through a noble reputation extolled by moral philosophers.
The victor can write his own history later.
Richard, by contrast, who is neither perfectly good nor bad, becomes
ever more loquacious, ruminative, and introspective as his royal power
drains away, ever more saintly as his only remaining prop is the whim
of Fortuna, which he misinterprets as the invisible support of God.
Shakespeare employs Richard’s utter folly and delusion about what it
really takes to be a prince as the source of some of the most beautiful
poetry in any of his plays, with a marked Augustinian resonance in its
emphasis on the frailty of man in his worldly pomp when confronted
with the ravages of mortality and time (3.2):

“For within the hollow crown

that rounds the mortal temples of a king
keeps Death his court and there the antic sits
scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp
allowing him a breath, a little scene
to monarchize, be feared and kill with looks,
infusing him with self and vain conceit
as if this flesh which walls about our life
were brass impregnable and humored thus
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!”

The consolation of mystical insight for the foolish loss of worldly power
is an irony that Machiavelli might well appreciate.

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The bookend to John of Gaunt’s vision of the teleological benefi-

cence of England under the classical/Christian conglomerate, a symbol
of the old politics, is the Gardener’s speech (3.4), the symbol of the
new Machiavellian politics embodied by Bolingbroke, now Henry IV.
Whereas Gaunt praised nature for her teeming bounty, including the
steady breeding of legitimate hereditary kings, the Gardener stresses
that nature must be controlled through pruning and cutting back – sim-
ilar to language that, as we noted in Chapter 7, Machiavelli employs in
the Discourses in reference to the Romans, those surgeons and horticul-
turalists of power. The defender of the old order was a royal duke, but
the avatar of Bolingbroke’s regime is a lowly person, an artisan. This
reflects Bolingbroke’s alliance with the common people at the expense
of the nobles, whose arrogance and love of honor make them, as Machi-
avelli advises in chapter 9 of The Prince, less reliable than the common
people’s humble expectations, and who therefore must be purged. As
the Gardener concludes about his horticultural techniques in the little
fiefdom of his garden, “all must be even in our commonwealth.” Bol-
ingbroke’s own method parallels that of the Gardener when he refers
to Richard’s swaggering entourage as “the caterpillars of the common-
wealth, which I have sworn to weed and pluck away.”

the two corridors to modernity (dark and light)

Now that we have considered the impact of the stage Machiavel on
the early modern imagination, let us proceed to the consequences and
implications of Machiavelli’s new political science more strictly in terms
of political philosophy. I have argued that from the core of Machiavelli’s
new ontology of tyranny – the summons to conquer fortune or chance
and the immanentization of political existence as a completely time-
bound process – many paths radiate. By way of concluding this study, I
want to trace two main corridors that open up into the development of
political modernity, corridors to some extent separate from one another,
but sometimes intertwining. I begin with an overview, then look more
closely at some of the major components.
What Machiavelli in chapter 3 of The Prince terms “the natural
desire to acquire” material goods and prosperity opens the way to a
politics based on a social contract designed to maximize every indi-
vidual’s prospects for survival and commodious living, entailing the

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overthrow of the old feudal-theocratic politics of economic monopoly

and frozen social mobility and advancement. Accompanying this project
for a politics of individual opportunity and prosperity was the new
physics of Bacon, explicitly designed to create power over nature for
“the relief of man’s estate” (Bacon [1937] p. 214). In this sense, Bacon’s
call for the mastery of nature through scientific experimentation repre-
sents a narrowing of Machiavelli’s more general and variegated onto-
logical summons to the conquest of Fortuna by the new virtu. Hobbes
continues this narrowing by building his teaching about the social con-
tract on the physics of matter in motion inaugurated by Bacon, trans-
ferring to human agency – as Machiavelli had envisioned – the power
of “artificer” over nature formerly reserved for God.
In keeping with the Tudor and Elizabethan opening up of the New
World, and later against the backdrop of the civil wars in seventeenth-
century England which were to some degree a battle between the old
and new politics as well as between the Church of Rome and the Refor-
mation, the Machiavellian prescription based on the evolution of Rome
from republic to empire is increasingly identified with the English vision
of a commercial Atlanticist republic whose destiny lies to the west, the
future site of those scientific marvels for mankind’s benefit envisioned
by Bacon’s island utopia, the New Atlantis. The new world of Shake-
speare’s The Tempest, the island of Bermuda, is followed by Harring-
ton’s island republic Oceana. Harrington, although intellectually not on
a level with Hobbes, does return behind Hobbes’s reduction of Machi-
avelli’s new science of politics to a model for absolute monarchy to the
more full-blooded republicanism of the Discourses, on whose account
of the evolution of Rome Oceana is partly based. Harrington is every bit
as much a materialist as Hobbes, and he shares both Hobbes’s appeal
to individual self-interest and his distrust of the classical prescriptions
for an education in virtuous character. At the same time, however,
Harrington rejects Hobbes’s exclusive endorsement of monarchy and,
more like Machiavelli, envisions an expansionist republic of checks
and balances, “bent on increase” and driven by the tension between
its agrarian commoners and a martially inclined nobility. He is also
more inclined than Hobbes – and in this, again, truer to Machiavelli –
toward treating honor seeking as an independent variable in political
motivation, not reducing it like Hobbes to a distorted understanding of
a more fundamentally natural and rational desire for self-preservation

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and a fear of violent death. Like Machiavelli, Harrington often drapes

his anticlassicism in, as Paul Rahe (2008) puts it, the rhetorical “toga”
of veneration for the pragmatic political practice of the ancients, as
opposed to the transcendentalism of their philosophy.
We recall from Chapter 1 that Hobbes is silent about the motivation
of the absolute ruler of the Leviathan – the one glory seeker who is
needed to crush all the other glory seekers – because to explore this psy-
chology would call into question the alleged universality of the desire
for self-preservation according to which glory seeking is degraded into
mere irrational “vainglory.” Harrington, by contrast, and again more
like Machiavelli, is prone to recognize the rare type of men who want
supreme prestige for its own sake. The founder of Oceana, the Lord
Archon – a stand-in for the Lord General Oliver Cromwell and an ide-
alization of what Harrington would wish him to be – is said to establish
Oceana out of a love of glory. Moreover, whereas Hobbes’s chief con-
cern was with the state’s inner order and security, Harrington and the
other English republicans understand, like Machiavelli, the potentially
universal appeal of the spirit of republican liberty. As Rahe has argued,
long before the French Revolution, the English republicans (Puritans
and Machiavellians alike) dreamed of liberating all Europe from king-
ship and priestcraft, further confirming the early connection we have
discussed, already visible in Machiavelli, between the spiritual individ-
ualism and interiority of Protestantism and the worldly individualism
of what would come to be regarded as the Protestant “work ethic.”4
Meanwhile, as this tableaux of westward expansion unfolded,
philosophers not explicitly concerned with fomenting a commercial
expansionist republic but more concerned with a prescription for inter-
nal self-government, such as Spinoza and Locke, worked to humanize
and rehabilitate the harshly reductionist materialism and authoritarian-
ism of Hobbes, arguing that individualism was not wholly at odds with

4 In addition to his overall superb scholarship and rare ability to relate theoretical princi-
ples to the flow of events and personalities, I am specifically reliant on Rahe’s reading of
Harrington, how he compares and contrasts with Hobbes, and, in my own assessment
of what I term the many faces of Machiavelli, Rahe’s argument that the English repub-
lican experiment conducted between 1649 and 1660 was already aiming, Puritans and
Machiavellians alike, more than a century ahead of the Jacobins, to spread the revolution
against traditional divine right monarchy and “priestcraft” throughout all of Europe.
Rahe (2008).

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a larger sense of historical community and could serve nobler values of

tolerance and educational enlightenment beyond mere self-enrichment,
and, most important in Locke’s case, that self-interested individuals
were capable of voluntarily establishing their own institutions of repre-
sentative self-government, avoiding the need for the odious Hobbesian
prescription for a monarch who in truth would be indistinguishable
from a tyrant. In this respect, Locke wrote the script for the Glorious
Revolution of 1689, while his Whig successor Edmund Burke contin-
ued Locke’s work by grafting liberalism onto the unfolding of English
history since Magna Carta, ostensibly reconciling the radicalism of the
new science of politics with stalwart English traditions of the rule of
law, a hierarchy of classes, and the sanctity of property.
The English Revolution continued to unfold into the American Rev-
olution (as Michael Barone [2007] has suggested, they were two install-
ments of the same dynamic), a Lockean prescription leavened by Mon-
tesquieu, who like Harrington had revived and extended Machiavelli’s
interest in Rome, which Montesquieu used as one of the bases for
his model of a mixed regime premised upon enlightened self-interest
and a respect for commerce and its concomitants of religious tolerance
and rationality, as against the superstitious priest-ridden world of feu-
dal Europe. These several streams came together in the New Rome,
America, whose founders often saw their work as the reenactment of
ancient republican virtue mediated by the Enlightenment, propertied
and liberally educated men of substance who identified with Brutus
and liberty as against Caesar, Catiline, and demagoguery, promoting a
regime of internal checks and balances combined with a nascent con-
tinental empire to be opened up through agriculture and commerce.
Jefferson’s Palladian masterpiece Monticello embodied these overlap-
ping motifs – it was adorned with Greek and Roman antiquities but
also had a portrait of Locke prominently displayed.5

5 I very much agree with Rahe (2005), as against the Cambridge school, that the American
founders, however much they may have admired classical antiquity, were not primarily
influenced by classical political philosophy but by the new science of politics, as Hamilton
regarded it, filtered to them, on the one hand from Montesquieu, and on the other from
the English republicanism of Harrington and Locke, stretching back to their common
stalk, Machiavelli. See my own discussion of the Founders’ and especially Hamilton’s
dislike of the ancient Greek polis and his belief that the new science of politics had
remedied the defects of classical republicanism. Newell (2009) pp. 129–206.

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One corridor to modernity, then, runs from Machiavelli to the rel-

atively sunny uplands of Lockean liberalism, science at the service of
the common man, prosperity, and representative government.6 How-
ever, another, darker corridor runs from the same source, and because
our theme is tyranny, that darker corridor concerns us foremost in
what remains of this Conclusion. That darker side entails the exten-
sion in principle of Machiavelli’s summons to the conquest of nature
to the tyrannical reshaping of human nature in the apocalyptic cre-
ation of “new modes and orders” by rulers of godlike scope and power.
Hobbes’s Sovereign is equipped to liquify his subjects in fear by repli-
cating, through his own acts of terror, that terror inflicted directly on us

6 An interesting variation on the issue of the narrowing and reinterpretation of Machi-

avelli’s new science of politics can be found in the bracing book by John McCormick
(2011). McCormick argues that the Cambridge School (exemplified by Pocock and Skin-
ner) have turned Machiavelli into the precursor of modern American republicanism,
which the author views as egregiously elitist, plutocratic, and undemocratic. He attempts
to rescue Machiavelli from this cooptation by stressing that Machiavelli finds in Rome a
prescription for populist democracy, not elitist and capitalistic republicanism. He accuses
the Cambridge School of smoothly integrating Machiavelli’s teaching into the stance of
ancient thinkers such as Cicero, ignoring the fact that they were defenders of oligarchy
and patrician privilege and therefore antithetical to Machiavelli’s defense of the common
people and their justified need to “patrol” the upper classes and keep their greed and
power seeking in check. I am partly sympathetic to this interpretation. I have argued in
this book that Machiavelli’s political teaching is radically opposed to that of even the
most pragmatic among the ancients such as Cicero, which is why Machiavelli’s discussion
of Cicero is scant and far from completely approving, but not primarily because they rep-
resented an elitist viewpoint, but rather because they mistook the reality of princely and
republican power seeking and were too heavily mortgaged to the classical orientation on
the eternal truth about the cosmos. I also agree that there is a certain kind of populism
in Machiavelli’s diagnosis, accompanied by an ironic debunking of oligarchical claims to
superiority (for instance, in chapter 9 of The Prince). Nonetheless, I believe McCormick
goes too far in seeing in Machiavelli’s approval of class conflict a consistent recipe for
populist curtailment of elites. Surely that class conflict is a dynamic by which both “the
people” and “the nobles” aggrandize their power and wealth – there is both a populist
and a plutocratic dimension. Furthermore, although Machiavelli does praise institutions
such as the tribunate for curbing the arrogance of the patricians, he surely also values the
consulship as well as the Senate for its aristocratic contribution to deflecting the many
from overthrowing them by turning their energies outward in conquest. That all said,
I do sympathize with McCormick’s implication that we should not view Machiavelli
wholly in terms of the commercial republicanism of his successors like Montesquieu and
the American Founders. Although Machiavelli valued economic expansion and success,
these were to serve or demonstrate the more authentic aims of honor and glory. The
commercial republicanism of Montesquieu and the English republicans is a valid but
somewhat reductive reading of Machiavelli’s more full-blooded endorsement of patriotic
fervor and collective honor.

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 tyranny

in the state of nature through the war of all against all. The Sovereign’s
power to terrorize is an institutionalized salutary reminder that we are
always better off obeying the contract, and the importation of Machi-
avelli’s more general prescription for the use of law to replicate the
severity of nature through periodic acts of republican refounding into a
more narrowly focused technique for autocratic repression.
Rule by institutionalized terror was probably not Hobbes’s preferred
path to consolidate the social contract, but modernizers in a hurry were
to seize on it. We are very far now from the benign utopianism of Bacon
or even Harrington’s exuberant republicanism, although for reasons we
will consider, Hobbes is at the juncture of both corridors, the light and
the dark. For now, suffice it to say that the Hobbesian Sovereign at
his most fear-inspiring as the methodical crusher of all human impulses
not reducible to conformity to the social contract leads directly along
the dark corridor to Rousseau’s Legislator, who “re-creates” human
nature with a godlike determination, and from there to the “incorrupt-
ible” Robespierre, a prime example of the “secular saint” who destroys
thousands, without personal malice, for the sake of the collective. It
leads finally to ascetic police state mass murderers including Dzerzhin-
sky and Himmler, for whom the cleansing of class and race enemies in
order to create a perfect community of interchangeable human integers
is a duty requiring all sentiments of pity, or even of personal anger,
to be overcome for the sake of the ideal. Here is the most extreme
working-out of Machiavelli’s designs for the deeroticization of tyranny.
Awful prospects. Yet it is fair to say that, as moderns, we remain
ambivalent in our assessment of the tyrannical founder – an ambiva-
lence, moreover, in the history of political ideas that, as we have seen in
this book, goes all the way back to Plato’s Laws. For, although I have
distinguished for purposes of analysis between a light and a dark corri-
dor to modernity, it would be more precise to say that, in the warp and
woof of political history from which these motifs are abstracted, the
dark corridor has at least two shafts and is not always or entirely sep-
arable from the more benign face of modernization. Nationalist mod-
ernizing revolutions have often been accompanied by autocrats. In this
sense, Kemal Ataturk or the last Shah of Iran could be classified as
Hobbesian Sovereigns, attempting to bring their peoples into the world
of secular liberalism and materialism from above, postponing or forbid-
ding democratic self-government until the new modern character type

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has been sufficiently habituated to part ways with premodern sectarian

and religious animosities. Although these modernizing autocrats have
no aim beyond the pragmatic – the creation of secular regimes with
productive economies and technological progress – sometimes more
radical, out and out millenarian revolutions bent on bringing about
utopia through the extermination of whole classes or races are accom-
panied by this more pragmatic agenda for modernization in the here
and now. In this respect, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, although bent on
utopian genocide to create a new world of pure community, also has-
tened the modernization of their respective nations, not in the sense
of promoting democratic values or the rights of the individual, but in
the sense of achieving rapid economic, military, and industrial develop-
ment. Even today, some Chinese still regard Mao as a great patriotic
founder, even as they press for full political liberty. Russians can feel
similarly conflicted about Stalin, who made their country into a modern
industrial economy and superpower seemingly overnight while system-
atically exterminating millions of “class enemies.”
Again and again, I would argue, we are drawn back to Hobbes –
and his narrowing of Machiavelli’s new science of politics – at the
juncture of the opposed tendencies within modernity. For Machiavelli,
honor is always at the forefront of political existence, summoned forth
by the pursuit of princely might or communal liberty through a life
and death struggle as republics and empires continually rise and fall.
Hobbes, by contrast, abstracts entirely from foreign policy as a con-
stituent of internal self-government, the outside pressure of events that,
in Machiavelli’s view, requires republics to act boldly to expand their
sphere of power and brings men of “grandeur of spirit” to the helm of
affairs. By abstracting the method for constructing and maintaining the
social contract from the historical cycles of foreign policy, Hobbes is
able to almost completely expel honor seeking and a republican sense
of the communal “we” that Machiavelli, despite other profound differ-
ences between them, does share with the classical republican thinkers.
In contrast with Machiavelli’s robust and tumultuous republican Rome
with its vital, clashing classes, Hobbes’s Leviathan is a world of iso-
lated monads ruled absolutely by another monad.7 Honor seeking as an

7 Especially in Taming The Prince (1993), Mansfield begins with the classical understand-
ing of the relationship between tyranny and monarchy in Aristotle, and the qualified

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independent variable in human motivation remains only as the lacuna

in the Hobbesian Sovereign’s own hidden and unacknowledgable eros
for glory. It is an impulse which, when it crops up in any other mem-
ber of the social contract, is hurled aside with contempt by Hobbes as
“the fool who hath said in his heart, ‘there is no justice,’” based solely
on the assumption that, given the almost complete certainty of being
defeated, disgraced, and violently killed, those who attempt to usurp
authority because they are driven by glory seeking are irrational to the
point of madness (Hobbes [1971] p. 203). Yet Hobbes’s own design
for the social contract requires at least one of these madmen to act as
umpire over the pedestrian desires for survival and comfort of all the
others, to silently work the levers of power while crushing within him-
self the impulse to flaunt his power through invading and despoiling
his subjects or lavishly rewarding his favorites. One must combine the
abstemiousness of a monk with the cruelty of a Caligula.
Aside from this psychological lacuna of the hidden tyrant, the Hobbe-
sian social contract is a bloodless, rootless mechanism, with no con-
nection to history, tradition, or patriotism – a despotic algorithm for
internal peace that can be imposed anywhere, or indeed, everywhere,

endorsement of a form of monarchy guided by reason that might well resemble a tyranny
in its absolutism and eradication of citizen participation. He then examines Machiavelli’s
unvarnished endorsement of princely coercion, including large-scale violence, and poses
the question of how we might explain the “banalization” of the Machiavellian prince in
the institutions of the modern liberal constitutional polity such as the “executive power”
and “war powers” of the American presidency. How, he asks, does this banalization or
“taming” occur? “The answer is that the history of Machiavellism is chiefly a process of
domestication, whereby Machiavelli’s thought was appropriated and absorbed by liberal
constitutionalism so that it could be regularized and legitimated” (p. xxiii). This comports
with my suggestion that the Hobbesian Sovereign, already a narrowing of the Machi-
avellian prince to a mechanism for sheer control and umpirage of the social contract,
could as efficiently or more efficiently be deployed as a completely impersonal constitu-
tional mechanism for checks and balances exemplified by the American Constitution. The
essence of the superiority of what Hamilton regards as the new science of politics over
that of the ancients is this reliance on impersonal institutions in contrast with the vagaries
of personal rule. I would only add that there is a competing stream in modern political
philosophy, what I have termed the light path exemplified by Spinoza and Locke, in con-
trast to the dark corridor that leads to the more unvarnished endorsement of executive
power, that helps mitigate the potential in the modern executive power for spilling over
into dictatorship. I wholly agree with Mansfield that both Skinner and Pocock, by begin-
ning with an already tame Machiavelli, occlude our understanding of why he needed to
be tamed. The side of liberalism that dispenses with Machiavelli’s harsher prescriptions
does not come from Machiavelli himself as much as from the modification of his view of
the relationship of man to nature undertaken by the holism of Spinoza.

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a precursor of Kojeve’s universal homogeneous state. In the Euro-

pean aesthetic consciousness, it becomes the nightmare of the faceless,
omnipresent bureaucratic state of Kafka’s The Castle, or, to use Weber’s
bleak phrase for modern life, “technicians without vision” ruling over
“voluptuaries without heart.” This pedigree proceeds straight down to
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, in which Alcibiadean ambi-
tion can find no outlet in a dreary welfare state dystopia except base
criminality, and whose psyche must be rejigged in the correct Hobbe-
sian direction through torture, behavior modification, and regular visits
from a social worker. In its sheer impersonality, the faceless and root-
less mechanism of the Hobbesian Sovereign is already “technological”
in its essence, in the sense meant by Heidegger (1993) – that prior to the
literal creation of modern machine technology, nature must be onto-
logically reconceived as that “calculable coherence of forces” mapped
by modern physics over which total mastery can be projected. Indeed,
Hobbes’s project for the reconstruction of reality, not only political but
economic and cultural, through the imposition of the will to fabrication
on the physics of matter in motion, is the closest match among political
philosophers to what Heidegger means by technology – a project that
aims to surmount even those limitations placed on the human will by
chance evoked by Machiavelli, to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle.
The Hobbesian prescription, fully developed, could be a super-efficient
technology of robotic surveillance like the science fiction dystopia of The
Matrix, or, in real life, the increasingly relentless digitized surveillance
of daily existence in England. To think through another implication: as
that matchless Hobbesian and Marxist materialist C. B. Macpherson
(1972) once opined – in an unusually optimistic interlude – the threat of
universal annihilation through violent death posed by nuclear weapons
technology might function as the ultimate Hobbesian Sovereign, bring-
ing peace to the world by terrorizing all mankind into an awareness
of the need for survival and reconciliation under a world authority
securing it.
The paradox of modernity, already foreseen by Machiavelli, is that
although it liberates desire, thereby understanding itself to be more
realistic and hard-headed than the ancient philosophers’ “imagined
republics,” that success in the liberation of desire leads in the long
run to “effemination” and the unrealistic longing (far more unrealistic
than anything envisioned by the ancient thinkers) for permanent peace.

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Much as Machiavelli admires the dynamic evolution of Rome from

republic to empire, he deplores the full-blown imperial outcome, which
destroyed the spirit of liberty as it crushed every remaining local repub-
lic, and, by making the subjects of its world-state soft, prosperous and
insulated from the dangers that had prompted the republic’s original
rise, opened up a craving for universal peace and its religion, Christian-
ity. As we observed in Chapter 7, a striking instance of Machiavelli’s
ambivalence about Rome’s rise to empire is his evaluation of Augustus
Caesar. Although Augustus was arguably one of the most Machiavellian
rulers in all history, with his cold determination, bottomless mendacity,
and inhuman self-control as he strode over mountains of corpses from
a young putschist and generalissimo to become the benign and revered
master of the world – a man so alienated from himself and his inner
feelings that his dying words were to jokingly ask for a tip like a stage
actor who has turned in a good performance – Machiavelli has not a
word of praise for him, because he destroyed the republic for good.
In an analogous way, Hobbes, in his initial diagnosis of human
nature, is realistic and hardheaded about people’s unvarnished ambi-
tion for power, honor, and wealth and their willingness to tyrannize
whenever they can get away it with. However, he is realistic about
these facets of human nature precisely because he believes that, hav-
ing been identified without flinching or squeamishness, they can now
be methodically controlled and even eradicated. Yet whereas Machi-
avelli is troubled by the universal pacification that is the outcome of
an “effectual” politics and regrets what is arguably its inevitability,
Hobbes is an unqualified proponent of it – another symptom of his nar-
rowing of Machiavelli’s vibrant phenomenology of political existence
to a mere set of authoritarian techniques. Hobbes is confident that men
can be changed by his new psychology of power seeking, brought to
trade in their dangerous ambitions for honor and glory in exchange
for a guaranteed net gain in security and material well-being. Although
the Sovereign holds in reserve the emergency capacity to terrorize the
contumacious, this is probably not (to amplify an earlier observation)
Hobbes’s preferred solution. Indeed, the need for its constant use might
prove that vainglorious ambition was not eradicable, calling into ques-
tion Hobbes’s core contention that the pursuit of honor is not strictly
speaking or intrinsically a facet of human fulfillment at all, in contrast
with what the classical political thinkers would have maintained. For

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Hobbes, the solid and lasting change in human conduct will come not
primarily through terror and direct coercion, but through the steady
and peaceable spread of “right reason,” of enlightenment. Under the
influence of the new psychology of appetitive desire, man will come to
set aside martial strife and pride and, as Voltaire urged, to cultivate his
garden. When James Madison argues that the new American republic’s
checks and balances will allow “ambition to counter-act ambition,” the
Machiavellian surface of this observation is underlain by the Hobbesian
premise that ambition will already have been largely channeled into the
competition for success through the peaceful arts of commerce. It is
not that a Cato will counteract a Catiline but that a Bill Gates will
counteract a Warren Buffet.
As I stress that a potential project for “permanent revolution” – the
project for the endless reengineering of the human soul through terror –
is, although a dark possibility lurking in Hobbes’s political science,
likely not his preferred prescription, I want to reemphasize my view that
modern revolutionary terror is at best no more than partially explained
by aspects of early modern political theories like those of Machiavelli
and Hobbes even at their most ominous. For reasons I discuss presently,
the meaning and scope of modern tyranny changes drastically with
Rousseau, his detestation for bourgeois liberalism, his rejection of early
modern natural right (especially of Hobbes’s view of the state of nature
and the social contract), and his romanticization of “the people,” a shift
in the ontology of tyranny that carries us beyond the thematic limits of
this study. Before turning to a sketch of that boundary transformation,
however, let me continue with this broad overview from within the
premises of my focus in this book on the conquest of nature and of eros
characteristic of early modern political thought.
As the modern age and the Enlightenment unfolded, people certainly
continued to know about the dangers of tyranny as set forth by the
classics, but the rising belief in the progress of history led to the conclu-
sion that the dangers of tyranny were being steadily overcome as well.
For Hegel, history begins in the “slaughter-bench” of the pursuit of
mastery, but it will end in peace and the brotherhood of man. The Phe-
nomenology of Spirit begins historically with the master-slave dialectic
and ends with a verse from Schiller’s Ode to Joy. For Marx, even more
than for Hegel, history to date has been one unending, blood-soaked
struggle for tyrannical mastery by one ruler or class over all the rest, but

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it will end in the disappearance of all such conflict, indeed of politics as

such.8
In the totalitarian revolutions beginning with the Jacobins and con-
tinuing with the Bolsheviks and Nazis, the use of terror and genocide in
the present is justified because it will bring about a new world of lasting
peace, joy, community, and equality. In the aftershock of these terrible
experiments in utopian genocide, culminating in the apocalyptic war of
the Nazi and Bolshevik Weltanschauungen in the East in World War II,
students of politics began to wake up from the slumber of the Enlight-
enment’s residual belief in the progress of history. Figures as diverse as
Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Seymour Martin Lipset, Max Horkheimer,
Aaron Wildaavsky, Theodore Adorno, and Hannah Arendt all became
keenly aware that tyranny was still with us in the twentieth century
and could be again in the future. Still, as I will elaborate later in this
Conclusion, the Hobbesian underlay of the social sciences remained
for many an almost insuperable obstacle to complete clarity about the
recurrent reality of tyranny and of the psychology peculiar to it. The
Hobbesian realism of the social sciences could be drawn on to identify
tyrannical ambition when it reared its head, but it cast that ambition
psychologically in such a way as to persevere in the optimistic belief that
tyrannical and ideological violence might fade away if modern progress
and prosperity continued to take root, an article of faith ringingly reaf-
firmed as recently as President Barack Obama’s speech during his first
run for the White House, “The War on Terror We Need to Win.” In
order to reflect on why modern social science has been unable fully
to grasp the reality and the ongoing danger of tyranny, we must look
further into the narrowing of Machiavelli’s new science of politics by
Bacon and Hobbes.

the torture of nature?

When I argue that the narrowing of Machiavelli’s new science of politics
proceeds by way of Bacon and Hobbes, I am not necessarily implying a
negative judgment as to the worth of their philosophies, only the need
for an appreciation of Machiavelli’s scope so as to more adequately
unfold his more broad-reaching premise. As Beland (2010) puts it in

8 Consider Hegel (1997). See the discussion in Newell (2009a); (1994) pp. 107–122.

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describing Richard Kennington’s assessment of Bacon’s contribution to

the origins of modernity, “Bacon’s philosophy radicalizes the thought
of Machiavelli in extending to the natural world the reflections that the
latter restricted to the human world. Disease, famine and death: those
are, in the eyes of Bacon, the true reverses of fortune against which man
must protect himself.” My only reservation about this formulation is
that, in my view, it is Bacon’s new natural science that restricts the
scope of Machiavelli’s phenomenology of political existence because
Machiavelli’s project for the conquest of nature so as to maximize secu-
rity and well-being for peoples and princes already entails and antici-
pates Bacon’s modification of it as a model for the study of nature. In
other words, it is not Bacon who escapes Machiavelli’s restrictions but
Bacon who restricts Machiavelli’s range, which was never limited to the
human world alone but always grounded the human in a new ontology
of nature.
We have already considered Bacon’s complimentary gloss on chapter
15 of The Prince, arguing that philosophers should forsake “imaginary
commonwealths” and focus on the world as it is. The purpose of natural
science, as Bacon famously put it, should be to acquire power “for the
relief of man’s estate.” As with Machiavelli himself, who as we observed
in Chapter 6 conceals his project for a radical reorientation toward
nature as a mere realist’s scrupulous attention to observable fact, what
amounts in Bacon’s thought to a new and revolutionary assertion of
the power to reconstruct nature through an act of will presents itself
on first inspection and at the most superficial level as the mere patient
observation and accumulation of factual data. Thus, Bacon writes in
further praise of Machiavelli, he chose a sound method for his study
of government: “Namely, discourse upon histories or examples, for
knowledge drawn freshly, and in our view, out of particulars, findeth
its way best to particulars again; and it hath much greater life in practice
when the discourse attendeth upon the example than when the example
attendeth upon the discourse” (Bacon [1869] p. 99). In other words,
Bacon claims, Machiavelli arrived at his general theory of government
through the observation of particulars, instead of, like the ancients,
twisting the particulars to fit their already-held cosmologies. Or as he
puts it about his own work: “Men have sought to make a world from
their own conception and to draw from their minds all the material
which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted

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experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinion
to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of
the laws which govern the material world” (Bacon [1854] pp. 343–371).
Like Machiavelli as he depicts him here, Bacon appears to be exhort-
ing us to set aside improbable cosmologies like those of the ancients,
based on factually unverifiable myths such as the Platonic Forms or the
Aristotelian Unmoved Mover, in favor of the patient accumulation of
facts about the world as it is, not as it ought to be. This corresponds to
Machiavelli’s claim that he is setting aside the pretensions of the “imag-
ined republics” of the ancients so as to focus on the “effectual truth” –
the real world, as we might say, rather than the ideal. Yet just as Machi-
avelli presents this appeal to observable experience as the gateway to a
Promethean assault on nature, the possibility of which is not exclusively
derivable from observable experience itself, Bacon, too, reveals that the
allegedly empirical observation of nature can only proceed once nature
has already been intellectually assaulted and subdued by an act of will
in the mind of the scientist. Like Machiavelli’s emphasis on the will, the
radical voluntarism of Bacon’s scientific method wholly outstrips any
precedent to be found in ancient materialism, the pre-Socratics, or the
Sophists, the “Homeric-Heracleitean doctrine” that evolved a view of
nature as cycles of motion out of an already existing poetic emphasis on
the tragic limitations placed on human action and reason by necessity
and chance.9

9 Richard Kennington (2004), following what he takes to be Strauss’s understanding of

Machiavelli, perhaps comes closest to the view that Bacon envisioned nature ahead
of time in such a way as to make possible the project for its mastery, not that he
derived the project for mastery from the empirical observation of nature. This pursuit
of “mastery” Kennington traces to its source in Machiavelli’s call for the conquest of
Fortune. As a commentator on Kennington has put it about Kennington’s view of Bacon,
“he [Bacon] achieves this [the synthesis of science and mastery] through a fusion of
Epicurean materialism and Platonic mathematics as resulting in a non-metaphysical or
methodological materialism. This fusion is based on the principle that the first grounds
of knowledge are human constructs, or that we know only what we make. Philosophy,
formerly the attempt to grasp the eternal, becomes without residue the mastery of chance
or fortune.” Velkley (2002). I have somewhat analogously characterized Machiavelli’s
project for the mastery of Fortuna as a synthesis of Platonic rationalism and the view of
nature as motion. In other words, man will impose on the flux of nature the rationalism
of the Platonic forms, now seen as a purely anthropocentric agenda for reshaping nature,
an empty formalism drained of its teleological content and connection with the world.
However, I do not believe Machiavelli goes as far as Kennington’s Bacon in believing this
agenda for mastery can anticipate complete success. For Machiavelli, fortune will to some

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Time and again, Bacon’s characterization of the natural scientist’s

correct methodological stance toward nature recalls Machiavelli’s adju-
ration that Fortuna must be subdued and mastered by force. He takes
what Machiavelli presents as a poetic, metaphorical, and existential
stance toward nature and, abstracting it from the ebb and flow of
historical events, the rise and clash and decline of entire political bod-
ies caught in the cycles of history and time, refines it into a concep-
tual framework for scientific experimentation. It is already rationalism
presupposing existentialism, the dilemma of Max Weber. Personifying
nature as a woman in the New Organon exactly as had Machiavelli
in The Prince, Bacon maintains (contrary to his erstwhile pose as the
modest empirical observer) that we learn more not when nature is “left
to her own course” but when she is “under constraint and vexed; that
is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her
natural state and squeezed and molded” (Bacon [1960] p. 25). Just as
for Machiavelli, for Bacon, nature cannot be trusted in her outward,
visible manifestations – the interior matrix of origination is what mat-
ters. At times, he comes as close as Machiavelli had to characterizing,
in metaphors close to obscene, the proper stance toward nature as akin
to rape: “I invite all such to join themselves, as true sons of knowledge,
with me, that passing by the outer courts of nature, where numbers have
trodden, we may find a way at length into her inner chambers” (Bacon
[1960] p. 36). This appeal to the “sons” stresses both the newness of
the moderns in choosing “the way of today” over the classical-Christian
yesterday and also the lustiness of “the young,” whom Machiavelli also
regarded as most likely to win over Fortuna owing to her preference

extent always elude the grip of human mastery, partly for reasons based on Machiavelli’s
view of Lucretian materialism itself. Thus, it is not true for Machiavelli strictly speaking
or in every instance that we can “only know what we make,” for we can know that
fortune will always limit man to some degree, and our own desires will never remain
stable or contented; we will not be able to devise any solutions for these impediments
that reach right down to the bottom of the world’s existence so as to uproot and transform
it entirely. Not every Bacon scholar agrees, however, with Kennington’s interpretation
of Bacon, which makes Baconian mastery seem almost to anticipate Fichte’s voluntarism
or Nietzsche’s will to power, or, indeed, Kuhn’s quasi-Nietzschean view of science as a
paradigm shift. Travis Smith (2009), for example, thinks Bacon’s promise of mastery for
the relief of man’s estate is partly a rhetorical means for gaining broader popular support
for a scientific project whose tangible benefits will remain in doubt for some time to come.
Rousseau famously regarded Bacon as the very archetype of the philosopher motivated
by a pure love of the truth.

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for hot-blooded youth over cautious old age. However, it is hard not to
detect in Bacon’s words a transition from the comparative delicatezza of
Machiavelli’s multifaceted and balletic wooing of Fortuna to something
more akin to the cloddishness of a methodological soccer club. Perhaps
Swift had this rape of nature in mind when he named his parody of
Bacon’s Royal Society – an island of scientific technocrats flying over
the inherited traditions of the Old World like the islands of the new
world beckoning to the west – Laputa, the whore, nature whored.10
Just as Machiavelli counsels the prince to expel erotic longing from
his own character and replace it with methodical discipline, Bacon says
that the scientist must probe nature with a “chaste and severe course
of inquiry” (Bacon [1960] p. 28). Just as Machiavelli urged this inner
process of deeroticization so that one might guard oneself against the
allures of the imagined republics, the psychological key to our reliance
on Fortuna, leading to the rejection of the Great Tradition in its entirely,
Bacon argues that “the entire work of the intellect (must) be commenced
afresh, and the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take
its own course but guided at every step” (Bacon [1960] p. 34). Just
as, for Machiavelli, seeing nature as it really is must be preceded by
one’s inward-turning alienation from its bewitching outward sheen of
beneficence encouraging the belief that nature upholds peace and justice,
for Bacon as well, rigorous science requires that the mind be reshaped in
abstraction from all received experience and tradition “and the business
done as if by machinery” (Bacon [1960] p. 34).
For Bacon, before we can conquer nature, we must purge our minds
of her influence over us through the seductive traditions of the past or
the apparently beautiful patterns of the visible world. This inner self-
purgation corresponds with a preference for breaking nature down into
her constituent parts and forsaking the allure of the surface harmony, a
discipline that Machiavelli had urged princes to practice on themselves
and in their relationship with their subjects (for “all see you, but few
touch what you are”). For Bacon just as for Machiavelli, in other words,
the study of nature is grounded in a secularized Augustinian distrust of

10 The ungallant description of “her” outer chambers as places where “numbers have
trodden” suggests she has been pretty undiscriminating in her earlier admission of
wooers. More brutal and deeper penetration is apparently required to get past this
antechamber of aging Aristotelian ponces.

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the looks of the world, the visible flourishing of phenomena that led
Plato and the ancients to reason upward through those orderly appear-
ances toward the perfect archetypes of the Forms. For Machiavelli and
Bacon, whatever order the world possesses will be fashioned by the
sustaining will of the prince, or the prince of science, transferred from
God to man.
I suggested in Chapters 5 and 6 that Machiavelli’s fully rounded
view of the proper approach of the prince to Fortuna is more complex
than mere hot-blooded subjugation, however stirring that metaphor in
chapter 25 of The Prince may be to ambitious young men. Instead, it
is an inner dyad alternating between the unseen recesses of the prince’s
character and the unseen spontaneous forces of Fortuna herself. For-
tuna as the unseen source of origination bonds with the prince’s inner
character, a primordial as opposed to a transcendental link between
man and the world. The prince must imitate fortune’s impetuosity in
order to channel and tap into her power. Paradoxically, complete mas-
tery comes by way of complete submission. Only by renouncing our
hopes from nature can we gain freedom from her, which is also free-
dom over her.11 In this sense, for Machiavelli, the knowledge of nature is
assimilated by the will to subdue her through imitating her own lack of
intrinsic teleological purpose. So, too, does Bacon argue that “human
knowledge and human power meet in one.” If we do not know the
cause, its “effect cannot be produced.” Most important, “nature to be
commanded must be obeyed.” When we understand nature, we can
harness and replicate her spontaneous effects so as to maximize man’s
power over her: “That which in contemplation is as the cause is in oper-
ation as the rule” (Bacon [1857] I.iii). To know something is to be able
to make it, but this mastery of nature through technique is preceded by
submission to nature’s sheer power of genesis.
We considered in earlier chapters how, according to Machiavelli,
the centuries-old conglomerate of the classical and Christian “imagined

11 Pesic (1999) makes the interesting argument that the Baconian scientist’s stance toward
nature should not be seen exclusively as “torture” but as more akin to a wrestling match.
This comports with my view of the Machiavellian prince’s relationship with Fortuna as
a kind of dance or dyad in which the prince mush channel fortune in order to subdue
her, and while I see the Baconian stance as more straightforwardly dominating, Pesic
has a point that the scientist must also internalize the flow of nature – in effect, to woo
and not merely conquer.

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republics” had produced an overwhelmingly beguiling and authoritative

medium for the refraction and distortion of our expectations from the
world, a psychological grip so powerful that even the most ruthless of
contemporary rulers such as Cesare Borgia could not consistently emu-
late the “well-used” cruelty of ancient tyrants like Hiero – and above
all, those matchless surgeons of political force the Romans – always
falling prey at the crucial moment to some residual attachment to the
old morality. We also noted that Machiavelli frequently characterizes
“the writers” of the Great Tradition as appealing to the prejudices of
“the many,” as if to imply that, in attributing the success of statesmen
to the pursuit of the moral and intellectual virtues for their own sake,
they were playing to a vulgar, childish, and sentimental desire of the
many to view their rulers as kind and good, as in a fairy tale. (There
is perhaps in Machiavelli’s critique an echo of Callicles’ charge that
Socrates, in arguing his excessively namby-pamby view that it is better
to suffer injustice than to do it, is “playing the demagogue,” that is,
playing to the credulous moralism of the many [Gorgias 482].)
Altogether, a remarkable transformation is implied in this judgment
about the vulgarity of the Great Tradition, what we might term the
replacement of the aristocratic political morality of the classics with
the elitist leadership style of modernity. The political morality of the
classics is centered around the prescription for a balance in the soul
between mind and desire that allows the passions themselves to be
fulfilled in the service of civic nobility and the philosophical longing
for immortality. This prescription could be participated in, to varying
degrees, by all strata of society in normal circumstances absent the crises
of war or insurrection, excluding only the most vicious or desperate.
Certainly for Plato and Aristotle, the class of gentlemen is best favored
to devote itself to political deliberation and philosophy. However, as
Aristotle argues in his discussion of polity, even the decent middle-class
majority can approach an aristocratic degree of virtue, while Plato and
Aristotle would agree that most people, irrespective of their rank, can
be shaped by correct opinion about virtue even if they lack the leisure
for a full-time devotion to politics or philosophy. Socrates concedes
in the Republic, for instance, that even the lowest class of the best
regime, the Artisans, must to some degree be capable of sharing in
the moderation of the Auxillaries (421c–422a). With Machiavelli and
Bacon, in sharp contrast, we encounter a new deeroticized cadre of

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political methodologists, for whom the harmony of the soul is irrelevant

in comparison to their disciplined minds, and who, like the “projectors”
on Swift’s flying island of Laputa, stand outside of all other social groups
in their dedication to pure technique. Their minds have no objective
correlate in the structure of the cosmos, no “divine spark,” as Aristotle
put it, connecting the human intellect to the Unmoved Mover. For the
new elite of methodologists, nature is an alien Other to be subdued and
rendered orderly.
As we have seen many times throughout this book, Plato and Aristo-
tle promote the appeal of philosophy primarily through an appeal to the
“beautiful and good ones,” the gentlemen. Plato’s primary therapy for
curing the leaning of excessive eros toward tyranny is through an appeal
to eros itself and its longing for the beautiful or noble. As depicted in
the Republic, tyrannical eros is shameless, vulgar, and demagogic, an
extension of the vices of democracy, the regime most disdained by the
gentleman. The rehabilitation of eros toward the pursuit of civic virtue
and contemplation attempts to wed an aristocratic standard for per-
sonal integrity and public service to a respect for philosophy as the
steadfast guardian of the truth, as in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. As
Aristotle presents his hierarchy of virtues, the moderate traits of char-
acter most desirable in citizens are also required by philosophy, and
through studying the eternal truth, philosophy shelters the gentleman’s
code from the passions of the day and ties it to the teleological order of
the cosmos, granting it permanent validity in its properly subordinate
role. The man of superlative virtue is himself a kind of way station to
the philosophic life (the candor of the great-souled man, for example,
resembles that of the philosopher), although his virtue is noble and
self-sufficient in its own right. Prudence, the highest of the political
virtues, is itself in the sphere of the virtues of the intellect, second only
to sophia, the very highest of the virtues, and not strictly speaking in
the subordinate sphere of the virtues of character (Nicomachean Ethics
1139b11–1142a27). Although good citizens on the whole need only fol-
low correct opinion about the virtues of character, the very best citizens
and statesmen must share to a lesser but real degree in the theoretical
orientation of the philosopher toward the eternal truth.
Machiavelli seeks utterly to disrupt this teleological ascent from civic
virtue through the highest political prudence toward the contemplative
life. In effect, he treats the alliance between philosophy and aristocratic

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morality forged by the classics as part and parcel of the delusions of the
many, making them subject to the pretensions of what Hobbes would
come to call the “vainglorious.” A part of Machiavelli’s populism is
evident in his belief that, although the people want only to survive and
enjoy their property, the nobiles always want to displace the prince,
and so are the chief fomenters of instability. Contrary to what Aristotle
argued, there is no distinction in principle between aristocracy and oli-
garchy. Whatever they may call themselves, their motives are venal (The
Prince chapter 9). In the fluid world of the rise and fall of states, self-
described aristocrats are oligarchs plotting to become tyrants. What
Plato and Aristotle regarded as the better sort of men, the gentle-
men, whose innate or inherited nobility might incline them toward the
nobility of philosophic independence from the sway of base passion,
are lumped together by Machiavelli with countless other varieties of
deluded hopes, ambition, and self-indulgence. Standing over against all
of these moralizers – the people, the so-called nobles and their flatterers,
the philosophers of old – is Machiavelli’s new prince, an amalgam of a
ruler and a thinker, whose reason is assimilated to his will and the mark
of whose excellence is his inner austerity, his rigorous self-purgation of
the delusions of the old conglomerate. One might well ask at the end
of the day who has a better opinion of the people, Machiavelli or the
classics? Plato and Aristotle believe that the common people, although
not best equipped or situated to actualize their virtue, can be educated
or habituated to do so to some extent by rising above base desires.
Machiavelli, by contrast, encourages the people to pursue their base
desires in an alliance with the prince by liberating them from the sway
of belief in ancient moral philosophy and its intertwining with Chris-
tian revelation – a liberation that will require the methodical reshaping
of their natures by a cadre of leaders so as to save them from their
own attachment to the Great Tradition. When Machiavelli, in urging
the prince to forsake the nobles for the people, remarks that “who
builds on the people builds on mud,” we realize that a mud founda-
tion is a very strong one and at the same time a simile for lowness of
character.
There are many parallels with Machiavelli in Bacon’s thought for
the need to purge both natural science and political morality of its joint
delusions about the teleological beneficence of nature: what Machiavelli
termed “imagined republics,” Bacon terms “the idols of the tribe.”

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Moreover, in the distinction Bacon makes between followers of the old

Aristotelian physics – where “numbers have trodden” but never found
their way past nature’s outer chambers to her interior – and his vigorous
new band of the “sons of knowledge” who will probe her all the way,
we sense a contempt for the numerous credulous dodderers of the past,
pandering to the idols of the many, and their coming displacement by a
bold new elite of methodologists. As Descartes and Hobbes were both
to argue, the idols of the tribe must be demolished through rigorous
self-emptying, alienation from history and tradition, and introspection.
(“Everything is to be doubted.”) The interior of what we now might
term the “unencumbered” self becomes the criterion for judging reality,
not the soul that participates in the Idea of the Good, sped in its longing
for wholeness by eros as the demonic link between the human and
the divine. Comparing the power of these idols to an “assault” on the
mind that recalls Machiavelli’s warnings about the hostility of Fortuna,
Bacon writes:

The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human under-
standing and have taken deep root therein, not only so best men’s minds that
truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance is obtained, they will
again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men
being forewarned of the danger, fortify themselves as far as may be against
their assaults. (Bacon [1857] 1 xxxviii)

In a way that is analogous to Machiavelli’s teaching on the need

for refoundings, Bacon warns that extirpating these idols will require
ceaseless vigilance stretching into the future, because “the human under-
standing is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more
order and regularity in the world than it finds” (Bacon [1857] 1.xlv).
The mind tends to interpret what it encounters in the light of received
opinion: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opin-
ion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it” (Bacon [1857]
1.xlvii). The grip on the mind and emotions of the Idols of the Tribe
must be continually overcome by the “severe law and overruling author-
ity” of Bacon’s new method. In this, we might see the internalization by
the new natural scientist of Machiavelli’s more general teaching about
the need for severe law in the founding of healthy republics. We recall
from the Discourses that Machiavelli believed republics were more vig-
orously founded when the open hostility of nature forced on them the

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necessity to labor. However, when the severity of nature was remedied

by manmade prosperity, there ensued the danger that men would read
into nature the bounty they had achieved through their own labor and
let down their guard. This danger could be remedied by fashioning
harsh laws that continuously reimposed the austerity of the founding
situation, thereby purging illusion and restoring vigor. Tapping into
nature’s power to oppress us through the artificial simulacrum of the
law might keep citizens in a continuously virtuous condition. Bacon
is in effect importing Machiavelli’s prescription for the refounding of
republics into the mind itself, internalizing his teaching on republics
as a methodological prescription for the continuous refounding of the
necessity to labor against nature through the purgation of mental sloth.
Taken together, these references help us past the initial, superfi-
cially modest pose of the empirical observer to the truly revolutionary,
millenarian stance of Bacon’s new science, a project for the endless,
dynamic transformation of nature for the benefit of man, what Hei-
degger will later term “technology.” To use Kuhnian terms, Bacon’s
own language often lifts the coverlet of “ordinary science,” ostensibly
limited to the patient accumulation of data, to reveal the underlying
and more fundamental “paradigm shift” of modernity. Echoing Machi-
avelli’s comparison of himself in the first pages of the Discourses to a
Columbus of statecraft opening up an “as yet untrodden path,” Bacon
proclaims that his object is “to open a new way for the understanding,
a way by [others] untried and unknown.” The parallel to Machiavelli
is even more explicit when he writes:

(I)t is fit that I publish and set forth these conjectures of mine which make
hope in these matters reasonable, just as Columbus did, before that wonderful
voyage of his across the Atlantic, when he gave the reasons for his conviction
that new lands and continents might be discovered besides those which were
known before; which reasons, though rejected at first, were afterwards made
good by experience, and were the causes and beginnings of great events.
(Bacon [1857] 1.xcii)

As the comparisons in this passage suggest, Columbus was the sea-

faring equivalent of Bacon’s Novum Organum, searching for the New
Atlantis. In Bacon’s depiction, Columbus began with his “conviction”
that a new world existed, and then he went out to find it – analo-
gous to Bacon’s call to probe nature’s inner chambers by an act of

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will in order to unlock her powers, with the empirical verification to

follow. Columbus’s reasons for his confidence were at first rejected by
followers of the Idols of the Tribe, but through his boldness Columbus
overcame them by afterward providing the evidence, and now a great
new canvas awaits for the creation of mankind’s future. Bacon envisions
his scientific voyage in analogous terms. The consistent metaphorical
depiction of modernity as being akin to seafaring is striking. Beginning
with Machiavelli’s self-alignment with Columbus, recurring in different
ways and with varying relationships to the Classical/Christian con-
glomerate, in More’s Utopia (an island commonwealth in which the
common man’s material needs are met), Shakespeare’s The Tempest
(where a deposed duke, natural philosopher and alchemist, banished
from Milan to Bermuda, uses his wisdom to create astonishing new
marvels of power and finally takes back his dukedom), Bacon’s own
New Atlantis with its robots and clinics and later Harrington’s Oceana,
a seafaring republic of prosperous farmers, merchants, and a martial
nobility, this new world of the modern finds, by progressive degrees, its
field of action westward toward the Americas, first in the imagination
and eventually in reality.12

12 Tuck (1993) sees in Bacon’s project a synthesis of Judaism and Protestantism. This
certainly comports with the view of Rahe (2005, 2008) and Sullivan [1996, 2004]) that
English republicanism was a synthesis between Puritans and Republicans, meaning to
say between the Reformation and modern secular political thought. It also comports
with the earlier linkage between Machiavelli and Luther, especially given that the Refor-
mation early on identified with the ancient Hebrews. Others, however (Lampert in Bacon
[2000]; Kennington [2004]) see Bacon as entirely antireligious and purely rational, such
that Bacon’s new science sparked, in Lampert’s words, “the actual holy war fought in
Europe . . . the warfare of science against religion that tamed sovereign religion.” We
can never resolve with certainty or complete transparency the degree to which those
wars were carried out by rationalists wishing to overthrow Christianity or by Protes-
tants wishing to overthrow the Church of Rome, or to what degree the actors viewed
themselves as one, the other, or both (for example, Milton, Protestant theologian and
the defender of freedom of speech). Both sides, Protestant and modern rationalist, were
united in their wish to jettison classical teleology, the buttress both of classical philoso-
phy and Thomism, the latter of which sanctioned both the sovereignty of the Church in
religious matters and of divinely anointed monarchy over republicanism. A part of the
antiteleological temperament of the Reformation, and of English Protestants, was their
self-identification with the ancient Hebrews, owing among other things to the Hebrews’
monotheism, comporting with the Protestant trend against Trinitarian consubstantia-
tion and toward an elevation of God the Father at the expense of the Son, excluding
altogether the Mother of God as a polytheistic abomination. In another vein altogether,
Leon Kass (2003) has identified the Jewish God’s radical distance from nature – leading
to a distrust of the looks of the world, and in direct contrast with Platonic philosophy

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However disturbing may be the resemblances of Bacon’s new sci-

entific methodology to the torture and rape of nature, he sets his face
forward toward this brave new world. He foresees a future in which new
technical marvels wrested from the inner power of nature will improve
life for everyone, dispelling the fear, oppression, misery, superstition,
and intolerance of the past. It is important to note that, for Bacon,
the scientist’s tyranny over nature to extract this bounty need not be
extended to tyranny over human beings themselves, at least not in an
overt political sense, as opposed to their liberation through the spread
of the new reason from the delusions of tradition. Nor will ordinary
people, as opposed to the elite of methodologists, have to be purged
of their pedestrian comforts and pleasures. On the contrary, because
nature can be reshaped, ordinary people will enjoy as never before
the peaceful and commodious existence Machiavelli had feared as the
source of the republic’s rot and decline, an important departure on
Bacon’s part from “the Florentine’s” own republican prescription and
where he joins forces with the more benign liberalism of Locke.13 With
Hobbes, however, we encounter an altogether more brazen prescrip-
tion for the conquest of human nature itself, with far darker political
prognostications including the open endorsement of tyranny, ostensibly
based on the new Baconian physics.

In the opening of the Leviathan, Hobbes argues that nature is like a

machine designed by God. By imitating nature so conceived, man can
create an artificial man, the Commonwealth, and so remedy the natural
defects of our passions that, unchecked, lead to the war of all against all.
Man might replace God the artificer, with reason assimilated to the will
to reconstruct nature. As in Bacon, for Hobbes, the knowledge of nature

in which the visible world crowned by the Sun is seen as the paradigm for knowledge –
with the distrust shown by modern Baconian science toward teleology (an “idol of the
mind”) and a corresponding emphasis on the will to master the knowledge of nature
by standing outside of nature. There are many paths, in other words, to the notion of
Bacon’s thought as a synthesis of modern rationalism with the Reformation and with
Judaism.
13 In this connection, see Clarke (2008) who plausibly argues that Bacon distinguishes
himself from Machiavelli by signaling “his rejection of an imperial model based on
violent conquest. . . . In its place, he erects a new imperial model dedicated in principle
to humanity, prosperity and cosmopolitanism.”

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is also the power to refabricate it (Hobbes [1971] p. 115). Moreover,

following Machiavelli’s adaptation of the Augustinian and Thomistic
reversal of Aristotelian causality, whereby efficient cause located in God
is given priority over formal and final cause as the imposition of will
on matter, Hobbes’s artificer of the Commonwealth (like Machiavelli’s
prince of “outstanding virtue” who can “introduce into matter whatever
form he chooses”) prospectively takes the place of God as the fashioner
of nature and human nature (Hobbes [1971] pp. 82–83).
However, lest this master artificer be confused with the classical
account of superlative virtue and prudence in statesmen, Hobbes cou-
ples his elevation of technical willpower with a frontal assault on Aris-
totle’s maxim that man is by nature a political animal. In constructing
a sound commonwealth, Hobbes tells us, we should introspect about
human nature, comparable to Descartes’ call on the self to divest itself
of all received tradition in seeking clear knowledge derived from sense-
data and observable experience. Our guide, Hobbes argues, should not
be the objects of the passions, but the “similitude” of the passions
themselves, which reduce down to the simplest impulses for survival
(“which are the same in all men, desire, fear, hope, etc.”). What Hobbes
terms the objects of the passions (“the things desired, feared, hoped,
etc.”) correspond to the opinions regarding how to live about which, in
Aristotle’s definition of human nature, citizens deliberate – the debate
about the meaning of the just, the noble, and the advantageous for the
city. Because, according to Hobbes, these clashing opinions are inher-
ently unstable, divisive, and controversial, they make peaceful consensus
impossible: Aristotle’s definition of the fulfillment of human nature, if
acted on, leads inevitably to civil strife, insurrection, and the war of all
against all. Moreover, we ourselves, being systems of matter in motion,
even if we could agree on one day about the meaning of justice and the
other virtues, our shifting passions might incite us to reverse ourselves
the next as we are struck by new desires. The passions, in contrast
with the objects of the passions, though purely impulsive, are paradox-
ically more rational in the sense of being universal, yielding the kind
of “political arithmetic” (as R. H. Tawney [1950] put it) on which a
solidly crafted social contract can be constructed, with the logical neces-
sity of a geometric proof. Stripped of their objects in the world at large –
different substantive understandings of justice, happiness, nobility, and

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truth – the passions possess the “similitude” of their emptiness, at once

abstract and irrational. Opinions vary, but the passions themselves are
common to all.
Hobbes’s reversal of Aristotle’s definition of the purpose of human
nature means that human nature is fulfilled – because its only natural
impulse is self-preservation – by avoiding the full debate over ends that
Aristotle maintains actualizes our telos. Politics is only about securing
the means to self-preservation, not the seditious issues of who is right
about justice, virtue, and the entitlement to rule. This reversal enables
Hobbes to parody Aristotle’s Politics at every turn. He derides Aristo-
tle for arguing that some are by nature “more worthy to command”
because they favored his philosophy, “as if Master and Servant were
not introduced by consent of men, but by differences of wit” (Hobbes
[1971] p. 211). If human nature is solely and entirely fulfilled through
the pursuit of self-preservation, then an argument for the existence of
superlative virtue cannot be grounded in nature, as Aristotle would have
it, but only by whatever conventions happen to currently prevail due
to “consent.” The Hobbesian Sovereign does not rule because he has
a superior character (“more worthy to command” due to “differences
of wit”) but because he employs the correct method. He is the neu-
tral umpire of the social contract, protecting everyone else from their
own and others’ aberrant natural impulses, thereby maximizing the net
gain of every individual in security and well-being. Aristotle’s much-
vaunted prudence, the hallmark of the natural monarch and leading
aristocrat, is in Hobbes’s reduction nothing but the accumulated expe-
rience of staying alive, common to all animals and men. Worthiness to
command is not grounded in nature at all, but is a purely conventional
claim that serves merely to justify one’s own preferences stemming from
self-interest and vanity. Young men like to read ancient thinkers such
as Aristotle on the naturally superlative ruler because they flatter them-
selves that they fit the bill (Hobbes [1971] p. 162).
In the most blatant parody of all, Hobbes claims that in Aristo-
tle’s view, creatures such as “bees and ants” are “numbered amongst
political creatures” (Hobbes [1971] p. 225). But, Hobbes’s reasoning
runs, if Aristotle believes that human beings are capable of living in
harmony like bees and ants, why, one might ask of him, is it so man-
ifestly the case from all known history and observable experience that

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they in fact cannot? In contrast with what Hobbes presents as Aris-

totle’s naive assumption about human beings’ proclivity to communal
cooperation, Hobbes’s answer is that mens’ “continual competition for
honor and glory” leads to “envy and hatred,” for man’s chief joy is
in establishing himself as preeminent over other men. In other words,
whereas Aristotelians naively believe that men in political communities
might be effortlessly gregarious and cooperative like bees and other
“political creatures” working harmoniously away, the worldly wise
Hobbes knows that their competition for prestige makes voluntary
political associations impossible in the absence of an absolute monarch
to enforce the peace.
But of course Aristotle never argues that men are naturally gregar-
ious: on the contrary, he defines the nature of man as “political” in
direct contrast with the nature of gregarious creatures like bees and
ants (1253a7–10). A careful exegete like Hobbes must have known
that he was attributing to Aristotle the very opposite of what Aristotle
in fact argues, and so constructing a fake debate between himself and
Aristotle, likely to slide by the casual Aristotelian reader, over a position
Aristotle never held. For according to Aristotle, in fulfilling his nature
through civic deliberation, the actualization of man’s end is inherently
controversial, attended by the permanent danger that heated debate may
boil over into civil strife. What Hobbes does not want to acknowledge is
that Aristotle himself provides for this danger by encouraging the devel-
opment of a high level of civic virtue through education, through civic
institutions that moderate excessive greed and promote inclusiveness,
and by relying on the inherent authority of reason itself to illuminate
the correct path to the common good, supplemented by laws and coer-
cion where needed. Rather than introduce these complexities into his
reduction of human nature from Aristotle’s definition of man as a polit-
ical animal to the barren “similitude of the passions,” Hobbes simply
burlesques Aristotle as having his head in the clouds. Because Aristo-
tle’s reasoned distinction between superlative virtue in one or a few
statesmen and tyranny has been excluded except as a matter for snide
parody, Hobbes is free to drive home his conclusion that any attempt to
distinguish between one ruler as a virtuous monarch and another as a
tyrant depends solely on whose ox is being gored. As long as the law is
enforced by a neutral umpire, protecting individuals from each other’s

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unchecked natural passions for exploitation and mastery, and enabling

people freely to buy and sell their labor to survive and prosper, this
distinction is insignificant.
The need to obviate an Aristotelian riposte to his new political science
through a parody of Aristotle’s actual teaching points, in my view, to
the irreparable incoherence of Hobbes’s point of departure. The central
paradox of Hobbes’s thought is that he wants to ruthlessly expose the
hidden ambitions of men – to tear away from our eyes the comforting
veil of Aristotelianism and Christianity that teaches us that man has
the potential (whether based on reason or revelation) to be good – in
order to eradicate those ambitions permanently. Whereas the classics
began by taking it as a given that men would always seek honor, and in
the worst case tyranny, so as to think about how to lead them toward
civic virtue and a friendliness for philosophy, Hobbes begins by sever-
ing any possible connection between honor seeking and this prospect
for transcendence. Apart from Augustine, no profound thinker about
political existence so thoroughly drains honor of its connection to the
erotic longing for wholeness at the heart of classical and especially Pla-
tonic pedagogy – with the very great difference, of course, that whereas
Augustine does this in order to purify man of his natural longings
in light of a higher supernatural standard, Hobbes does so in order
to sever honor seeking from any connection to a higher natural stan-
dard in light of which its good and bad versions might be assessed.
By denying the capacity of all varieties of honor seeking for moral or
philosophical transcendence, Hobbes might at first blush appear to be
more realistic than the ancients, given what we know from history and
experience about how people really act when they claim to be motivated
by honor – amply demonstrated, as Hobbes believed, by Thucydides’
history of ancient Greece and by the political strife of his own England.
Yet Hobbes’s reductionist account of honor seeking is for the ultimate
purpose of suppressing or even eradicating honor seeking altogether.
The notion that political ambition of the kind leading to empire and
immortal glory could be extirpated from human beings arguably makes
Hobbes ultimately much more optimistic than the ancients about the
prospects for permanent peace – optimistic to the point of being delu-
sional himself, based on how people and states have actually acted
since Hobbes’s efforts to enlighten them about their own motive of self-
preservation.

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Hobbes’s social contract requires that one honor-seeking man – the

Sovereign – discipline his pleasures so as to crush methodically all the
other proud ones. He can then allow the peaceable majority to prosper
and live as they please in private life as long as they do not contest the
Sovereign’s absolute authority. The price this Sovereign must pay is that,
to the extent that he dedicates himself to Hobbes’s method for ruling,
he must give up his own full scope for glory seeking and for exploiting
his subjects wantonly. It is not that he must go from being a Nero to a
Marcus Aurelius, the kind of transition from an exploitive tyrant to a
benevolent monarch the classics would have urged (a distinction based,
in Hobbes’s language, on “differences in wit”), but that he must go from
being a Nero or a Marcus Aurelius to being a kind of detached and invis-
ible manager. Indeed, his method of ruling could arguably be best car-
ried out by an impersonal mechanism – say a constitution that, through
checks and balances, retarded political ambition by sluicing the peo-
ple’s passions into three mutually impeding branches of government –
rather than a flesh-and-blood human being at all, with all his potential
for inconstancy and whim.
Broadly speaking, then, the potential of Hobbes’s political philos-
ophy for the future runs in two different directions: totalitarianism
and enlightenment. On one level, as we have observed, the Sovereign
must have the capacity to inspire terror, especially in the vainglori-
ous; to replicate the terror that would spontaneously be experienced
when we revert from the social contract to the state of nature with
its war of all against all, thereby schooling those foolishly tempted to
do so to change their course of action. By replicating this terror insti-
tutionally, the Sovereign saves us from ourselves through a salutary
dose of fear, anticipating Hegel’s depiction of the slave as being liq-
uefied by the fear inspired in him by the master. In this sense, Stalin
was one of history’s most consistent Hobbesians. He used terror in a
relentless campaign to re-create human nature as empty integers inter-
changeable with one another, stripped of ambition, living in enforced
harmony. Hitler employed the same methods for the purification of the
Volk. Still, as I have already stressed, no dimension of early-modern
political theory, even in its darkest potential, fully explains the poten-
tial for totalitarian and millenarian revolution or terrorism like that
of the Bolsheviks or Nazis. That further radicalization of the exer-
cise of the will to reshape human nature can only be thought through

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by way of Rousseau’s romanticization of the “people.” More on this

later.
Moreover, we must recall again that Hobbes’s own preferred solution
to the problem of ambition was not this constant, institutionalized use
of terror, which would be a kind of concession that the nature of the
vainglorious was irrepressible and ineradicable. Instead, Hobbes hoped
and believed that his new psychology of pedestrian appetitiveness, to be
taught “in the universities” ([1971] p. 728) in the place of “Aristotelity,”
would over time genuinely convince people that they should understand
all their passions, including honor seeking, as deriving from a desire for
comfortable self-preservation and fear of violent death, thereby realizing
the irrationality of honor seeking and especially tyrannical ambition.
The universality of the scientific method imported from Bacon leads
to the “political arithmetic” of the “similitude of the passions” – the
reduction of human nature per se, and without exception, from an
absorption in the objects of men’s ambitions in the wider world to a
baseline of sheer survival, echoing Machiavelli’s endorsement of fear
over love as the basis for sound statecraft, or, alternatively put, for
what “touches” man inwardly as opposed to his bedazzlement by the
looks of the world. Hobbes will not admit of an exception to this
reduction of honor seeking to self-preservation in anyone guided by
a true understanding of nature (as opposed to the spontaneous and
misguided impulse for mastery characteristic of some in the state of
nature), making his view of the state of nature different from that of the
Sophists, who had maintained that there was a just and noble life by
nature as opposed to convention; that while the just and noble life by
convention was indeed the morality of equality and contract, based on
pedestrian appetites and the fear of being tyrannized over, there would
always be certain naturally noble “masters” who would never submit.
Gorgias, Callicles, and the other Sophists would never have agreed with
Hobbes that the distinction between master and servant existed solely
by “consent” and not in nature. Unlike Hobbes, the Sophists would not
have disagreed with Aristotle that the distinction between the superior
and inferior man existed by nature. Their disagreement would have been
over what the nature of that superiority, including the most satisfying
way of life, really is.
Hobbes believes that this kind of man, the alleged master by nature
idolized by Callicles, can eventually be brought to understand that he

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is not truly independent or set apart from the many who are con-
cerned with mere survival and comfort. He argues in chapter 15 of the
Leviathan that aspiring tyrants who believe they can get away with
achieving dominion simply have not thought through how the dangers
of failure, including being crushed by the authority they want to usurp,
must always outweigh through fear any merely prospective gains they
could make by continuing to struggle for predominance. But this, after
all, one might object, is a mere assertion or expression of hope on
Hobbes’s part, because people then and now manifestly do continue to
take the risk. However that may be, this side of Hobbes’s argument,
in my view his preferred outcome, leads not to totalitarianism but to
enlightenment – the belief that the new psychology of pedestrian appeti-
tiveness will by degrees work its way into the human character, leading
man to shed aggression and intolerance in exchange for the right to
comfortable self-preservation.
The same paradox we have identified in Hobbes – an ostensibly
more realistic presentation of human nature than that of the premod-
ern tradition in order to usher in a far more optimistic set of expec-
tations about the complete withering away of tyrannical aggression
and oppression than anything the premodern tradition would have
envisioned – becomes an in-built feature of much of modern political
thought. Spinoza is a case in point. Like Machiavelli, whose wisdom he
acknowledges, Spinoza gives a realistic, pragmatic, this-worldly account
of Moses in order to deflate the claims of revelation that Moses was a
divinely guided prophet. In Spinoza’s depiction, Moses used force judi-
ciously and created a religious faith so as to unite his people. In the
first instance, this real-world account appears to bring power politics
to the fore as against concerns about divine revelation and the life of
faith. As Wildavsky (2005) puts it concerning this secular approach to
interpreting Moses’ authority, by stripping Moses of his “sacerdotal”
character, we can better appreciate his genius, courage, prudence and
ingenuity as a ruler, including how he sometimes verged on “despo-
tism.” However, insofar as Spinoza’s long-term goal is this-worldly
peace, tolerance, harmony and stability, the realistic side of politics
exemplified by Moses’ leadership will eventually give way to a spiritu-
alized liberal democracy where the hard-headed realism of the founder
can be dispensed with. On reflection, therefore, we realize that the fun-
damental aim of Spinoza (presaged by Machiavelli in presenting the

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realistic Moses, the secular leader or, to use Machiavelli’s more poetic
language, “armed prophet”) was to tame Mosaic politics by separating
them from the nonnegotiable zeal and righteousness sustained by a faith
in God and God’s justice. This tension between unsentimental realism
about politics in the present for the sake of a peaceful, bounteous, toler-
ant, nonaggressive future undulates, as we consider in the next section,
throughout the Enlightenment. Even later rebellions from the fascist
right against what it regarded as liberal weakness and pacifism were
unable to escape its contradictions. Carl Schmitt tried to derive the
primacy of the friend-enemy distinction from Hobbes’s warlike state of
nature as a weapon against what he saw as the creeping and despiritual-
izing bourgeois materialism of Europe. He could not, however, success-
fully derive a more robust code of political strife from Hobbes’s view
of the state of nature because the most consistent long-term outcome of
Hobbes’s initially unvarnished presentation of honor seeking – domi-
nation and strife as man’s spontaneous natural condition – is, through
the construction of the social compact, precisely that bourgeois hamster
wheel that Schmitt and many other fascists and National Socialists so
loathed.14
Let us restate the central paradox of early modern political theory in
its approach to tyrannical honor seeking as it originates in the thought
of Hobbes. Political realism is advanced against what is caricatured
as classical and Christian idealism or unworldliness so as to promote
a project for political and social peace beyond anything ever thought
possible by the allegedly unrealistic ancients. The principled rebellion
against this emerging bourgeois world, and against early modern nat-
ural right, begins with Rousseau and Hegel, who recognize the super-
ficiality and naivete of liberalism’s hopes and so strive to reintroduce
more full-blooded notions of honor, civic virtue, the warrior’s code,
and manly patriotism, often invoking the heroic republicanism of the
ancient world. Yet in many ways these critics of the Enlightenment
remain in the thrall of its paradox. Hegel’s philosophy of history begins
in the master–slave encounter, his strident celebration of history as a
“slaughter bench” in which selfish passion alone can advance justice,
and his broadsides against Kantian naivete for thinking that political

14 On Schmitt and Hobbes, see Strauss (1995). On Moses as a political leader, consider
Wildavsky (2005).

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 conclusion

ambition could ever be “disinterested.” It culminates, however, in the

view of a coming world of forgiveness and reconciliation, with the last
shock of tyrannical violence, the French Revolution and Napoleonic
Wars, being but the darkest hour before the dawn, the final birth-pang
of a new world of brotherhood and harmony.
We can extend these reflections much closer to the present. The
approach to the phenomenon of tyranny taken by contemporary politi-
cal science, fed by these deeper intellectual sources, remains in the thrall
of the paradox we have identified. It begins with hardheaded realism
about self-interest as the driving force of all political actors and ends
in strikingly optimistic prognoses about the coming “new global civil
society” of lasting peace, community, and equality in “a world without
borders.” Starting with the theories of Hegel and Marx, and continuing
today with the alleged revolutionary power of economic globalization,
the historical process itself becomes the tyrant that will once and for all
free us from tyranny. Once the final avatar of violent transformation
(the oppressive and destructive values of the Enlightenment, global cap-
italism, the bourgeoisie, today increasingly identified with the United
States) needed to bring about nirvana is itself finally eclipsed, along
with all oppressive nationalisms and competitiveness, world peace will
reign. As the hope for a coming world of peace and the end of conflict
always inherent in liberal political philosophy has unfolded, one might
argue that its extravagant idealism has steadily eroded its underlying
and original realism. In John Rawls’s still-influential A Theory of Justice
(1971), we find a world already completely transformed into a Hobbe-
sian bourgeois social contract where we all prospectively have a “plan of
life” and the economic means to carry it out, but completely abstracted
from the Hobbesian state of nature. Whereas Hobbes’s state of nature
at least evoked the inherently belligerent side of human nature in order
to remind us of the woes we would face without the social contract, and
to remind us as well that human wolves will continue to roam the dark
margins beyond the artificially constructed safety zone of the contrac-
tual state, Rawls’s world abstracts entirely from those dark margins of
war, imperialism, religious and national sectarianism, and fanaticism.
Shorn of its moorings in a realistic assessment of man’s belligerent side,
liberalism, its original dynamism fueled by being conflicted, being torn,
between hardheaded appraisals of the present and utopian expectations
for the future, has increasingly passed in its intellectual classes to the

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utopian expectations alone, the coming postmodernist nirvana. Yet if

the history of the great antiliberal revolutions from the Jacobins down
through Bolshevism, National Socialism, Maoism, the Khmer Rouge,
and the International Jihad are any guide, we can confidently predict
that in any coming revolution on behalf of the “new global civil society,”
the pacifists and reformists will be swept aside by the more methodical
and committed totalitarians.

the phenomenology of tyranny

My argument about the central paradox of early modern natural right
regarding the status of tyranny and honor seeking has so far been delib-
erately rather general, abstracted, as it were, from the warp and woof
of historical events. Now I would like to reintegrate some of that his-
torical texture for a more rounded phenomenology of tyranny and its
relationship to contemporary political science.
Political ideas, it is well to bear in mind, do not cause events in a
lockstep way, but can be abstracted from them to illuminate an impor-
tant dimension of events. In this book, although I have been arguing
that, at a very general level of theoretical abstraction in the history
of political thought, the understanding of tyranny changes from the
erotic to the impersonal, and that the identity of modern tyranny is in
some measure obscured by being adopted as an instrument for radical
political and social change, I mean nothing so superficial as to suggest
either that tyranny of the kind originally diagnosed by the classics actu-
ally disappeared from the world or that people ceased identifying and
understanding tyranny in ways still heavily reliant on the classics, which
remained at the heart of liberal education as it was conceived of by the
Enlightenment.
For example, the American founders, steeped in the classics including
Plato, Aristotle, Sallust, and Cicero, carefully pondered the permissible
limits of ambition and the danger, discussed at length throughout this
book, of would-be tyrants posing as liberators. Modern conquerors like
Napoleon were certainly recognized by their contemporaries, including
Emerson and Guizot, as attempting to imitate the glories of ancient
rulers like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Hegel, as already noted,
extolled the need for ambition and a lust for prestige as an engine for
the achievement of justice and derided the Kantian notion of a purely

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“disinterested” morality, while at the same time arguing that modern

mass man needed the counterweight of classical learning to combat
materialism and frivolity more than any previous epoch. Whereas Toc-
queville worried that grand martial and political ambition might dis-
appear in America because of its overwhelming interest in bourgeois
commerce, the young Abraham Lincoln took the view that, on the
contrary, ambition characteristic of “the tribe of the lion” including
Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon would always emerge, in America as
much as anywhere else. The danger was not that grand ambition would
fade away, but that it would find democratic politics too paltry to fur-
nish such leonine men with a sense of honor from serving the common
good.15 For these Alcibiadean strivers, Lincoln worried, there might be
more glory in overthrowing the republic than in saving it.
Distinguished historians and statesman including Gibbon, Macaulay,
Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle all recognized the important role of
honor seeking in political life and the need to distinguish between per-
missible and impermissible varieties of ambition and pride. Moreover,
they were very much alive to the problem first observed by Sophocles,
Plato, and Aristotle that some of the same dark or bellicose qualities
present in tyrants might also fuel the vigor of the leading statesman. As
Emerson memorably put it about Napoleon: “Here was an experiment,
under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without
conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed and so weaponed;
never leader found such aids and followers.”16 In some ways, then,
modern historians and men of affairs did not succumb to Hobbesian
reductionism about the place of honor seeking in political life. Grand
ambition still had a role, for good or ill. To quote de Gaulle:
When faced with the challenge of events, the man of character has recourse
to himself. His instinctive response is to leave his mark on action, to take
responsibility for it, to make it his own business.17

At the same time, however, beginning with the Age of Reason and
the Enlightenment, we also find a tendency to believe that, with how-
ever many fits and starts and occasional relapses, the history of the West

15 For a full discussion of Tocqueville on the danger posed to grand ambition by democracy
and Lincoln’s differing view in the “Lyceum Speech,” see Newell (2009) part 2.
16 Quoted in Newell (2001) p. 279.
17 Quoted in Newell (2001) p. 297.

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was progressing toward ever greater prosperity, freedom, justice, peace,

equality, and tolerance and that this process could not be reversed. Fig-
ures as various as Gibbon, Tocqueville, and Marx all believed this, albeit
with very different expectations for the final outcome. Hegel among
others recognized that Napoleon was not merely the recrudescence of
some ancient conqueror, but spread the rationality of the Enlighten-
ment through his conquests. He was, in effect, a liberalizing tyrant who,
because he introduced the modern conception of the nation-state and
the social contract to the backward remnants of the ancien regime in
Europe, would conceivably make conquests and imperial glory seeking
like his own unnecessary in the future, when the peaceful individualism
and commercialism promoted by Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and
Voltaire would reign supreme.
This belief in the progress of history had to qualify the extent to
which thinkers and historians believed that tyranny of the kind diag-
nosed by the ancients had survived in pure form or would survive long
into the future. For must it not fade away as men became more enlight-
ened, even if, as Hegel argued, the twenty years or more of revolution,
terror, and war between 1789 and 1807 was the necessary final spasm
of violence needed to bring about the rule of reason? But then, finally,
we reach the supreme paradox that the twentieth century, when one
might have imagined that the beneficent progress of history was nearing
its end state, produced tyrannies unprecedented in scale, destructive
power, and fiendishness, suggesting that not only had the modern
belief in progress arguably been naive, but that the ancients themselves,
for all their belief that tyrants will always be with us, would have
been confounded by the likes of Stalin and Hitler. Something new had
been added to our experience and understanding of tyranny, it could
be argued, not only from the classical viewpoint, but from the liberal
progressivist one as well. By way of concluding these studies, let us try
to unravel the layers of this enigma in turn. As I have already suggested,
the attempt at a full explanation of the distinctive totalitarian tyrannies
of the twentieth century, including their more recent Islamist variant,
is beyond the scope of this study. For they cannot be explained solely
within this book’s theme of the deeroticization of tyranny or the con-
quest of nature alone. At the same time, however, totalitarian tyrannies
do, I am suggesting, share in these strains of the first transition to moder-
nity inaugurated by Machiavelli. In this way, I hope to substantiate, on

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the basis of everything we have considered throughout this book, my

suggestion in the Introduction that tyranny cannot be understood as a
constant in the history of political ideas, psychology, or, indeed, political
experience.
I have described the classical approach to tyranny as trying to deter-
mine in a given context just where the untutored passion for distinction
can be sublimated and reformed into a sense of honor that comes from
benefiting one’s fellow citizens; where an egotism and belligerence that
might in one setting lead to tyranny can in another be the fuel to excel
in public service. To reiterate: this classical temperament for evaluating
the relationship between tyranny and statesmanship did not go away as
modernity took root. Quite the contrary: the general love of classical
learning consequent upon the Renaissance, and that even Machiavelli
contributed to inspiring despite his radical repudiation and modification
of it, was renewed during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.
Even a strictly religious humanist like Erasmus, in his prescription for a
Christian King, although disapproving of the moral slipperiness of the
Machiavellian Prince, regards honor and glory as perfectly legitimate
rewards for just rule, a manly satisfaction in its own sphere that need
not bow to Christian humility in the undiluted way required of the
clergy, in this sense marrying Aristotle’ great-souled man to the vision
of a Christian commonwealth.
To take a later and even more forthright example of a political
realism at least partially classical while modulated by a more mod-
ern, Machiavellian temperament, Edward Gibbon’s description of the
future emperor Constantine as a young man expresses well how traits
unattractive or overbearing in themselves and in private relationships
may be necessary (a point made repeatedly, as we have seen, by the clas-
sics) for the development of a ruler’s character, a sap that strengthens
the fully developed plant even as it is submerged in and shaped by it:

He was dexterous in all his exercises, intrepid in war, affable in peace; in

his whole conduct, the active spirit of youth was tempered by habitual pru-
dence; and while his mind was engrossed by ambition, he appeared cold and
insensible to the allurements of pleasure. (Gibbon [1900] vol.1, p. 470)

This could be a description of Xenophon’s Cyrus.

Separated from the context in and for which these character traits
were developed, what type of person is this? An intense but outwardly

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reserved man, unlikely to be too free with his thoughts or feelings,

relentless in the pursuit of distinction and reproaching, by his very
presence, the ordinary pleasures of those around him. Not a pleasant
dinner companion or a suitable talk-show host. In the wider context of
which Gibbon writes, though, the restorer of the Roman state after one
of its starker passages of decline.
As another example, let us take Lord Charnwood’s biography of
Abraham Lincoln. Written in 1912, it is considerably closer to home
for us in time and spirit, yet has a genuinely Aristotelian flavor in its
judicious balance of admiration for a statesman who dedicated him-
self to his country’s highest principles of justice with a shrewd insight
into how strong were Lincoln’s longings for success and fame. “Very
soon,” Charnwood observes after describing Lincoln’s first emergence
as a national politician after eight years in the Illinois state house, “the
question of whether a proposal or even a sentiment was timely or pre-
mature came to bulk too large in the deliberations of Lincoln’s friends.
The reader will perhaps wonder later whether such considerations did
not bulk too largely in Lincoln’s own mind.” Charnwood then formu-
lates the problem that ambitious servants of the common good such as
Lincoln presents to the student of politics:

Was there in his statesmanship, even in later days when he had great work
to do, an element of that opportunism which, if not actually base, is at least
cheap? Or did he come as near as a man with many human weaknesses can
to the wise and nobly calculated opportunism which is not merely the most
beneficial statesmanship, but demands a heroic self-mastery? (Charnwood
[1917] p. 74)

This is an updated version of the question first posed, as we saw

in Chapter 4, by the chorus in Oedipus Tyrannus: Where do political
opportunism and personal ambition leave off and great statesmanship
begin? Might they be combined in the same persons? Indeed, as we have
already observed, it is Lincoln himself in the Lyceum Speech who mused
on the choice between a life devoted to serving the republic and one,
perhaps more glorious, devoted to bringing it down. In contrast with
Charnwood’s nuanced and mature evaluation of political ambition,
still plausible to readers on the eve of World War I, our own categories
usually require us to choose between, or at least lean toward, one of two
equally implausible notions: that political actors are motivated either

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by a purely disinterested devotion to universal morality, or by a desire

for power, wealth, and status regardless of whatever rhetorical cant
they may employ in public. Charnwood’s middle ground of a “wise
and nobly calculated opportunism” is still evident in certain leaders in
practice, but has all but vanished as a psychological category among
political analysts and commentators.
The earlier literature stretching back to the Renaissance of which
Charnwood’s biography is a late but fine example, a compendium of
classical, Christian, and modern learning, understood that to achieve
good for people through politics, one needed to achieve political power,
which will inevitably entail a degree of ethical compromise and even
unscrupulousness. The goal of this literature was not merely to describe
ambition, but to distinguish its permissible varieties from the tyran-
nical ones so as to encourage the former and discourage the latter.
The respective descriptions were meant to entail the condemnation or
commendation, as in, say, Plato’s description of the tyrant versus his
description of the just man. However, as Charnwood observes, some-
times these two aims were at cross-purposes. Some of the classically or
religiously inspired accounts are so eager to condemn tyrannically or
venally motivated honor seeking that they bury the more complicated
blend of personal ambition and public service typical of the greatest
statesmen in bromides about how one should never under any circum-
stances be ambitious or seek honor. Against this excessively moralistic
stance Charnwood, perhaps with a view to the Calvinistic morality of
the particular nation whose hero he was praising, observes with respect
to Lincoln:

We must accept without reserve Herndon’s reiterated assertion that Lincoln

was intensely ambitious; and if ambition means the eager desire for great
opportunities, the depreciation of it, which has long been a commonplace of
literature, and which may be traced back to the Epicureans, is a piece of cant
which ought to be withdrawn from currency, and ambition, commensurate
with the powers which each man can discover in himself, should be frankly
recognized as a part of Christian duty. (Charnwood [1917] p. 260)

Altogether, then, despite the massive shift in ontological orientation

between the classical and modern understandings of tyranny beginning
with Machiavelli, a rich trove of ambiguities about the character and
desirability of political ambition, compounded of classical, Christian,

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and modern sources, continued to flourish. Nevertheless, the growing

conviction that modernity, with its emphasis on equal rights, individual
self-interest, and a preference for the peaceful arts of commerce over
aristocratic pride and martial glory, was being progressively revealed
as the direction in which all previous human history was inexorably
tending, did have the long-run consequence of dulling the perception
that tyranny every bit as monstrous as, or more so than, the worst pre-
vious examples might continue as a recurrent and unavoidable feature
of political life. Gibbon himself, a matchless psychologist of ambition
when examining the Roman past, believes at the same time that histor-
ical progress will steadily dissipate the possibility of tyrannical violence
and conquest in the future, as the new psychology of enlightened self-
interest originated by Hobbes and other modern thinkers continued to
spread:

We cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their
future advance toward perfection; but it may safely be presumed that no
people . . . will relapse into their original barbarism. . . . The benefits of law
and policy, of trade and manufactures, of arts and sciences, are more solid
and permanent.

After Auschwitz and the Gulag, not to mention Chairman Mao, the
Khmer Rouge, and the Taliban, it is difficult, to say the least, to believe
in our “advance toward perfection.” Surveying the tumult of twenti-
eth century politics in his 1960 classic Political Man, Seymour Martin
Lipset acknowledged and drew upon the regime types first elaborated
by Plato and Aristotle, including tyranny, despotism, oligarchy, democ-
racy, and the danger posed to popular government by “the appeal of
irresponsible demagogues.” There was ample evidence for reconsider-
ing Aristotle’s contention in the Politics that the desire to tyrannize
was not reducible to the desire for pedestrian material gratification –
that a man did not become a tyrant “in order to get in out of the
cold” (1267a2–17). The Enlightenment had believed that someone’s
desire to dominate and oppress others derived from the frustration of
his desires for security from harm and for material pleasures that are
in themselves harmless. The solution lay in removing the frustration
needlessly caused by religious and moral restrictions on self-interest
and private pleasure, thereby dissipating the sources of war and hatred.
After the unprecedented devastation of World Wars I and II and the

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superpower conflict of the Cold War, however, it was perhaps actually

easier to agree with Plato and Aristotle than it had been for Gibbon
and other earlier moderns in the salad days of the belief in historical
progress that certain people intrinsically want to tyrannize over oth-
ers, whether out of greed, conviction, a love of mastery, or all three –
and find that the glory and exhilaration of doing so far outweigh the
risks to one’s security and comfort that this kind of ambition may entail.
The twentieth century was the era when the goals of the Enlighten-
ment, one might have claimed, had been most thoroughly actualized
in North America and Europe. The scientific wonders fantasized about
by Bacon in The House of Solomon and viciously lampooned by Swift
(for example, a machine for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers) in
Gulliver’s Travels had all come to pass. It was assumed by Voltaire,
Becarria, and the other preceptors of the Enlightenment that when indi-
vidual self-interest, liberated from feudal and theological restrictions on
commercial enterprise and aided by science, held sway everywhere, peo-
ple would lose their hatreds and intolerance because, once the impedi-
ments to their survival, comfort and self-fulfillment vanished, so would
the motives for aggressive conduct. The steady spread and success of this
worldview led nineteenth-century Europe to see all of history as advanc-
ing toward an impending future of perfect democracy, prosperity, indi-
vidual freedom, rationality, and peace. War would be outmoded, either
for the idealistic reason that people would finally shed the last lingering
prejudices of religion, race, class, or caste that prevented mutual respect,
or for the utilitarian reason that the material cost and devastation of
war were demonstrably too high in an era that depended on uninter-
rupted economic growth to facilitate social advancement. On the eve
of World War I, and in a strange way making people welcome it, the
belief was widespread that this was the “war to end all wars”; that for
something so retrograde and barbaric to happen at the opening of the
twentieth century could only mean that it was the apocalyptic prelude
to the final achievement of the emerging new era of lasting peace; that
its horrors would finally teach us our lesson and impel us to abandon
militarism for good. Yet, as we know, 1914 was instead the prelude to
a series of tyrannies, revolutions, and wars unparalleled in all of history
for their levels of carnage and destruction, their efficiency in murder
and torture, and the depths of depravity sunk to by the oppressors and
of despair by their victims.

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These things were not supposed to happen. In the century when

liberalism was to be triumphant everywhere, not only did tyranny and
wars of conquest not vanish, but they achieved levels of destruction and
cruelty that made the “tyrants” decried by eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century revolutionaries look like comic opera martinets by comparison.
The psychology of liberalism and the Victorian belief in cumulative
material and moral progress could not account for such leaders or
movements often erupting in the very countries where the Enlighten-
ment’s political and economic agendas were most advanced. The spread
of prosperity and rights, by dispelling ignorance and removing the bases
for prejudice and belligerence, should have made tyranny too danger-
ous, irrational, and indecent a goal for any sensible person to pursue or
support. It should likewise have robbed anyone aberrant enough still to
want it of credulous, backward masses to obey him. As Gibbon’s work
reveals, the modern age had preserved an appreciation for the richness
of classical political psychology out of its general respect for learning
and desire to foster it. Yet precisely Gibbon, as we have seen, did not
believe that modern Europe’s progress could regress into barbarism
like that of Rome’s decline into the Dark Ages, let alone something
worse.
Here is where we reach the most difficult issue in the ontology of
tyranny, one that I initially raised in the Introduction to this book: Is
it enough to recognize the danger of modern tyranny by reverting to
the classical perspective, thereby freeing oneself from the delusions of
historical progress and Hobbesian reductionism? For even that classi-
cal psychology, never entirely lost sight of in the West, with its detailed
exploration and condemnation of the tyrannical character and regime,
might well appear to be inadequate to account for the most monstrous
of our own era’s tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. As we have
observed, the Hobbesian and Kantian strains in contemporary political
morality tend to dismiss political ambition and honor seeking alto-
gether as either camouflage for a more basic impulse to exploit others
for material gain, or as an unworthy, extraneous motive for performing
our duty. The classical thinkers were more receptive, both descriptively
and prescriptively, to entertaining such motives because they saw the
ambition for honor and rule as partially condemnable but also partially
redeemable facets of human behavior. Rather than dismissing the pur-
suit of honor on a priori grounds, their moral aim was to enlist honor

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seeking in the service of a self-governing community under the rule of

law. They sought to convince the ambitious, tyrannically inclined man
that the pursuit of tyranny, as opposed to civic virtue guided by phi-
losophy and the life of the mind, could lead only to a dishonorable,
despised, degradingly self-indulgent, paranoid, and bestial existence.
The bizarre quality of modern totalitarian regimes is that their tyrants
(if, indeed, this is even the best term for them) have not been self-
indulgent in the gargantuanly hedonistic sense condemned by Plato and
Aristotle. Moreover, the honor they desire is of an arguably different
character than the strictly personal type of recognition that the classi-
cal thinkers saw a tyrant as gaining from his subjects and from which,
they conceded, the tyrant could take a certain satisfaction (recalling
Xenophon’s portrait of Hiero), albeit a misguided one, as the “lover”
or “owner” of his people. For, in contrast with the vivid and urbane
tyrants of the ancient world, our contemporary totalitarian tyrants have
at once a public aspect that is titanic, omnipresent and beyond personal
human scale (reflected in the mechanized mass genocide and the archi-
tectural brutalism of Stalin and Hitler) and in their personal lives a kind
of self-effacement, crankishness, banality, or awkwardness. Whereas
the lives of the ancient tyrants are seamlessly interwoven with the per-
sonalistic, patrimonial character of their regimes, so that their political
predominance is conflated with the possessiveness but also at times
the generosity, charm, or flamboyance of a lover (think of Alcibiades or
Julius Caesar), we are astounded at the kind of “gray blur” (to use Trot-
sky’s famous description of Stalin) who stands behind the levers of the
totalitarians state’s superhuman power. While having millions killed,
Hitler showed an elaborate Austrian courtesy toward his secretaries,
like that of a bourgeois banker, teasing them that they were fattening
him up with too much cake. Himmler suffered from chronic stomach
pains and, while supervising the Holocaust, thoughtfully remembered
his secretaries’ birthdays. These rulers do not seem to seek public honor,
at least not in the traditionally recognizable splendor of past emperors
and kings. They often spurn elaborate ceremonials, regalia, and other
marks of high office for “a plain field tunic,” avoiding the public for
years at a time in their bunkers or walled compounds. Stalin’s quarters
in the Kremlin have been compared in size to those of an Oxford don;
Hitler’s summer retreat to that of a relatively prosperous businessman.
Osama bin Laden, once the aspiring revolutionary leader of the Muslim

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world, was killed in a near-empty bedroom. The point is not that these
leaders were actually incorruptible or did not have secret vices and
purloined wealth. The point is that their personal lives were entirely
sundered from their monumental public image, whereas past despots
lived on a scale and in a way (think of Nero’s Golden House or Louis
XIV’s Versailles) that merged their capacity for luxury, adornment, and
refinement with their public identities as rulers.
Reclusive in their “Spartan quarters,” modern totalitarian tyrants
purge and recreate human existence on a vast scale, through the destruc-
tion and transportation of millions of people, in the service of doctrines
that proclaim an ideal, beyond compromise, of equality, virtue, class-
lessness, and communal or racial purity. Although capable of setting
in motion prodigies of terror that in the past one can find only in
descriptions of the most vengeful deities – and which the Enlighten-
ment believed would vanish with the end of Europe’s religious wars –
in person our tyrants tend to be gray, mild, lacking in vanity of dress
or manner, studious, gluttonous, and fussy. Many witnesses testify to
Hitler’s shyness and tentativeness in private, in contrast with his thun-
dering public performances, while Stalin’s speaking style even in public
was tediously dry and pedantic, reflective of his early seminary train-
ing. Sometimes they are histrionic in the manner of an overwrought
professor or café intellectual, eager to lay out their crankish opinions
on all facets of life from the cycles of empire to music, diet, and groom-
ing (such unendurable monologues were common to Stalin, Hitler, and
Castro). As Flaubert sums up his character Senecal in L’Education sen-
timentale, the would-be Jacobin of 1848 who ends up as the police
agent of Napoleon III, they “smell of the pedagogue and the priest.”18
We wonder what secret of our age would finally explain the connection
between such unprepossessing individuals and the titanic scale of their
destructiveness.
A brief example from the ancient and modern literature will crys-
tallize this contrast. In Aristotle’s description, the tyrant at his worst
is a monster of desires who outrages his subjects by plundering or
ravishing them (Politics 1312b17–38, 1313b32–1315a40). Citizens are
driven to tyrannicide by the need to rid society of this bloated exploiter.
This powerful condemnation, repeated and embellished by humanist

18 See the discussion of eros and revolution in Flaubert’s novel in Newell (1995).

488
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commentators both religious and secular, still animates many contem-

porary denunciations of oppressive regimes, like the 2011 uprisings
in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria against corrupt kleptocrats and their idle,
spoiled families and hangers-on. In striking contrast, however, as Sergey
Nechaev writes in a classic modern statement of the terrorist’s creed,
Catechism of the Revolutionist, the terrorist’s violence is aimed at the
purgation of society’s own bloated desires and corruption.19 Tyran-
nical methods are used for ascetic ends by ascetics who want to force
everyone else to be ascetics. Nechaev’s very use of the term “catechism”
suggests that terrorism aims to create a politicized, secularized version
of a community of religious penitents with its absolute monastic disci-
pline, forced to renounce their pleasures and luxuries for the sake of
the collective. Even pity for the oppressed themselves, the poor and dis-
advantaged, cannot stand in the way of striking at those among them
who, through foolishness or venality, prop up the established order.
The majority of the guillotine’s victims under Robespierre were from
the middle and lower orders. Ostensibly the intended beneficiaries of
the French Revolution, in practice they often clung most staunchly to
their religious faith and loyalty to the monarchy. The terrorist’s creed
calls, as it were, for an idealistic and disinterested tyrant, murderous and
pure of spirit, a paradox that points to the limitations of the Aristotelian
categories for characterizing this peculiarly modern kind of coercion.
“Hard toward himself,” Nechaev writes in language at once ruthless
and principled, “he must be hard toward others also. . . . He must not
be what the promptings of his personal inclinations would have him be,
but what the general interest of the revolution prescribes.” This new
psychology of the ascetic terrorist is one attenuated outcome of what I
have argued is the ontological shift, inaugurated by Machiavelli, from
the classical emphasis on the character of the ruler grounded in the har-
mony between the intellect and the passions and the modern impersonal
method of rule requiring the conquest of eros.
Just as these actual or aspiring terroristic tyrants promote the image
that they are not hedonistic, vain, splendid, or flamboyant in their
desire for public adulation, they do not attract their following because,
as Plato and Aristotle had tended to argue, tyrants pander to the masses’
own hedonism and moral laxness, such that tyranny for Plato emerges

19 Nechaev (1987) pp. 68–72.

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 tyranny

seamlessly from the basest traits of democracy. On the contrary, where

they do not terrify their followers, these leaders often elicit a kind
of selfless zeal on their part as well. The followers participate in the
leader’s sense of having a “historic mission” whose scope and intensity
of destruction were formerly approached only by the most savage of
religious wars and persecutions, a mission that requires of its partici-
pants that they renounce not only an easy life of pleasure and relaxation
but the luxury of ordinary moral scruples and decent sentiments of com-
passion and tolerance. In this connection, we can think of Himmler’s
infamous speech at Posen in 1943 to a secret gathering of SS leaders
describing the glory of the Holocaust as a “secret page” of history that
they alone would share, or of Bukharin’s effusions about the “diffi-
cult tasks” faced by the Cheka during the Soviet Union’s campaigns of
forced collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks. Both points of
view share in common the idea that what distinguishes these revolution-
ary movements from the selfish interests of both bourgeois democratic
and traditional throne-and-alter conservative politics is precisely the
lack of venality or personal passion that characterizes the elite cadres
who carry out the surgical reconstruction of society through genocide.
The “greatness” of these revolutionaries stems in their own minds from
their ability to feel nothing toward their victims, not even an ugly spasm
of envy, cruelty, or triumph. They aspire to a purely disinterested mur-
derousness.
The classical thinkers begin with this ugly spasm – with such passions
as anger, envy, and hatred (as in Aristotle’s Rhetoric) – on the assump-
tion that, even at their basest, these passions harbor a potentiality for
rising above selfish desires and exploitation, so that, shaped by educa-
tion and rhetorical exhortation, their energies might be converted to
exertion on behalf of the common good. Although, left to themselves,
such spasms may result only in the domination and conquest of one’s
competitors, they can, when properly educated, be redirected toward the
honor derived from public service. Arrogance, cruelty, and hatred can
be sublimated by – while providing the transmuted emotional energy
for – the merited pride of a leading citizen.
Our terroristic tyrants, by contrast, appear to elude the classical start-
ing point altogether. They measure their own success by their striving
not to manifest any of the traditional signs of a corrupt character – van-
ity, lust, dissipation, greed, vengefulness – and so are more disturbing,

490
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because their self-restraint is not on behalf of reason or justice at the

expense of tyranny, but to enhance their tyrannical focus at the expense
of all pleasures and sentiments. They aspire to practice a weird idealism
calling for the repression and purgation of ordinary passions for the sake
of maximum efficiency, undistracted by hatred, in pursuing hatred’s
goals. If anyone is to be pitied (Bukharin and Himmler both express
this view), it is the executioners themselves, for the psychic toll which
their self-discipline takes in requiring them to give up the luxury of
ordinary anger or greed, let alone compassion for or misgivings over
the fate of their victims. The ideal is to achieve a pure will to annihilate,
to be denatured in the service of the cause. Striving for this ideal of
impersonal destruction protects the purity of the revolutionary move-
ment not only from blandishments based on traditional and customary
notions of shame, compassion, and decency but from the temptation
to perform one’s duty to kill out of any sense of personal gratification.
For to hate or envy the victim on a personal level implies the possibil-
ity that you could be mistaken about the desirability of the possession
you envy them for, about whether they actually possess it, and about
whether they have really done or said the things you hate them for.
Changing one’s views about the object of one’s hatred might lead to
forgiveness and reconciliation. If, however, one wills the destruction
of another regardless of one’s personal opinion or feelings about their
blameworthiness, there is no danger that murderous passions might
be led by gentler sentiments and better reasoning and information to
convert themselves into acceptance and friendship.
The point is not that the murderers actually or even frequently
attained this state of inner purity, but that the movements understood
and presented themselves this way as an ideal to which they should
aspire. Himmler was appalled at any instance of unorganized violence
or sadism toward the victims of the Holocaust that might taint the
purity of the will to annihilate the Jews with corrupt personal motives,
and he was scandalized by, and sought to punish, the widespread theft
of the victims’ belongings by the camp guards and officers. The German
Volk must take everything from the conquered with a clean conscience,
but the SS man must aim for a higher standard: to liquidate the German
people’s enemies without personal greed or malice toward individuals.
The capacity of such movements to inflict death on millions in a techno-
logically routinized manner appears to comprise a new kind of tyranny,

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a de-natured, impersonal ideal of rule that can make all traditional

understandings of honor and virtue appear irrelevant. For they are led
by rulers who not only disprove the assumptions of liberal psychology
that equality and prosperity will dissipate the sources of aggression, but
also seem to fall outside the classical assumption that aggression can
be sublimated by a love of honor that elevates and enlists the passions
by promising honor from one’s fellow citizens in exchange for public
service, possible at bottom because the eros for exclusive prestige and
tyranny is a misguided version of the longing for the beautiful and the
good that contains the kernel of its own self-transcendence. When we
look back to the eve of World War I and reflect on the catastrophes
to come, Charnwood, writing in 1912 about Lincoln’s love of honor
through serving justice and the common good, might as well have really
been writing in Aristotle’s time.
Considering what I have termed the impersonal, deeroticized char-
acter of modern rule leads us to the question of technology itself and
how it has arguably assimilated the drive to tyrannize, an issue I first
broached in the Introduction. Some important contemporary thinkers,
above all Heidegger, have identified technology as the defining essence
of modernity altogether, fully manifest in the destiny of the West only
in the last century, and therefore establishing a fateful break between
our era and all previous ones. Given the permanent terror in which the
world has been held by nuclear weapons technology – a terror that,
because it is daily and mostly unseen, is not identifiable as terror in the
usual sense of that word as an extreme emergency, but is taken to be
the height of normality – and given the more mundane ways in which
our lives are increasingly organized and surveyed by machinery includ-
ing cybernetic technology, it might well be asked whether the masters
that rule our fates are primarily people at all, or rather an autonomous
network of interlocking electronic forces. The problem of technology is
especially dramatic in the case of totalitarian tyrants such as Hitler or
Stalin, for the technology of the modern police state enables such rulers
to launch destruction on a scale unavailable to past despots. As I write
these words in the summer of 2012, the ever more pervasive power of
global communications technology is both a source among dissidents
of potential liberation from oppressive regimes such as China or Syria
but also of the state’s extension of its own capacity for monitoring or
shutting down all communications among citizens. In a strange way, it

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might actually be reassuring if one could assume that modern tyranny

equaled something like ancient tyranny plus technology – “Genghis
Khan with electricity” as Stalin was once termed. For if this were true,
it might mitigate the bleak picture just sketched. It would suggest that
we could after all understand modern tyrants according to the tradi-
tional categories or as some derivation from them. Technology would be
a mere instrument that, although terrible in the hands of a tyrant, could
in principle be treated separately from tyranny and deployed solely for
humane purposes.
The problem, however, may go deeper than this. On a descriptive
level, as we have just seen, there are reasons for doubting that modern
tyranny at its most extreme can be characterized in terms even similar
to those of classical political psychology, as (to vary the metaphor) a
sort of Hiero of Syracuse on Twitter. More fundamentally, the same
machine and cybernetic technology which makes the police state pos-
sible also makes possible the prosperity of the liberal democracies and
is grounded in a human and spiritual revolution stretching back to
the Enlightenment. The transformation of the premodern politics of
classical/Christian communality into the new politics of autonomous,
self-interested individuals linked together by the artificial instrumen-
tality of the social contract always entailed, as we have considered
throughout this book, the conquest of nature in the material sense, the
scientia propter potentiam envisioned by Bacon. Yet the conquest of
nature in the outward, material sense also entails, and must continu-
ally reaffirm, that man is by nature inwardly this isolated, individual
rights-bearing producer and consumer of commodities, grounded in the
self-introspecting subject of Cartesian epistemology. The full sense of
technology, then, is not only the productive apparatus of the modern
economy but, more profoundly, the new ontological stance toward the
world originating in Machiavelli, Bacon, and Hobbes in which such
unprecedented productivity is grounded. For if man forgets that he is
alienated and dissociated by the state of nature, he may slip back into
the reliance on priests and kings, on theology and teleology, that once
restrained individual self-interest and commercial enterprise in the name
of a higher social wholeness. Technology is the pregnant term for this
transformation of man’s relation to the world, in which man is ripped
out of the communal, pedagogical, and theological contexts provided
by the old politics of the classical-Christian conglomerate and cast alone

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into a hostile world that must be fought with and subdued before it can
be made to yield the material balms that will make aggression disap-
pear. Running counterpoint, one might say, to the optimistic strain of
the Enlightenment with its hopes for a peaceful and prosperous future
for all is this ongoing project for the reconstruction of human nature
as individualistic, spurred by the existential anxiety of one’s solitari-
ness and vulnerability. For Hobbes, only ceaseless anxiety in the face
of our finitude will keep our desire keen to embrace the benefits of the
social contract and live as long and as well as we can. Here is where the
light and dark corridors radiating out of Machiavelli’s project through
Hobbes may most closely intersect.
Tempting as it may be, however, to follow Heidegger in equating
modernity altogether with technology (indeed, for Heidegger, its origins
run back to the ancients themselves, to Plato’s metaphysics), we must
beware of so doing, because it involves a massive distancing of oneself
from the world of observable political experience, a world in which,
however much they may need to be supplemented or qualified, the fun-
damental premises of classical political philosophy are still operative –
at least as an earlier level of the archaeology of tyranny added to by
Machiavelli and the moderns – and provide a starting point for diag-
nosing tyranny in our own era, even if it is not the whole story. For
to assimilate modernity entirely to technology, as Heidegger does, is
to obliterate any proximal distinctions – based on our own experience,
historical memory, and learning – between more or less just or unjust,
more or less legitimate or illegitimate, regimes.
As Heidegger famously wrote in An Introduction to Metaphysics
(1959), viewed from the perspective of the unstoppable juggernaut of
global technology, summing up the entire destiny of the West from
Anaximander to Fordism, it makes no difference whether one lives
under Franklin Roosevelt’s America or Stalin’s Russia: As the two
superpower variants of global technology’s relentless unfolding, they
are “metaphysically the same.” Yet all of our experiences, the lessons
we draw from history, our capacity for discriminating judgment, and
our whole heritage of political philosophy both ancient and modern,
tell us that this is not so: it does make a difference. Tyranny may come
to us in the guise of invisible or impersonal technology, with its threat
of annihilation or total control. But it also still announces itself, as it
always has, in the open manner of cynical and murderous pirates like

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Saddam Hussein with his rogue’s gallery of blood-sucking relatives and

hangers-on, or of murderous religious extremists like the Taliban, to say
nothing of more ordinary, shambling garden variety Mafia-style klepto-
crats like Mubarak, or nationalistic, would-be Great Power militarists
of the nineteenth-century Bismarckian Reatpolitik variety like Putin.
Perhaps none of these varieties is precisely identical with tyranny
as it was practiced and understood in the ancient past. But they are
at least intelligible, as a point of departure, in terms of the traditional
categories of political philosophy, both ancient and modern. Modern
totalitarian tyrants, although different from any ancient counterparts in
the utopian and millenarian aim of their destruction, do display some
of their psychological traits, such as the capacity diagnosed by Plato of
spontaneous thumos for righteous zeal, anger, bellicosity, jealousy of
rivals, and possessiveness. On the lowest level of base conniving thug-
gery, the rise of a Saddam Hussein through treachery and murder could
come out of the annals of past tyrants and political adventurers includ-
ing Hiero of Syracuse or Cesare Borgia. That said, we admittedly still
face the central hermeneutical conundrum that I sketched in the Intro-
duction to this book: If the character of modern tyranny is in some
crucial respects fundamentally different from, and unanticipated by,
the classical account, does this mean that human nature itself and how
it experiences and evaluates political life has been historically altered
by the project for the conquest of Fortuna?

Leo Strauss once characterized the social sciences, in a reference to the

famous scene of the Emperor Nero, as “fiddling while Rome burns,”
a remark that did not endear him to those disciplines.20 Although not
referring to tyranny in that particular context, he made it clear in other
works that a major part of this fiddling was that the social sciences
could not recognize tyranny, including its contemporary manifestation
as totalitarianism, for what it was. This obfuscation he regarded as
one of the central contrasts between ancient and modern political sci-
ence, to the discredit of the latter. Although the behavioral revolution
long ago abated, overtaken by the postbehaviorists and postmodernists,
the obfuscation Strauss identified as a hallmark of the social sciences
is still widespread. It is still fundamentally rooted in Hobbes and the

20 In Storing (1962).

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assumption that aggressive behavior is not an independent variable

in political motivation rooted in honor, patriotism or moral convic-
tion, but a distorted psychology stemming from the desire for self-
preservation. Once the fear of death is mollified by peaceful and com-
modious living, it is still widely maintained, the sources of aggression
will dissipate.
This assumption began as a core value of the Enlightenment, and, in
regimes like the United States, Canada, and those of Western Europe,
gradually became a self-fulfilling prophecy buttressed by procedural
democracy and a long process of character formation stressing toler-
ance and the debate over means rather than ends.21 But it has never
been true of much of the rest of the world, then or now. In much of the
rest of the world, many of the core premodern and nonliberal values
that required three centuries of steady erosion in Europe and North
America to dissolve remain vigorous and even self-renewing. Much of
the world still believes (or is constrained to believe) in the primacy of the
household over the civic community, of clan and patrimonial authority
over the rights of the individual, whether locally or writ large as entire
regimes ruled by “strong men” like Putin or collectivist oligarchies like
China. Much of the world’s politics is motivated by clan and sectar-
ian rivalries and hostilities based on ethnicity and religious conviction.
Frequently, the rival factions do not hesitate in acting on those disagree-
ments violently. Frequently, the victors will seek to erect a tyrannical
authority over their rivals based on revenge, greed, the passion for mas-
tery, religious or ideological conviction, or all of these together. Large
parts of the world, in short, are in Hobbes’s state of nature or on the
brink of it. People of course do not want to be terrorized or tyran-
nized over, but unfortunately many do want to do this to others, and
even where it is possible to agree that peace benefits everyone, a good
many believe there are aims in life that are more important, dignified,

21 In this connection, consider Berlin’s characterization of Machiavelli’s protoliberalism.

He makes an interesting link between Machiavelli’s shattering of the “unity” provided by
the Platonic notion that there is only one Good for all human beings and the tolerance
that results from realizing that, because there are numerous incompatible goods, the
debate about politics should concern only means, not ultimate ends. Men had always
been aware of the need to “make agonizing choices between incompatible alternatives,”
but Machiavelli “converted its expression from a paradox into something approaching
a commonplace. . . . His achievement is of the first order.” Berlin (2000) p. 79.

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and satisfying than peace, because they involve passionate conviction,

nonnegotiable justice, and righteous anger.
In the real world of politics, and especially of international rela-
tions, political actors and observers in the West are often faced with
the difficult, and ethically queasy, task of distinguishing between better
and worse versions of nondemocratic government. Should we always
support democratically motivated revolutions against dictatorships and
one-party states, like the brave struggles of the Arab Spring in Egypt,
Tunisia, Libya, and Syria? Or are we sometimes faced with balanc-
ing the support for democracy against other important pragmatic and
moral concerns – for example, the fact that Hosni Mubarak maintained
Egypt’s peace with Israel and opposed radical Islamism, while we do
not yet know how his successors will treat those issues.
Does democracy simply equal the absence or removal of tyranny,
absolute monarchy, or dictatorship? Or does a people’s spontaneous
and understandable desire for liberation from a tyrannical oppressor
require a long period of character shaping before they can become the
rights-bearing individuals of a fully developed liberal democracy – a
process of secularization, the replacement of debates over nonnego-
tiable ends with debates over means toward the same ends of eco-
nomic security and well-being, and the inculcation of the values of
tolerance, freedom of speech, and freedom of worship? Might over-
throwing a despot lead to something even worse following in its stead?
This has happened in successive revolutions including the French, Rus-
sian, Maoist, Cuban, and Iranian, in each of which a fitfully mod-
ernizing authoritarian regime was replaced by more radical reformers
who were themselves rapidly swept away by totalitarian collectivists.
Quandaries of this kind were difficult enough for the classical political
theorists, as we saw in our examinations of Plato and Aristotle on the
possibility of benign despotism and a role for tyrannical founders in
establishing just or at least stable regimes, an examination shrouded in
circumspection and caution in order not to undermine their foreground
preference for republican self-government. Although modern political
science beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes started out, by con-
trast, with a seemingly franker, bolder, and more realistic assessment of
these moral gray zones in distinguishing openly between relatively con-
structive and unconstructive tyrannies and endorsing the former, oddly
enough, the original pragmatism of modern political theory has in the

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long run been undermined by its extravagant counterfactual longing for

a future world free of all oppression, violence, and injustice. Today, as
a consequence, political science is frequently ill equipped to embark on
the disturbing but necessary discussion of the greater and lesser evils
among nondemocratic regimes.
Throughout this book, I have argued that the drive toward an imper-
sonal paradigm of authority launched by Machiavelli and radicalized
by Hobbes, entailing the severing of the connection between the sponta-
neous longing for tyrannical mastery and the potentially rehabilitative
erotic longing for the beautiful and the good first elaborated by Plato,
is the source of what is arguably modern political science’s psycho-
logical deficit when it comes to understanding the varieties of regime
types and leadership types, including the varieties of tyranny and of
honor-seeking ambition across the spectrum from out and out tyranny
to a robust service of the common good and all the shades of gray in
between. Although Machiavelli’s new science of politics remains in an
interstitial zone between the modern drive toward pure method and the
more rounded and heterogeneous account of political existence char-
acteristic of the ancient philosophers and historians, Hobbes’s political
theory, aided by Baconian science, aims to achieve the complete drain-
ing of eros from political ambition and the reduction of honor seeking
to the empty, abstract impulse to seek power for the sake of mere self-
preservation. Thus, the deeroticization of tyranny went hand in hand
with the triumph of Hobbesian method in the behavioral social sciences.

the transition to totalitarianism and the will of

the people: the limits of this study
I have argued that modern political science beginning with Hobbes
starts by being more pessimistic than the ancients about the motiva-
tions for political ambition and ends up being more optimistic about
the prospects for a future in which tyrannical aggression disappears
than anything to be found in the ancients. In other words, the pes-
simistic undertow of Hobbes’s state of nature, in which ambition is
presented as the unvarnished drive for the exploitation and mastery of
others and stripped of any Platonic capacity for transcendence, is in the
long run consumed by the rational superstructure of the social contract
erected over it. Prompted by the danger posed by the state of nature,

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the construction of the social contract comes to be seen as eradicating

that danger altogether.
For Plato, there are “great natures” like Alcibiades capable of the
worst and the best behavior. The aim of politike is to encourage the
eros of a man like Alcibiades away from tyranny and toward moder-
ate politics and a friendliness for philosophy. Modern political science
begins by denying as a matter of principle that a man like Alcibiades
is capable of any drive other than tyranny, but maintains that, through
the proper construction of the social contract and the psychology of
enlightened self-interest, such men will gradually “wither away,” as
Marx forecast about politics altogether (which he also identified with
sheer domination). For Plato and the classics, Alcibiades is a type of man
who will always be with us, dangerous but capable of rehabilitation, a
threat to the political community, but whose vigor must sometimes be
placed at its service. For Hobbes and modern political science, Alcib-
iades has always been with us so far, has always been dangerous and
incapable of rehabilitation, is of no use at all to the service of sound
government, but need not be with us in the future.
If these reflections have any merit, it becomes especially important
to emphasize the continuing relevance of classical political science as a
counterweight to the unrealism of modern political science and a match-
less resource for our need to continually identify tyranny in the world
around us. Nevertheless, I still do not believe that it is possible simply to
restore or return to classical political science without a supplementary
account of what is distinctive about the modern version of tyranny. I
have argued throughout this book that, despite the continuing relevance
of the classics, one cannot treat modern tyranny entirely as a contin-
uation of or variation on the classical typologies. I would now like to
sum up this argument by way of conclusion, as well as to suggest that
what is distinctive about modern tyranny in its most radical, totalitar-
ian, and chiliastic manifestations lies outside the boundaries of both
classical political philosophy and early modern political philosophy as
inaugurated by Machiavelli, despite drawing on some characteristics of
the latter, and is therefore beyond the boundaries of this study in its
concentration on the mastery of Fortuna.
Let me return to our central motif in contrasting the ancient and
modern understanding of tyranny – the conquest of eros. Whereas the
classics understood the passion of eros as both the source of tyranny

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and as containing the potential for its rehabilitation, modern totalitar-

ian tyranny, I would argue, is aimed at the extirpation and suppression
of eros altogether in both ruler and ruled. Thus, modern tyrannies like
those of Stalin and Hitler must be understood not primarily in erotic
terms, or even as deformed versions of eros, but as the radicalization
of the will to master nature that includes the repression of human
nature, most especially as it is characterized by an erotic longing for
the beautiful and the good and the longing for an immortal reputation
through noble deeds. The characteristically modern tyrant has therefore
much less in common with exemplars of depraved or excessive eros like
Alcibiades or (depending on your judgment) Julius Caesar and more in
common with Torquemada. The modern totalitarian tyrant is a secu-
larized fanatic, what Konrad Heiden called “the man in the plain field
tunic” who is abstemious and ascetic, or at least not prone to public
displays of luxurious personal grandeur, ornamentation, architectural
splendor, and robes of state characteristic of traditional monarchs all
the way back to Cyrus the Great. This turn from erotic excess to secu-
larized fanaticism is anticipated, as we earlier observed, in the rise of the
terrorist in nineteenth-century Europe and vividly depicted in Flaubert’s
portrait of the 1848 revolutionary Senecal, as well as Turgenev’s por-
trait of the nihilist Bazarov, and later on in Solzhenitsyn’s fictionalized
account of Lenin in Zurich.
I have referred to Hegel’s discussion of the French Revolution and
Terror a number of times throughout this book as an interesting bench-
mark for what distinguishes ancient from modern tyranny as a theme
in the history of political philosophy. It is true that, strictly speaking,
Hegel is locating this change in a particular historical event, the Jacobin
Terror of 1793. Even so, for Hegel, the attempt of the Jacobins to master
nature and human nature through the imposition of “absolute freedom
and terror” in 1793 is the result of a long dynamic in human history
as a whole, that aspect of the historical process driven by the will to
master nature in the pursuit of freedom (“the labor of the negative”).
This aspect of history is one that Hegel squarely locates as a dominating
characteristic of modernity, beginning with the Reformation, the Age
of Reason, and the Enlightenment, an emphasis on the will to master
nature that can only be derived from the concept of the Abrahamic
God and that is not derivable from the ancient Greek world or ancient

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Greek philosophy. So Hegel may not accord Machiavelli the centrality

that I do in the transition from ancient to modern political thought, but
he does believe there is something distinctive about the modern focus
on freedom from and over nature (as opposed to the ancient focus on
the virtues of character within the natural order), with its concomitant
danger of reaching an excessive extreme of the will to master nature and
human nature, a danger that comes to fruition in revolutionary move-
ments like the Jacobins. Hegel is also an important benchmark because
his view of freedom in history continued to inform debates about mod-
ern rule including Alexandre Kojeve’s famous left-Hegelian emphasis
on man’s ongoing pursuit of mastery over nature in the furtherance of
his freedom.
In considering Hegel’s analysis of Jacobin terror as the distinctive
hallmark of modern political extremism, one might ask of my approach
in this book: Because modern natural science and its technological appli-
cations, as well as modern ideological movements and regimes, postdate
Machiavelli by a considerable distance in time, can one explain what is
distinctive about modern tyranny without taking account of these post-
Machiavellian factors? I would answer: No, but the shift inaugurated by
Machiavelli from the ancient focus on the education of character to the
modern focus on impersonal method is one absolutely central and mas-
sive dimension of the transition from ancient to modern tyranny that
is this book’s theme. Moreover, I have also tried to sketch some of the
paths from Machiavelli’s originary project for the mastery of nature to
those later technological and ideological consequences. Questions that
arise for further consideration as we reach the boundary of our con-
sideration of the transition from the classical account of politike to the
new science of politics of the modern age and the Enlightenment, and
the concomitant shift from personal to impersonal or “representative”
canons of authority, include the following: How might the existence of
what are arguably completely impersonal agencies for modern tyranny
and terror, including nuclear weaponry, environmental devastation, and
the World Wide Web – with the danger it poses for the global surveil-
lance and coordination of all human affairs simultaneously with the
hopes it encourages for further human emancipation – be considered as
extensions of the project for the mastery of Fortuna first broached by
Machiavelli, Bacon, and Hobbes? Is Heidegger correct that all varieties

501
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of modern authority, regardless of whether we might try to classify

them as legitimate or illegitimate according to premodern concepts of
justice and ethics, are indistinguishably assimilated into the ceaseless
dynamic of global technology, the Baconian and Hobbesian project for
the imposition of instrumental rationality on the rest of existence?
At this point, I want again to make it emphatically clear that I do not
believe that Heidegger’s technology discourse explains all versions of
modern tyranny (let alone liberal democracy). The existence of global
technology, in my view, does not fully explain National Socialism,
Stalinism, or their leaders, and, to reiterate my earlier argument, the
power of global technology does not prevent us or excuse us from
making proximal distinctions between more just and less just regimes;
between tyranny and republican self-government, or between more and
less humane understandings of government. I also want to reemphasize
that I am not arguing that Hitler and Stalin and their fellow politi-
cal mass murderers including Mao Tse-tung are direct equivalents of
Machiavelli’s new prince. We can certainly explore them as starting
points from more recent history for reflecting on a change in the mean-
ing of authority which I have argued is inaugurated by Machiavelli.
The emphasis on the power of the human will to master nature is cer-
tainly manifest in both Bolshevik and Nazi ideology, and that is one
strain of Machiavelli’s influence. But to arrive at a full elaboration of
the totalitarian ideologies and movements of the twentieth century and
their contemporary progeny, we need to add to this emphasis on the
power of the will to negate and transform nature a political romanti-
cism that extols the supreme value of “the people,” a romanticization
of the collective that begins with Rousseau. Although I am confident
that it is enough for one book to uncover the dimensions of modernity
that emphasize the conquest of nature, by way of summing up, I do
want to bring my analysis to the cusp of the issues surrounding political
romanticism and existentialism, and suggest in very broad strokes that,
having uncovered the dynamic of the conquest of nature through power
politics and science characteristic of early modern political thought, we
might now be in a better position to turn to the “folkish” dimension of
contemporary totalitarian revolutions and movements that first crystal-
lizes in Rousseau and in aspects of German Idealism. The full exposition
must await the planned sequel to this volume.

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I will formulate the difference as broadly as I can for now. For

Machiavelli, the “humors” or passions of the people can be constructive
(when directed toward imperial expansion, for example, or expressed
in the division of clashing powers within a republic), but they also
have to be purged periodically so that they do not undermine pub-
lic order. It is not a matter of educating them to pursue higher ends,
but, to recall Machiavelli’s horticultural imagery, pruning them back
to the roots. Those humors themselves, therefore, cannot be the source
of goodness or wholeness in the Platonic sense. Hence, Machiavelli’s
statecraft, notwithstanding a millenarian dimension, is based on intel-
ligent or rational self-seeking – the mastery of the passions so as bet-
ter to achieve their own long-term goals of security and well-being.
Although Machiavelli does differ from some of his successors including
Hobbes in insisting on the importance of honor seeking as an indepen-
dent incentive to further this rational politics, he harbors no expecta-
tion that honor can bring one happiness in the transcendental sense of
Platonic psychology: it is an energy to be methodically deployed for
gain. It must wait for Rousseau to transform the modern understand-
ing of human nature from Hobbesian perpetual anxiety over the fear
of violent death to “the sweet sentiment of existence,” a spontaneous
instinct for wholeness which, when collectivized, leads to a republi-
canism not merely efficiently and rationally deployed for the sake of
security and material well-being and a worldly patriotism entirely con-
sistent with individual self-interest (as in the early-modern republican
prescriptions of Machiavelli, Harrington, and Montesquieu), but that
promises transcendence and happiness on a sheerly spontaneous, imma-
nent level. With Rousseau, then, modernity opens up into its second
major paradigm. The first paradigm, Machiavelli’s exhortation to the
prince to exert his will over nature, narrowed by Bacon and Hobbes
into the scientific and methodical reconstruction of nature, leads at
its most extreme to a hypertrophic rationalism and an agenda for the
complete technological mastery of the world at the service of utility,
pedestrian hedonism, and soulless materialism. The second paradigm,
inaugurated by Rousseau in zealous, heartfelt opposition to the first,
leads eventually to romantic tribal nationalism, political existential-
ism and Volkish collectivism. Rousseau shares Machiavelli’s prefer-
ence for the earthly fatherland over the heavenly beyond. But whereas

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Machiavelli’s republican Romans, like those of Montesquieu, are cool

calculators of commerce and gain, Rousseau’s are heroic extremists.22
While Machiavelli’s Romans are like surgeons and horticulturalists of
power, Rousseau’s are sincere, passionate, and committed unreservedly
to the collective.
To put this shift in sharper focus, let us revisit some of our main
themes concerning the ways in which nature can be characterized and
their relationship to different views of statecraft. At the outset of this
book, I suggested that the classical understanding of tyranny, and the
possibility of forestalling or reforming it, presupposed a view of the
cosmos in which the primordial, time-bound origins of existence were
solicited toward their teleological fulfillment within an ordered, harmo-
nious, and beneficent whole. A well-educated soul could instantiate in
itself, through the cultivation of the civic and intellectual virtues, this
cosmic balance and repose. Eros, as the longing for the beautiful and the
good and the desire to possess it forever, was for Plato the passion that,
if left untutored, could derail into the excesses of tyrannical violence,
corruption, and depravity, but which, properly educated, could lead the
soul in the ascent from the primordial to the transcendental limned in
Diotima’s Ladder – the erotic longing for immortality best satisfied by
philosophy, but entailing, at the second level of ascent, the virtues that
served the city and family as well.
We have seen that, beginning with Machiavelli, the shift from the
classical to the modern diagnosis of tyranny begins by demolishing this
classical cosmology. Nature is now viewed as Fortuna, a field of sheer
origination and happenstance, typically indifferent if not outright hos-
tile to human hopes for peace, prosperity, justice, and repose. Instead of
reason mirroring and instantiating the order of the cosmos linking the
erotic longing of the soul to the immortally beautiful and good, reason
is drained out of the world and transformed into a purely anthropocen-
tric, instrumental faculty. Reason is assimilated to the assertion of will,
borrowed from the Abrahamic God, by which princes and statesmen of
outstanding virtue can strive to overcome nature and reshape it to serve
human purposes – a new politics of security and well-being to replace
the old politics of virtue and community. Drained of its teleological
substance and its link to the whole, reason is narrowed down to the

22 See the discussion in Yack (1992).

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methodical rationality with which rulers impose their will on nature

and human nature.
This early-modern project, whether it travels the darker corridor
from Hobbes to Rousseau’s Legislator toward totalitarianism, or the
more benign path through Locke and Montesquieu toward liberal
democracy, shares the assumption that nature is indeed indifferent or
hostile to human purposes and that, whatever security and justice is to
be achieved by man, it must come from subduing and reshaping this irra-
tional force, both through the power of Baconian natural science over
nature and through the suppression of our own natural human procliv-
ity to violence and exploitation. The social contract must constrain the
natural passions of each individual for the good of each individual. For
each individual to act on his passions, grounded in the impulse for sur-
vival and domination, would lead to the war of all against all, thereby
contradicting the fundamental aim of human nature – self-preservation
and the avoidance of violent death. On this view, it is self-evidently irra-
tional and contrary to “right reason” to want to live naturally without
the restraint of the contract.
With Rousseau, however, comes a new watershed, equal in profun-
dity, radicalism, and impact to that of Machiavelli, which carries us
beyond the scope of this study into another phase of tyranny, the col-
lective tyranny of le peuple and das Volk, a collectivist aggressiveness
and fervor without which the great antiliberal revolutionary movements
beginning with the Jacobin Terror and proceeding through Bolshevism,
National Socialism, the Khmer Rouge, and al-Qaeda cannot be fully
understood. For, although these revolutionary movements do also par-
take of the Machiavellian project for the imposition of man’s will on
nature and human nature – their rejection of liberal democracy and
individual rights is seen as being in no way incompatible with embrac-
ing modern military or police state technology or economic might – it
is for the sake of a new set of aims, not merely security and prosperity
or even enforced uniformity, but the blissful return to the Arcadian
origins of the golden age, what the Jacobins termed the return to “the
year one.” Starting with the Jacobins, and in stark contradiction to the
great liberal revolutions of 1689 and 1776, these revolutions are simul-
taneously both atavistic and futuristic – they want to rapidly accelerate
modernization, but for the sake of returning to a lost age of collectivist
harmony and purity.

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 tyranny

This transformation can only come about because, owing to

Rousseau, the state of nature is no longer viewed as dangerous and hos-
tile, as it was for Machiavelli and the early moderns, but as, on the con-
trary, the only condition in which human beings once knew wholeness
and happiness. The aim of politics is therefore not merely to repress and
control nature as self-evidently destructive, unreliable, or malign, but to
liberate us from all restraints, both premodern and modern, that alienate
us from our original happiness in the primordial origins. Machiavelli’s
political philosophy had drained eros from nature, following Augus-
tine in snapping the Diotiman link between eros and transcendence,
so as to liberate the primordial realm of chance, accident, and impulse
and then enable us to master it, equipped with reason assimilated to
willpower as our weapon. Rousseau, by contrast, transposes the erotic
longing for wholeness from the transcendental cosmos of the classics to
the realm of the primordial itself, such that reason now stands in the
way of our happiness because of its project for the conquest of nature.
This is a synthesis unknown either to the early moderns (for whom
satisfaction came through conquering nature) or to the classics (for
whom happiness culminated in the fulfillment of our capacity for rea-
son within the natural order). The erotic wholeness that Plato believed
only the best could achieve through the lifetime cultivation of moral
and intellectual virtue, and which Machiavelli disparaged as imaginary,
Rousseau transforms into the spontaneous and effortless possession of
all mankind, alienated from us by the political and social order, whether
this is seen in terms either of classical or modern political philosophy,
such that the aim of revolution becomes to shatter entirely the rule of
all convention, premodern and modern alike, and restore “the people”
to their spontaneous collective happiness. Accordingly, while I have
broadly compared Hobbes’s Sovereign to Rousseau’s Legislator with
their power to instill terror and re-make human nature, and although
Rousseau’s Legislator does in some measure batten off of the Hobbesian
Sovereign’s scope, their aims ultimately differ profoundly. The purpose
of the Hobbesian Sovereign is to restrain our natural individualism so
as to enable individual self-interest to flourish, whereas the purpose of
Rousseau’s Legislator is to force those who have already begun to lose
the “sweet sentiment of existence” in the pristine state of nature due to
individual self-interest to recover their lost wholeness through the forg-
ing of the General Will. That Rousseau lionizes the ancient republics

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of Sparta and Rome in lieu of classical political philosophy affirms this

transition. Although in this sense he follows Machiavelli in preferring
ancient republican practice to ancient republican theory, he does it for
contrary reasons. Whereas Machiavelli wanted modern man to reenact
Rome’s ascent toward imperial republican prosperity, grandeur, and
power, Rousseau longs nostalgically for a Rome that will never evolve
beyond its most austere and bucolic rootedness.
German Idealism springs from this new Rousseauan paradigm and,
by transposing Rousseau’s lost golden age of sheer immanent commu-
nality from the beginning of history to its end, allows us to believe that
revolutionary struggle is bringing us closer to that final transpolitical
nirvana. The long and rich debate begun by Hegel and continued by
Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger revolves around whether the progress
of history is in fact bringing us closer to this release, or, reverting to
the underlying Rousseauan critique of modernity, is in fact continu-
ing to alienate us from it by ratifying the status quo of the established
order. With Heidegger, we reach the limit of this debate. By returning
behind and beneath the settled outcome of history proclaimed by Hegel
and other nineteenth-century progressivists so as to reopen Rousseau’s
original vision of existence as a sheer matrix of spontaneous possibil-
ity and fullness, Heidegger dismantles all doctrines of the teleological
progress of history and urges that “the people” return to the pristine
vigor of its origins, his particular contribution to the Volkish worldview
of National Socialism. Only now, that spontaneous wholeness which
for Rousseau emerges from its green shoots in a permanent underly-
ing nature is entirely temporalized as the unfathomable and bottomless
“presencing” and “destining” of Being.
Moreover, instead of accepting the distinction we have pursued from
the beginning of this book between the classical view of the cosmos
in which man is subordinate to nature and the modern view accord-
ing to which man is impelled to conquer nature, Heidegger argues
that the modern conquest of nature through technology is already fully
implicit in classical metaphysics itself; that technology is the centuries-
long “working out” of classical metaphysics in its fully evolved present
dispensation. For Heidegger, modern global technology is rooted in
Plato’s attempt to erect “the tyranny of the forms” over the sheer orig-
inary matrix of Being, thereby chaining its revitalizing powers of gen-
esis and our authentic communal existence within the gray confines of

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alienating materialism, instrumental rationality, and pedestrian self-

interest. Whereas Plato had argued that the metaphysics of the Forms,
as the guide for philosophic and civic education, provided the best
prospect for the rehabilitation of tyrannical aggression, Heidegger is
arguing that the metaphysics of the Forms is itself the consummate
attempt to tyrannize over the rest of existence, including human free-
dom. Whereas the classics believed that the tyrannical impulse was the
ultimate departure from the life of reason, whose only therapy lay in
redirecting it toward the guidance of reason, Heidegger argues that rea-
son itself, originating with Plato and actualized as global technology,
is the worst and most complete tyranny ever experienced, and that the
only escape from it is to return headlong into the primordial origins
of chance, chaos, accident, motion, and impulse. Far from acting as
the philosophic charioteer in Plato’s image of the soul in the Phaedrus,
steering and redirecting the passions under the guidance of nous, Hei-
degger in effect seizes the reins and deliberately goads the steeds of eros
and thumos into plunging downward into the maelstrom.23
Thus, we have come from Machiavelli urging the conquest of For-
tuna to Heidegger arguing that our only salvation lies in our complete
self-abandonment to Fortuna, to the “overpowering power” of Being.
Far from wanting to master Fortuna by letting her selectively empower
our wills, as Machiavelli argued, we must, Heidegger proclaims, let her
overwhelm us entirely so as to sweep away the superstructure of will,
reason, and method and fill us with a new and “ecstatic” sense of possi-
bility, potency, and freedom. Rousseau’s vision of the prepolitical state
of nature as the source of our happiness, his transposition of Platonic
eros as the longing for the transcendental end to Machiavelli’s Fortuna
as the longing for the primordial origins, culminates in Heidegger’s omi-
nous rune: “Now only a god can save us.” We must abandon reason,
will, and virtue and wait for the primordial to envelop us and take
us where it will. As a consequence, the whole topic of the best regime
becomes meaningless and naive. The early moderns had not lost sight
of the distinctions among regimes or the distinction between just and
unjust, legitimate and illegitimate government, even as they severely
criticized the classical approach to these distinctions and placed them

23 On the relationship between German Idealism, and particularly the thought of Heideg-
ger, and totalitarianism, see Newell (1984, 1988a, 1988b, 1988c).

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on the new basis of the mastery of nature for a politics of prosperity and
power. It was still possible for the early moderns to entertain the distinc-
tion between tyranny and legitimate authority, as witness Harrington’s
and Locke’s stout rejections of Hobbesian absolute monarchy, without
repudiating the maximization of security and material well-being. For
Heidegger, however, all such distinctions among regimes, or between
just and unjust regimes, whether classical or from the modern social
contract school, along with any attempt to expound a rational teleology
of historical progress, are but ancillary instruments in the juggernaut of
global technology, such that the attempt to distinguish between Amer-
ica and the Soviet Union is baseless, because they are “metaphysically
the same,” twin “pincers” of the debased materialism threatening “the
people’s” recommitment to the primordial destiny of its origins in Being.

Readers who have made it this far may wonder why in this study I
have not discussed at length the sense in which religious institutions or
movements can be tyrannical. Of course, it has been implicit all along
as I have dwelled on Machiavelli’s sustained critique of the Church and
of what he takes to be Christianity’s deleterious consequences for patri-
otism and its attempt to dominate political life through its institutions
and theology, and as I have speculated on what psycho-spiritual teach-
ing he might have envisioned to guide the new Rome of the future. I
have, however, omitted a discussion of the sense in which the millenar-
ianism of the Joachites, or the search for a pure Christian community
bereft of priesthood or Church typified by the Cathars or Anabaptists,
could be seen as prototypes for later revolutionary millenarianism, as
discussed, say, by Cohn (1970) and more recently by Landes (2011).
Voegelin, moreover, saw Joachite millenarianism as an antecedent for
Machiavelli’s own version of an apocalyptic prince in his creation of
“new modes and orders.”
The reason is as follows. In limiting myself to the contribution of
early modern political thought, headed by Machiavelli and Hobbes,
to the understanding and practice of tyranny, I have centered on their
emphasis on willpower and the reduction of political life to domin-
ion which they import, in a secularized version, from the Augustinian
strain of Christianity. As they seek to elbow out their mainstream com-
petitors, the Church and Christian theology, the early moderns take a
mainly negative view of faith as what Hobbes termed “the Kingdom of

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Darkness,” religious superstition bound up with “Aristotelity,” and the

overall belief in “imagined republics” that the new science of politics
must regulate and perhaps replace or whose content it might dictate to
make it serve the social contract.
In my view, it is not until the totalitarian revolutionary populism of
the twentieth century, the Bolsheviks and National Socialists, already
anticipated by the Jacobins, that we see a recrudescence not of main-
stream Christianity, its institutions, and its theology – all of which,
indeed, these revolutionary movements viewed as a mortal enemy –
but of that dissident strain of alienated millenarianism including the
Anabaptists and Cathars. In the anarchistic populism of the early Bol-
sheviks and Nazis, in other words, we might detect a secularized ver-
sion of the search for the direct and unmediated immanentization of the
divine presence in a purely collectivized political community. However,
that transfer of an aspect of religious millenarianism to revolutionary
politics must, in my view, await Rousseau’s reversal of the meaning of
Fortuna from a hostile force meant to be mastered through the social
contract, science and commerce into a positive force of sheer possibility,
enchantment, love, harmony, and richness, a dynamic of sheer sponta-
neous origination that can be immanentized in the life-world of “the
people.”
Only when the world is viewed as historical through and through –
such that Being can be evoked, as does Hegel, as a “self-originating
wealth of shapes” – can the political community take on some of the
aspects of the dissident religious tradition of apocalyptic millenarian-
ism. Not until the rise of historicism, in other words, do we witness
the phenomenon of politics being thoroughly divinized, or of the state
being, as Karl Lowith put it about the Nazis and Heidegger’s philosoph-
ical justification of the Third Reich, the incarnation of God. Here, then,
I would depart from Voegelin, who sees a continuous development from
that earlier religious millenarianism toward modern totalitarianism. I
do not disagree with Voegelin’s view that Machiavelli’s new prince
may share in a strain of Joachite apocalypticism, and I have already
suggested that modern totalitarianism does partake of some aspects of
Machiavelli’s call to master nature. In the main, though, Machiavelli’s
emphasis on the mastery of nature cannot take us directly to mod-
ern totalitarianism, which proceeds by way of Rousseau’s worship of
the origins, or, as I have put it, his transfer of eros and the prospects

510
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for erotic wholeness from the telos to Fortuna.To that extent as well,
the religious millenarianism that we might see as secularized in mod-
ern revolutionary totalitarianism does not proceed directly by way of
Machiavelli and the early moderns. Instead, these modern revolutionary
movements including the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Nazis reach back
behind the early moderns in an atavisitc longing for the lost golden age
of the distant past, before the rise of bourgeois materialism, when the
people were whole and as one. To my mind, the early modern period is
mainly characterized by the attempt to control, even crush, or at least
tame and coopt religious faith into the liberal separation of church and
state. It may be socially useful in bolstering liberal values, but it must be
kept strictly within its boundaries of personal freedom of worship. Not
until Rousseau’s transposition of eros to the origins does the prospect
for the divinization of the people and the state emerge.

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 epilogue
The Hermeneutical Problem of Tyranny

Throughout this book, I have tried to show that there are fundamen-
tal differences in the understanding of tyranny between classical and
modern political philosophy, mirrored in the historical reality of mod-
ern tyranny itself, especially at its most radical totalitarian extreme. In
arguing this, do I necessarily commit myself to the view that human
nature in general has actually changed? Let me end with a few spec-
ulative remarks on this basic but enormously complex hermeneutical
problem.
I will begin by posing some fairly blunt alternatives. Is nuclear
weaponry, for example, no more than the outcome of the long evo-
lution of the human capacity to inflict destruction stretching back to
the Roman catapult? This is conceivable. On the other hand, did man’s
ability to split the atom, which presupposes modern natural science
and its refutation of ancient cosmology, introduce an entirely new force
into human history – the capacity to destroy human civilization? If so,
the destructive reach of tyrannical power has arguably been fundamen-
tally transformed from what it was before the twentieth century. In the
human realm, are Hitler and Stalin merely recognizable tyrants from
the classical typology equipped with military and technological power
that did not exist in the ancient past? Or (as I am inclined to believe)
did their secular millenarianism and projects for the futuristic recon-
struction of the world and the creation of a “new man” through geno-
cide introduce a fundamentally new element not comprehendible within
the ancient categories, perhaps closer to religious millenarianism and
fanaticism?
If we are asking whether tyranny has fundamentally altered its char-
acter, it would seem that we are led inevitably to the broader question

513
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of whether history, human nature, and our understanding of them have

also fundamentally changed. If they have not – if modern tyranny is
but a modification, however far-reaching, of the enduring archetypes –
then was Plato basically right, or closest to being right, about human
existence per se, with all later philosophy, as Emerson remarked, being
merely commentary or motivated by a vain desire to be original? If
this is so, then would it follow that the philosophic life, which Plato
argues is present at all times in principle for man regardless of histor-
ical circumstances inside the “cave” of the here and now, has actually
been fully and completely experienced only once, at the very beginning?
This would be to argue for a kind of reverse historicism of decline or
“fall” from the origins, implying that human existence was open to
the truth only once during the pristine origins of ancient Greece and
has added nothing fundamentally new since then, or has even drifted
away from that original pristine experience of access to the truth into
the delusions of modernity. It is certainly possible to argue that the
modern theory and practice of tyranny, however deep a modification
of classical political science, is at bottom no more than that – a modi-
fication of categories already sufficiently established by, say, Plato, and
merely added on to an underlying conception of human nature and psy-
chology that remains constant. Again, Genghis Khan on Twitter. The
mirror image opposite of this argument for the constancy of the clas-
sical understanding of human nature and regime principles is the view
that the truth was only discovered in modern times, correcting the delu-
sions of the classics – the view that modernity constitutes an advance
over the ancient world that is still a hallmark of much contemporary
education. In both cases, however, it is posited that human nature has
changed in the course of history, because the one side argues that human
nature possessed unmediated access to the truth only at the beginning,
then declined, perhaps irrecoverably, from that golden age, while the
other side argues that human nature was not in possession of the truth
about nature and human nature until modernity, when mankind was
transformed by possessing it for the first time. So the very attempt to
maintain the existence of the permanent truth – whether it has been
true all along or discovered only by modernity – tends to undermine
itself by making our access to the truth historically conditioned in both
versions. Although the question of the difference between ancient and
modern tyranny is a gateway to this dilemma, it is fortunately not my

514
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burden here to attempt to resolve it, only to sketch some of its contours
as they flow from the theme of this book.
Readers will recall from the Introduction that I questioned the ten-
ability of Leo Strauss’s view in apparently maintaining that, although
there is a fundamental break between ancients and moderns over the
meaning of tyranny and statecraft in general, the underlying truths
about human nature and classical political philosophy remain constant
and are preferable to the available modern alternatives. As he puts it
in a formulation characteristically rich in ambiguity: “Once we have
learned again from the classics what tyranny is,” we will have taken
“the first step toward an exact analysis of present-day tyranny, for
present-day tyranny is fundamentally different from the tyranny ana-
lyzed by the classics” (Strauss [1968] p. 189). But I myself, of course,
am partly guided in my own analysis of the differences between ancient
and modern tyranny by Strauss’s conception of such a break, which
in both Strauss’s case and my own is implicitly critical of Heidegger’s
view of tyranny as the tyranny of the Platonic forms, Platonic meta-
physics “completing itself” as technology (1954). So my attempt to
distinguish modern tyranny from ancient tyranny does invite the ques-
tion as to whether and to what extent the ambiguities about human
nature and historical change sketched here are characteristic of Strauss
himself, and how the theme of tyranny might point to and illuminate
some broader issues in Strauss’s hermeneutic and his relationship to
historicist thinkers such as Heidegger.
Let me begin by restating the fundamental alternatives. If ancient
and modern tyranny (along with the other dimensions of statecraft) are
underlyingly identical, then arguably nothing of fundamental impor-
tance for political philosophy has been done or thought about since
the classics. If, by contrast (and as I lean toward), ancient and modern
tyranny are fundamentally distinct from one another, then arguably
there may be nothing permanent about human nature and political
life. To the extent that Strauss embraces (as he appears at times to do)
the view that there is something fundamentally distinct about modern
tyranny, he might indeed be seen as embracing a historicist view. The
difficulty cannot be avoided by arguing (bluntly and for the purposes
of brevity and clarity) that the classics got it basically right, whereas all
modernity from Machiavelli through Hegel to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and
their epigones has been a compendium of various kinds of distortions

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in which philosophy, in Strauss’s memorable phrase, not only avoided

leaving the Cave but set about to dig us deeper into its lower recesses.
Because that would mean, again, that philosophy, which is supposedly
present for human beings as an alternative at all times in principle, has
in fact not been properly grasped for at least the past five hundred years,
maybe longer. Could something permanently natural and accessible –
moreover the highest way of life – be lost for so much of human history,
including to its greatest minds? To say that the classics got it basically
right is arguably only another, reverse kind of historicism, replacing
modernity and the Enlightenment’s claims to have surpassed the
ancients with the claim that ancient Greece was some kind of uniquely
privileged historical situation in which philosophy could emerge. That
would make philosophy at bottom a “Greek” phenomenon – that is,
a historically rooted and historically limited phenomenon.
As I understand Strauss’s thinking (and I do not claim to understand
it fully), the dynamism of his work came from its constant revolving
around these paradoxes. For example, the essay Progress or Return?
(1989) seems to suggest that Abrahamic Revelation, by going down the
same road as classical philosophy to a certain extent over the centrality
of justice, might provide a permanent prephilosophic explanation for
the emergence of philosophy that would itself be enduring and not tied
to “the Greeks” or to any specific historical epoch. Even in making
this argument, however, Strauss appears to concede that it might be
necessary to explain the need for the emergence of philosophy on the
basis of some set of prephilosophic experiences, problems, or a sense
of wonder – and hence again, in this sense, philosophy itself might
be grounded in some kind of historical, existential, psychological, or
revelatory context and not able to explain or justify itself entirely on its
own terms. Hence, there is arguably a degree of affinity between Strauss
and Heidegger over their shared interest in this prephilosophic horizon.
What links them as well is their shared view that we must clear away
centuries of sedimented, intervening interpretations and doctrines in
order to recover the pristine emergence of ancient philosophy in all its
radicalness. But then we are back to the same difficulty: Does this mean
that the greatness of philosophy owes itself to the robustness and vigor
of its historical origins? Finally, one would have to consider Strauss’s
ambivalent relationship not only to Heidegger but to German Idealism
as a whole. I believe he found promising its search for a holism that

516
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would overcome the dualism of the modern Cartesian subject, and hence
in some measure restore the holism of the classics. Yet by making history
the basis for that wholeness, historicism in another way ventured even
further from classical rationality than the admittedly truncated version
of it retained by Hobbes and other moderns. (I elaborate on this theme
in my essay, Did Plato Believe in His Own Metaphysics? And Did
Strauss? [2010].)
These issues certainly do bear on the provenance of tyranny. In main-
taining that modern tyranny does differ from ancient, I open myself
to the contention that I am taking a historical approach to the issue
and downplaying the underlying constants in human nature. As I see
it, however, and as I suggested in the Introduction and have tried to
demonstrate throughout, we can only think through the possibility of
such underlying constants in human nature and political philosophy if
we first pose the differences between ancients and moderns in their most
extreme dimensions, for me summed up by the deeroticization charac-
teristic of modern tyranny. Strauss himself famously argued the paradox
that we need “historical studies” precisely in order to overcome doc-
trinal historicism and reawaken the possibility that the classics might
be true. I do hold open the possibility, briefly alluded to in the Intro-
duction, that there may be some underlying constants in the ancient
and modern approaches to tyranny and statecraft, perhaps centering
on thumos and a reconceiving of it under the aegis of modernity and
the will, some of which I have tried to do in this book. More generally,
there might be some elastic and broadly characterized human leanings
toward honor, justice, nobility, and happiness sufficiently underdeter-
mined as to prevent an absolute dichotomy between the ancient and
modern approaches to statecraft. We might, for instance, read Aristo-
tle’s characterization of human nature as a civic animal with its capac-
ity for virtue, deliberation, and honor more as a series of leanings or
probabilities than as fixed, fully determined categories, introducing an
elasticity into politike that I tried to articulate in Chapter 3 with respect
to whether a monarchy or a republic was the best regime. This prospect
of recurrent but underdetermined human experiences that orient us to a
sense of wonder about life and the possibility of its further illumination
by the search for the truth can arguably be explored without falling prey
to the extreme of pronouncing that either the ancients or the moderns
are in the main completely right about everything or the extreme of

517
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denying that there is anything distinctive about the modern approach

at all.
As best as I can understand, Strauss may have been exploring this
alternative: a set of recurrent human concerns that are not sufficiently
laden with content as to rest exclusively with one philosophy or another
or be tied historically to one age or another. This search is conveyed
by his use of a term like the “problem” of Justice (as opposed to the
more strictly Platonic debate about the “Idea” of justice with its implied
metaphysical moorings) or “the fundamental problems ” as pretheoret-
ical intimations of what eventually emerge as fully articulated, varying,
and even contradictory philosophical schools. (“The possibility of phi-
losophy does not require more than that the fundamental problems are
always the same . . . ” [1974] p. 35.) I maintain what I first argued in
the Introduction: better an unresolved and possibly unresolvable ten-
sion among fundamental alternatives than the rush to submerge them in
the illusion that, from Plato to Heidegger, all the great ones have been in
open or secret agreement. In other words, could we find a set of recur-
rent prephilosophical leanings that would show how philosophy is an
enduring human concern while also showing how the full philosophical
elaboration of those concerns can differ so markedly between ancients
and moderns, among thinkers such as Plato, Machiavelli, Hegel, and
Heidegger? (Paul Ricoeur’s Fallible Man and Gadamer’s “fusion of
horizons” also explore this notion.) In this sense, Strauss’s long engage-
ment with the apparently resolutely unmetaphysical Socratic Xenophon
might have been his way of evoking a prephilosophic world, perhaps
analogous to Heidegger’s exploration of the “anthropology of Dasein,”
in which the Question of Being emerges from a “preontological” expe-
rience of the everyday world with its experiences, challenges, and
concerns.

518
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 index

Aeschylus, 250 Politics (work), 29, 141–157, 158–161,

Alberti, 285, 290–291 162–173, 187–188, 347–349,
Fate and Fortune (work), 290–291 355–356, 384–385
Arendt, 15, 175, 180–183, 456 Rhetoric (work), 490
Aristophanes, 37–38, 50–51, 140, 213, 216 Augustine, 68–70, 74–75, 234, 255,
Clouds (work), 37–38, 49, 213, 216 279–283, 292, 296, 299, 300,
Aristotle, 2, 4, 16, 21, 22, 24–59, 62–63, 308–316, 320–321, 322, 368–370,
68, 69, 74, 76–77, 82–83, 90, 94, 122, 426, 430, 472
124–133, 141, 186, 187–188, City of God (work), 279, 309
190–191, 199–200, 224–225, 227, on God’s power of creation, 69,
228–229, 230–231, 248–249, 299–300
251–252, 261–262, 269, 277–278, reduction of political virtue to dominion,
282–283, 284, 291, 310, 318–319, 68–70, 74–75, 269, 310–312
331, 341, 345, 346–349, 351–354, relationship to classical thinkers, 68–69,
355–356, 360, 366–367, 369–372, 74, 279–283, 309–311, 312–316
374–375, 380, 384–389, 394–395,
397, 400–401, 402–403, 406, Bacon, 13, 74, 151, 228, 270–334, 399,
422–423, 426, 462–464, 469–472, 433, 446, 456–461, 464–468, 469,
484–485, 488, 489–490 474, 485, 493, 501–502
critique of Platonic statecraft, 62–63, 94, The Advancement of Learning (work),
142–143, 156, 159–161, 277 13, 270
critique of Socrates, 90, 141, 158, The House of Solomon (work), 485
160–162, 164, 166, 167 New Atlantis (work), 467
critique of the pre-Socratics and new meaning of natural science, 270,
Sophists, 176–177 333–334, 446, 456–461, 466–468
Magna Moralia (work), 277 New Organon (work), 459–460, 466
Metaphysics (work), 278, 282 relationship to Hobbes, 74, 142, 182,
on monarchy and superlative virtue, 360, 446, 456, 468, 501–502
141–145, 155–176 relationship to Machiavelli, 13, 71, 139,
Nicomachean Ethics (work), 149–150, 174, 228, 270–334, 343–344, 433,
153–159 446, 456–461, 464–468
Physics (work), 175–178, 277, 280, 282
on political community, 141–156, Castiglione, 188, 228, 257, 291, 331
165–168, 174–176 adaptation of Plato’s Symposium, 262,
on political psychology, 142–143, 331
170–171, 249 The Book of the Courtier (work), 257

537
 index

Castiglione (cont.) 75, 80, 81–82, 85–86, 88–90, 91–92,

evaluation of Xenophon, 189, 228, 257 104–106, 108, 109–111, 112–113,
Charnwood, Lord, 482–483, 492 117–118, 120, 142–143, 173–174,
Cicero, 5–6, 81, 265–266, 278–281, 283, 192, 200, 201, 203, 206–208, 222,
287, 293, 328–329, 348, 349, 223, 225, 226, 230, 245, 298, 308,
391–392, 449 315, 336, 337–340, 342, 357–358,
connection to Octavian Caesar, 81, 378–379, 405, 409, 415–416, 434,
391–392 463, 499–500, 508, 510
On Divination (work), 279 evaluation by Augustine, 308, 316, 415
Dream of Scipio (work), 56, 208, 265, evaluation by Hobbes, 452, 498
463 evaluation by Machiavelli, 11–12, 31,
On Fate (work), 278, 280–281, 293 70, 72–73, 116, 117, 118, 254,
on fortune and fate, 280–281 337–340, 342, 358, 405, 416,
on free will and determinism, 278–282 506
Machiavelli’s critique of him, 328–329, in works of Aristotle, 63, 142–143
391–392 in works of Plato, 11–12, 33–34, 44–45,
Petrarch’s critique of him, 265, 287 49, 50–53, 57, 58, 59–61, 64, 88–90,
relationship to Plato and Aristotle, 55, 104–106, 108, 109–111, 118, 120,
56–57, 278, 329 173, 200, 203, 222, 223, 255, 256,
On the Commonwealth (work), 56 298, 315, 336, 357–358, 378–379,
on the Lion and the Fox, 328–329 405, 463, 504, 508
On the Nature of the Gods (work),
278–279 Germino, 429
constitution, the, 55, 71–72, 84, 97–99, Gibbon, Edward, 479–480, 481–482, 484,
103, 106–107, 114–115, 121, 485, 486
123–126, 144, 145, 164–166, 168, Gilbert, Felix, 229, 232–236, 294, 353,
171–172, 187–188, 307–308, 313, 432, 437
345, 346, 351–353, 357, 364–404, Grant, George, 306, 407
438–439
founding and re-founding republics in Hadot, 8
Machiavelli, 122, 125–127, 307–308, Harrington, 324, 359, 388, 411, 433,
346, 351–362, 363, 438–439 446–448, 450, 467, 503, 509
founding the best regime in Plato, 55, critique of Hobbes, 359, 446–447
98–99, 120–125 Oceana (work), 433, 446, 467
Machiavelli’s ranking of regimes, 71–72, relationship to English Republicanism,
345, 363–406, 438 324, 447
Plato’s ranking of regimes, 98, 106–107 relationship to Machiavelli, 324, 359,
and political debate in Aristotle, 388, 433, 446–447
162–163, 164–166, 171, 182, Hegel, 5, 6, 24, 71, 99, 169, 179, 202,
384–385 318–319, 344, 455, 472–473,
and relationship to economics in 476–477, 478, 480, 500–501, 507
Aristotle, 147–149, 187–188, Phenomenology of Spirit (work), 5, 298,
370–371 319, 455
and relationship to economics in relationship to Machiavelli, 71,
Hobbes, 182–183, 454–455 318–320, 344
as understood by the pre-Socratics and on the centrality of the will to
Sophists, 371–372, 373–375 modernity, 500–501
on the difference between ancient and
eros, 6–9, 11–12, 14–18, 19, 26, 28, modern tyranny, 6, 500–501
31–36, 42, 44–45, 47, 49, 50–53, on the Master-Slave relationship, 5, 342,
55–56, 57, 58–62, 63–65, 70, 72–73, 455, 476–477

538
 index

Heidegger, 15–18, 20, 23, 182, 183, 318, Homer, 42, 132–133, 178, 207, 210,
331, 453, 492, 494, 501–502, 248–250, 271, 330
507–509, 515–516, 518 The Iliad (work), 50, 207, 250
critique of Plato, 15, 507–508, 515 Horkheimer, Max, 13, 307, 456
An Introduction to Metaphysics (work),
494 Kant, 21, 22–23, 24, 97, 139, 163, 273,
relationship to Arendt, 182 298, 343
relationship to Hobbes, 16–17, 453 critique of tragedy, 24
on the centrality of technology to on the centrality of the will to modern
modernity, 15, 306, 466, 492, 494, moral autonomy, 18, 22–23, 298
501 Kennington, Richard, 24, 456, 458–459
Herodotus, 47, 205, 235–237, 240, 242, Kojeve, Alexander, 13–14, 15, 453,
247 501
Histories (work), 235–236
Machiavelli’s preference for his account Lilla, Mark, 17, 19
of Cyrus, 205, 235–238, 240, 242, Lucretius, 132, 178, 417, 418, 423, 424,
247 429, 431
Hobbes, 2, 7, 10, 16, 23–24, 25–30, 32, De Rerum Natura (work), 280
75–132, 136, 142, 154–155, 156–157, influence in Machiavelli’s Florence,
173–174, 178–179, 182–183, 216, 417–419
300–301, 323, 324, 334, 342, Machiavelli’s assesment of his natural
358–359, 381, 388, 399, 422, 433, philosophy, 417–418, 424
435, 436, 446–456, 468–477, relationship to Bacon and Hobbes, 132
493–494, 495–499, 503 relationship to the pre-Socratics and
The Citizen (work), 78 Sophists, 178
critique of Aristotle, 76–77, 172, Ludwig, 18
173–174, 182–183, 469–472 Luther, 300, 321, 325, 407, 415, 426, 430,
critique of Plato, 78 431, 438, 467
interpretation of Thucydides, 157, 472 critique of Thomism, 407, 415, 426
Leviathan (work), 77, 174, 342, 447, preference for Augustinian theology,
451–452, 468–469, 475 300, 325, 415, 426, 438
political psychology, 30, 76–359, 447, relationship to Machiavelli, 325–326,
451–452, 454–455, 469–475, 426, 430, 431–432, 467
495–496
reductionism regarding thumos, 78–80, Machiavelli, 6–7, 10–12, 14, 17, 19–20,
472–473, 498 23–25, 26–32, 57–58, 61, 65, 67,
relationship to Bacon, 74, 142, 182, 381, 69–71, 72–73, 76, 77, 78, 81, 91,
446, 456, 468, 501–502 113–114, 115–119, 121, 122, 124,
relationship to Machiavelli, 75–79, 142, 132, 138–139, 151–152, 154, 173,
182, 183, 253, 324, 358–359, 381, 174, 177, 183–184, 186, 199, 205,
388, 422, 428, 433, 436, 451–452, 206, 207–208, 209, 227–228,
454, 498, 503 271–274, 275, 277, 283–285,
relationship to the pre-Socratics and 287–288, 292, 294–308, 311–312,
Sophists, 132, 177–178, 377, 381, 316–318, 319–321, 326, 336,
474 337–346, 348, 350–376, 379–381,
on the re-construction of nature, 382–388, 409, 410–437, 444–450,
153–154, 178–179, 300–301, 451, 452–455, 456, 458–459, 462,
334–335, 446, 453, 468–469, 503 463–469, 475–476, 480–481,
on the Sovereign’s employment of terror, 493–494, 496, 497–498, 500–504,
30, 78, 80–154, 244, 342, 449–450, 505–507, 508–511
473–474 The Art of War (work), 411

539
 index

Machiavelli (cont.) relationship to Augustine, 30, 69–70,

critique of Aristotle, 124–133, 246–247, 74–75, 268, 269, 292, 311–312,
248–249, 251–252, 267, 341, 315–317, 319–322, 325–326,
353–354, 355–356, 384–389, 368–369, 415, 426, 430–431
394–395, 402–403, 423 relationship to Luther, 325–326, 426,
critique of Christianity, 69–71, 255–256, 430, 431–432, 467
263–267, 301–302, 307, 319–322, relationship to the pre-Socratics and
346, 412–414, 421–438, 509 Sophists, 81, 118–119, 127, 131–250,
critique of Plato, 115, 124, 128–131, 371–373, 381, 408–409
246–247, 326–327, 328, 336–340 relationship to Xenophon, 26–32, 189,
critique of the traditional writers on 199, 228, 232, 235–247, 257, 274,
politics, 114–116, 242–244, 245–246, 385, 433
369, 400–401, 404–406, 462–464 rhetorical appeal to antiquity, 127–128,
the cycle of regimes, 363–383 228, 257–274, 384, 424
on Cyrus the Great, 236–246, 247–248, on the traditional understanding of
256–261, 402 virtue, 250–257
de-eroticization of tyranny, 6–7, 31–32, understanding of virtue and fortune,
118, 254–255, 337–340, 342, 383, 70–72, 75, 232–236, 274–277,
450, 462 283–284, 294–296, 327
defining the virtue of the prince, 127, virtue, necessity, and choice, 351–363
232–236, 304–305 Macpherson, C. B., 453
Discourses on Livy (work), 124–125, Manent, Pierre, 24
236–239, 242–246, 345–346, 350, Mansfield, Harvey C., 7, 295–296, 346,
351–353, 361–364, 393, 401–404, 357, 388, 419, 451–452
411–413, 419, 421–424, 429, Masters, Rogers, 427–428
433–434, 438–447 metaphysics, 36, 40, 69, 70, 249, 277–278,
evaluation of imperialism, 345, 347, 289–294, 302–303, 407, 494,
349–351, 404, 453–454 507–508
Exhortation to Penitence (work), 429 absence from Xenophon’s political
founding and re-founding the republic, thought, 263
113, 122, 124–127, 307–308, 346, ancient view of the cosmos versus that of
351–363, 368, 419, 438–439, Christianity, 69, 282, 289–292, 293,
465–466 299–300, 302–303, 310–311
Mandragola (work), 139, 428 its relationship to political delusion in
on mastering fortune, 17–18, 30–31, Machiavelli, 71–118, 187, 255, 295,
65–67, 130–131, 151, 232–236, 274, 323, 327–328, 399, 407, 464
325–327 its relationship to politics for Aristotle,
the mixed regime, 383–390 40, 142–143, 277–278, 389
new understanding of thumos and eros, its relationship to politics for Plato,
65–67, 72, 75, 117–118, 340, 36–38, 54, 59, 94–96, 102, 277, 284,
357–358, 382–383 286, 309–310
the place of religion in a republic, its replacement by history in Machiavelli,
412–417, 419–432 70, 263, 305, 318, 381
preference for Rome, 114, 364–365, mind, 33, 56–57, 67, 119–120, 150, 158,
389–399, 404 234–235, 272–273, 300–302,
The Prince (work), 28, 124–125, 409–410, 462–463, 465–466, 508
246–249, 251–254, 263–268, the Aristotelian understanding, 150, 158
306–307, 345–346, 351–353, its assimilation to the will in modernity,
363–365, 393–394, 401–404, 33, 67, 130, 230, 234, 272–273, 282,
419–422, 433–434, 438–447 299–302, 306–307, 326–327, 372,

540
 index

406, 409–410, 458, 468, critique of Cicero, 265, 287

504–505 relationship to Machiavelli’s
its relationship to political life for the understanding of fortune, 287–288
ancients, 462 On the Remedies of Good and Bad
its role in the soul for Plato, 56–57 Fortune (work), 286–288
the Platonic understanding, 56–57, Pico, 285–286, 289–290
119–120, 130, 508 Oration on the Dignity of Man (work),
289–290
nature, 10–11, 26, 27–28, 29–30, 42–43, Pitkin, Hannah, 329–330
56, 57–58, 61–62, 65–67, 69, 70–71, Plato, 6–7, 9, 11–13, 15, 16–19, 20, 23,
73, 74–76, 77–78, 97–98, 99–100, 33, 34–36, 46–47, 52, 56, 57, 59, 60,
105, 119–120, 130, 132–140, 61–63, 72–74, 75, 78, 82–83, 93,
151–152, 153, 155, 175–179, 212, 97–98, 101, 102–103, 104, 108, 110,
219–220, 230, 268, 300–301, 113–114, 118, 119, 120, 124, 125,
318–319, 343–344, 354, 360–362, 127–131, 141–143, 159–160, 161,
408–410, 434–435, 446, 458–461, 173, 187, 188–189, 190, 192,
468–469, 504–506 199–200, 206–207, 221, 224–225,
as understood by Bacon and Hobbes, 228–229, 230–231, 246, 249, 250,
75–76, 77–78, 79, 132, 139, 151, 153, 260–262, 269, 271, 277–278, 284,
156, 174, 177–179, 300–301, 286, 289, 294, 297–298, 305–306,
333–334, 380–381, 458–461, 307, 309–310, 312, 313–315,
468–469 323–324, 326, 327–328, 329–330,
as understood by Machiavelli, 30, 57, 334, 336–338, 340, 346–347,
70–71, 73, 74–75, 151–152, 301, 307, 348–349, 352, 356–357, 364, 367,
320–321, 343–344, 354, 360–362, 371–372, 374–376, 379–381,
408–410, 434–435 382–383, 400–401, 405–406,
as understood by Plato and Aristotle, 29, 421–422, 462–463, 464, 478–479,
56, 109, 151–152, 153–155, 175–177, 497–498, 499, 507–508, 514,
268 518
as understood by Rousseau, 179, Alcibiades 1 (work), 36, 49, 203,
505–506, 508 213–214
as understood by the pre-Socratics and Apology (work), 41, 45
Sophists, 42–43, 61, 81, 119, on belief in the gods, 63–64, 112, 283,
132–136, 139–176, 212, 219, 299
380–381, 408 diagnosis of tyranny, 6–7, 34, 83–113
on education, 35–45, 56–57, 96–97
ontology, 20–23, 32, 61, 64–65, 119, 133, Gorgias (work), 42–44, 45, 218–219
134–138, 139–140, 177, 178, 180, images of the soul, 35–58
218, 230, 255, 269, 309, 321, 322, The Laws of Plato (work), 58, 81–82,
333, 335, 343, 352, 369, 421, 428, 108–111, 113–114, 219, 277
434–436, 445–446, periodization of the dialogues, 35–36
456–457 Phaedo (work), 40–41, 45, 51, 57
primordial and transcendental, 21, 32, Phaedrus (work), 55–57
61, 69, 75, 273, 427 political psychology of eros and thumos,
relationship to political theory, 23–25, 33–34, 58, 63–65, 66–67, 88–90,
434 109–113, 118, 357–358, 381–382,
409–410
Parel, Anthony, 427–428 portrait of Socrates, 36–39, 48, 49, 187,
Petrarch, 265, 276, 285, 287–289, 323, 189, 206–207
430 Protagoras (work), 58, 135

541
 index

Plato (cont.) Rousseau, 19, 84, 179, 273, 318, 434,

relationship of metaphysics to politics, 436–437, 450, 455, 459, 474, 476,
36–38, 54, 59, 94–96, 102, 277, 284, 502–508, 510
286, 309–310
relationship of the philosophic life to Salutati, 276, 285
civic virtue, 39–40, 52–53, 59–62, Schram, 73, 426
89–90, 98, 463 Shakespeare, 11, 67–68, 272, 333, 361,
relationship to the pre-Socratics and 391, 433, 441, 443–444, 446, 467
Sophists, 36–39, 109, 119, 132–138, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 441
312, 377–379 relationship to Machiavelli, 67–68, 272,
The Republic (work), 39–40, 53–55, 57, 332, 433, 441–445
59, 61–62, 85–103, 106–108, Richard II, 441
122–123, 159–160, 297–299, The Tempest, 446
313–314, 356–357, 374–375, 382, Skinner, Quentin, 274–276, 279, 283,
405–406 284–294, 449, 452
Socrates’ relationship to Alcibiades, Sophocles, 2, 21–22, 45, 46, 82, 140,
48–51, 103, 213–214 210–212
the Socratic turn, 41, 45, 51 Oedipus Tyrannus (work), 2, 22, 45–46,
The Statesman (work), 32, 62, 101–103, 210–211
170 relationship to Thucydides, 210–212
Symposium (work), 44–45, 47–48, on the danger and importance of
49–53, 59–60 political ambition, 210–211
on the reform of poetry, 36, 38–39, Spinoza, 13, 20, 233, 236, 307, 312, 318,
41–42, 50, 53, 54–57, 98 433, 435, 447, 452–456, 475–476,
Theaetetus (work), 132–135 505
Theages (work), 83–84 acknowledgment of Machiavelli, 13,
Timaeus (work), 298–299, 302 433, 475–476
the tri-partite soul, 57, 59, 88–89, 93, Stauffer, 8, 18
117, 378 Strauss, Leo, 13–15, 41, 70, 73, 116, 302,
use of rhetoric, 35, 36, 42, 43–44, 317–318, 412, 426, 429, 435,
111 439–447, 456, 458, 476, 495,
Plutarch, 272, 283–284 515–518
virtue as a consolation against the Sullivan, Vickie, 425, 456
reverses of fortune, 283–284
Pocock, J.G.A., 290, 411, 449, 452 Tacitus, 349
Popper, 12 preference for republic over empire, 349
Thomas (St.), 69, 177, 274, 299–300, 355,
Rahe, Paul, 351, 415, 426, 447–448 370, 417, 426
Revelation, 63–64, 74, 234–236, 250, on causality, 69, 177, 299–300
302–303, 317–318, 355 on God’s power of creation, 69,
and Machiavelli’s understanding of 299–300, 303, 417
Fortuna, 70–71, 317–318 relationship to Aristotle, 69, 177,
and the Abrahamic concept of God, 75, 282–285, 303, 370
139, 273, 282, 302–303, 318 relationship to Machiavelli, 274
and the critique of Thomism by Tempier Summa Theologica (work), 303
and Luther, 300, 303, 407, 415, 426 Thucydides, 48, 49, 82, 103, 158, 167,
as understood by Plato and Aristotle, 33, 199–200, 211–212, 213–218, 220,
63–64, 283, 298–299 221, 311, 346, 347, 472
Ricoeur, Paul, 34, 518 evaluation of Alcibiades, 47, 49, 167,
Rosen, Stanley, 54 216–218, 221–222

542
 index

evaluation of Nicias, 217–218 relationship to totalitarianism, 18–19,

evaluation of Pericles, 187, 214–216 434, 436–437, 456, 473–474,
History of the Peloponnesian War 480–481, 487–492, 495, 510
(work), 200, 210–224
relationship to poets and tragedians, Valla, 285, 291–292
215–216 Vergerio, 285
relationship to Xenophon, 212 Villa, Dana, 41
on the contradiction between democracy Viroli, Maurizio, 425, 429, 431
and empire, 221, 223–225, 346 virtue, 40–41, 57, 68, 89–90, 127, 130,
as the originator of Realpolitik theory of 141–142, 143–145, 157–158,
politics, 212 161–162, 164–166, 168, 172–175,
thumos, 18, 30, 33–36, 51–52, 57, 58–59, 180, 190, 200–201, 208–209,
61, 62–67, 72–73, 75, 78, 79–90, 91, 232–234, 239–240, 247–248,
109, 111–113, 117–118, 121, 250–251, 253, 269–270, 274–278,
142–143, 170, 203, 213, 222, 225, 282–295, 304–305, 337–340,
358, 378, 380, 381–383, 410, 495, 352–353, 421–422, 463–464
517 and Aristotle’s views on ethical choice,
evaluation by Augustine, 269, 472 148
evaluation by Hobbes, 78 civic and philosophic in Plato, 89–90
evaluation by Machiavelli, 65–67, as modern Kantian autonomy, 57
72–73, 75, 117, 118, 340, 358, need for shaping by education, 130,
382–383 154–155, 180
in works of Aristotle, 63, 142, 170 re-defined by Machiavelli as the mastery
in works of Plato, 33, 51, 57, 58, 61, 64, of fortune, 127, 232, 239–240, 243,
65, 89–90, 111–113, 118, 121, 203, 250, 275, 294–295, 304–305, 316,
213, 222, 358, 381–382, 508 324–325
Tuck, Richard, 467 relationship to intellect and passions in
tyranny, 1–20, 30, 57–59, 61–62, 80–83, Plato, 41, 56–57
90, 101–103, 167–168, 191–192, 210, and the need for economic wherewithal
359, 455–456, 468, 477–498, in Aristotle, 149–151, 356
513–515, 519 as understood by the pre-Socratics and
as deformation of eros and thumos, 34, Sophists, 136–138, 331
58, 111–113 Voegelin, Eric, 14–15, 51, 69, 73, 264,
difference between ancient and modern, 426, 456, 509, 510
12–20, 57–58, 83, 271–272, 434,
478–481, 486–495, 499–516, Walzer, Michael, 18
517 Weber, Max, 2, 453, 459, 498
different types, 2–6, 81–82, 101–103, Wolin, 320
191, 450–451, 498
exemplified by various historical figures, Xenophon, 26–31, 61–62, 82, 84, 91,
3–6, 61, 80, 90–91, 107, 108, 113, 92–93, 101, 103, 160–161, 186, 187,
203, 306, 437, 450–451, 473–474, 188–191, 192, 195, 198–200, 202,
478–480, 481–484, 486, 494–495, 209–210, 212, 225–228, 232,
502, 513 235–240, 242, 243–249, 252,
its possible usefulness, 61, 82–83, 256–268, 269–349, 367, 385, 393,
191–194, 210–211, 225–226, 433
246–247 absence of metaphysics from his works,
and modern concept of the will, 6, 12, 263
18–19, 491, 500–501, 502, 504–506, on civic education, 198–199, 201–203
508–509 Cyropaedia (work), 294

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Xenophon (cont.) relationship to Aristotle, 190–191, 195,

on Cyrus the Great, 189–190, 194, 199–200, 202, 224–225
196–209, 260–261 relationship to Herodotus, 47, 205,
Cyrus the Great as an idealized 235–236, 237, 240, 242,
Alcibiades, 200, 225–226 247
Education of Cyrus (work), 193–194, relationship to Plato, 102–103,
197–198, 199–209, 232, 238–241, 188–191, 199–200, 224–225
243–244, 247–248, 256–260, relationship to the mirror of princes
265–266 genre, 228, 239, 244, 257
on eros and thumos, 200, 203, 207–208 relationship to Thucydides, 212
esoteric teaching concerning fraud and on the philosophic life and political
violence, 238–240, 258–260 excellence, 189–190
Hiero (work), 13, 191–196 on the reform of tyranny, 200
Memorabilia (work), 194, 197 on virtue, fortune, and nature,
on monarchy and the art of household 208–209
management, 195, 204–205 on what it means to be a gentleman,
Oeconomicus (work), 196–199, 209 196–197, 209
preference for monarchy over republics,
188–189 Zuckert C., 18, 35, 48, 51, 102

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