Machiavelli

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Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1517)

Lecture note, just for reference


Students are advised to read book of George H Sabine, History of
Political Theory

 Born in Florence of Italy; was head of foreign affairs in


Florence
 Books – Discourse – Strong state; The Prince – strong king.
 Both books present aspects of the same subject – the causes of
the rise and decline of states and the means by which statesmen
can make them permanent. The Prince deals with monarchies or
absolute governments, and the Discourses mainly with the
expansion of the Roman Republic.
 true, by a desire to obtain employment under the Medici.

 Method – Historical and observation

 Art of Government – not political theory.

 Divided Italy - When Machiavelli wrote, Italy was divided


among five larger states: the kingdom of Naples in the south, the
duchy of Milan in the northwest, the aristocratic republic of
Venice in the northeast, and the republic of Florence and the
Papal State in the center.

 The pope as ruler - one Italian ruler among others. The old
ambition to stand as arbiter of all the quarrels of Christendom
had dwindled to the more practicable, but more worldly,
ambition to retain the sovereignty of central Italy.

 A state of arrested political development. In Italy no power


appeared great enough to unite the whole peninsula. Italians
suffered all the degradation and oppression of tyranny with few

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of its compensations, and divisions among the tyrants left the
land a prey to the French, the Spanish, and the Germans.

 Assault on Church - We Italians then owe to the Church of


Rome and to her priests our having become irreligious and bad;
but we owe her a still greater debt, and one that will be the cause
of our ruin, namely, that the Church has kept and still keeps our
country divided.

 And certainly a country can never be united and happy, except


when it obeys wholly one government, whether a republic or a
monarchy, as is the case in France and in Spain; and the sole
cause why Italy is not in the same condition, and is not governed
by either one republic or one sovereign.

 A state of institutional decay - It was a society intellectually


brilliant and artistically creative, more emancipated than any in
Europe from the trammels of authority, and prepared to face the
world in a coolly rational and empirical spirit, yet it was a prey
to the worst political corruption and moral degradation.

 Cruelty and murder had become normal agencies of


government; good faith and truthfulness had become childish
scruples to which an enlightened man would hardly give lip-
service; force and craft had become the keys to success;
profligacy and debauchery had become too frequent to need
comment; and selfishness, naked and unadorned, need only
succeed in order to supply its own justification

 It was a period truly called the age of "bastards and


adventurers," a society created as if to illustrate Aristotle's
saying that "man, when separated from law and justice, is the
worst of all animals." Machiavelli is, therefore, in a peculiar
sense, the political theorist of the "masterless man," of a
society in which the individual stands alone, with no motives
and no interests except those supplied by his own egoism.

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Art of government

 Indifference to the use of immoral means for political purposes


and the belief that government depends largely on force and
craft. What does not appear in the Prince is his genuine
enthusiasm for popular government of the sort exemplified in
the Roman Republic, but which he believed to be impracticable
in Italy when he wrote.

 The mechanics of government, of the means by which states


may be made strong, of the policies by which they can expand
their power, and of the errors that lead to their decay or
overthrow. Political and military measures are almost the sole
objects of his interest, and he divorces these almost wholly from
religious, moral, and social considerations, except as the latter
affect political expedients.

 The purpose of politics is to preserve and increase political


power itself, and the standard by which he judges it is its
success in doing this. Whether a policy is cruel or faithless or
lawless he treats for the most part as a matter of indifference,
though he is well aware that such qualities may react upon its
political success. He often discusses the advantages of
immorality skillfully used to gain a ruler's ends, and it is this
which is mainly responsible for his evil repute. But for the most
part he is not so much immoral as non-moral. He simply
abstracts politics from other considerations and writes of it as if
it were an end in itself.

MORAL INDIFFERENCE
The closest analogue to Machiavelli's separation of political
expedience
from morality is probably to be found in some parts of Aristotle's
Politics, where Aristotle considers the preservation of states without
reference to their goodness or badness.

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The Christian virtues he believed to be servile in their effects on
character and he contrasted Christianity unfavorably in this respect
with the more virile religions of antiquity.

“Our religion places the supreme happiness in humility, lowliness,


and a
contempt for worldly objects, whilst the other, on the contrary, places
the supreme good in grandeur of soul, strength of body, and all such
other qualities as render men formidable. . . . These principles seem to
me to have made men feeble, and caused them to become an easy
prey
to evil-minded men, who can control them more securely, seeing that
the great body of men, for the sake of gaining Paradise, are more
disposed to endure injuries than to avenge them.”

As this passage suggests, Machiavelli was not indifferent to the


effects
which morals and religion, in the masses of mankind, have upon
social and political life. He sanctioned the use of immoral means by
rulers to gain an end, but he never doubted that moral corruption in a
people makes good government impossible.

He had nothing but admiration for the civic virtues of the ancient
Romans and of the Swiss in his own day, and he believed that these
grew out of purity in the family, independence and sturdiness in
private life, simplicity and frugality of manners, and loyalty and
trustworthiness in performing public duties. But this does not mean
that the ruler must believe in the religion of his subjects or practice
their virtues.

An army fights with morale as truly as with guns, and the wise ruler
sees that both are of the best quality. Machiavelli offers an extreme
example of a double standard of morals, one for the ruler and
another for the private citizen. The first is judged by success in
keeping and increasing his power; the second, by the strength which
his conduct imparts to the social group.

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UNIVERSAL EGOISM
Behind nearly everything that Machiavelli said about political policy
was the assumption that human nature is essentially selfish, and that
the
effective motives on which a statesman must rely are egoistic, such as
the desire for security in the masses and the desire for power in rulers.

Government is really founded upon the weakness and insufficiency of


the individual, who is unable to protect himself against the aggression
of other individuals unless supported by the power of the state.

Human nature, moreover, is profoundly aggressive and acquisitive;


men aim to keep what they have and to acquire more. Neither in
power nor in possessions is there any normal limit to human desires,
while both power and possessions are always in fact limited by
natural scarcity. Accordingly, men are always in a condition of strife
and competition which threatens open anarchy unless restrained by
the force behind the law, while the power of the ruler is built upon the
very imminence of anarchy and the fact that security is possible only
when government is strong.

He frequently remarks, however, that men are in general bad and that
the wise ruler will construct his policies on this assumption. In
particular he insists that successful government must aim at security
of property and of life before everything else, since these are the most
universal desires in human nature. Hence his cynical remark that a
man more readily forgives the murder of his father than the
confiscation of his patrimony. The prudent ruler may kill but he will
not plunder. When completed by a systematic psychology to explain
and justify it, this phase of Machiavelli became the political
philosophy of Hobbes.

Machiavelli, however, is not so much concerned with badness or


egoism as a general human motive as with its prevalence in Italy as a
symptom of social decadence. Italy stands to him as the example of a

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corrupt society, with no such partial mitigation as the monarchy
brings in France and Spain. they have each a king who keeps them
united.

The problem in Italy, then, is to found a state in a corrupt society, and


Machiavelli was convinced that, in such circumstances, no effective
government was possible except absolute monarchy. This explains
why he was at once an enthusiastic admirer of the Roman Republic
and an advocate of despotism. By corruption Machiavelli means in
general that decay of private virtue and civic probity and devotion that
renders popular government impossible. It includes all sorts of licence
and violence, great inequalities of wealth and power, the destruction
of peace and justice, the growth of disorderly ambition, disunion,
lawlessness, dishonesty, and contempt for religion.

Man always commit the error of not knowing when to limit their
hopes."

THE OMNIPOTENT LEGISLATOR


A second general principle that is continually assumed by Machiavelli
is the supreme importance in society of the lawgiver. A successful
state must be founded by a single man, and the laws and government
which he creates determine the national character of his people. Moral
and civic virtue grows out of law, and when a society has become
corrupt, it can never reform itself but must be taken in hand by one
lawgiver, who can restore it to the healthy principles set up by its
founder.

limit to what a statesman can do, provided he understands the rules of


his art. He can tear down old states and build new, change forms of
government, transplant populations, and build new virtues into the
characters of his subjects.

If a ruler lacks soldiers, he says, he need blame no one but himself,


for he should have adopted measures to correct the cowardice and
effeminacy of his people. The lawgiver is the architect not only of the

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state but of society as well, with all its moral, religious, and economic
institutions.

In part it reflected his understanding of the problem that confronted a


ruler amid the corruption of sixteenth-century Italy. By sheer political
genius a successful ruler had to create a military power strong enough
to overcome the disorderly little cities and principalities and in the
end to evolve a new public spirit and civic loyalty.

For if human individuals are by nature radically egoistic, the state and
the force behind the law must be the only power that holds society
together; moral obligations must in the end be derived from law and
government.

The ruler, as the creator of the state, is not only outside the law, but if
law enacts morals, he is outside morality as well. There is no standard
to judge his acts except the success of his political expedients for
enlarging and perpetuating the power of his state. The frankness with
which Machiavelli accepted this conclusion and included it in his
advice to rulers is the chief reason for the evil reputation of the
Prince, though the Discourses were really no better. He openly
sanctioned the use of cruelty, perfidy, murder, or any other means,
provided only they are used with sufficient intelligence and secrecy to
reach their ends.

REPUBLICANISM AND NATIONALISM


Republic. The preservation of the state, as distinct from its founding,
depends upon the excellence of its law, for this is the source of all the
civic virtues of its citizens. Even in a monarchy the prime condition of
stable government is that it should be regulated by law.

Thus Machiavelli insisted upon the need for legal remedies against
official abuses in order to prevent illegal violence and pointed out the
political dangers of lawlessness in rulers and the folly of vexatious
and harassing policies.

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In particular, the prudent ruler will abstain from the property and the
women of his subjects, since these are the matters on which men are
most easily stirred to resistance.

He favored a gentle rule wherever possible and the use of severity


only in moderation. He said explicitly that government is more stable
where it is shared by the many and he preferred election to heredity as
a mode of choosing rulers. He spoke for a general freedom to propose
measures for the public good and for liberty of discussion, in order
that both sides of every question may be heard before a decision is
reached. He believed that the people must be independent and strong,
because there is no way to make them warlike without giving them
the means of rebellion. Finally, he had a high opinion both of the
virtue and the judgment of an uncorrupted people as compared with
those of the prince. They are unfitted to take a long view of intricate
policies,

Aristocracy and the nobility. More than any other thinker of his time
he
perceived that the interests of the nobility are antagonistic both to
those of the monarchy and of the middle class, and that orderly
government required their suppression or extirpation. These
"gentlemen," who live idly on the proceeds of their wealth without
giving any useful service, are "everywhere enemies of all civil
government."

The only way to establish any kind of order there is to found a


monarchical government; for where the body of the people is so
thoroughly corrupt that the laws are powerless for restraint, it
becomes
necessary to establish some superior power which, with a royal hand,
and with full and absolute powers, may put a curb upon the excessive
ambition and corruption of the powerful.

Side by side with Machiavelli's dislike of the nobility stands his


hatred of mercenary soldiers. Here again he had in view one of the
most serious

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causes of lawlessness in Italy, the bands of hired ruffians who were
ready to fight for whosoever would offer the largest pay, who were
faithful to no one, and who were often more dangerous to their
employer than to his enemies. Such professional soldiers had almost
wholly displaced the older citizen-soldiers of the free cities, and while
they were able to terrorize Italy, they had proved their incompetence
against better organized and more loyal troops from France.
Machiavelli had a clear perception of the advantage which France
gained from nationalizing her army and consequently he was never
tired of urging that the training and equipment of a citizen-army is the
first need of a state. As he knew from his own observation, mercenary
troops and foreign auxiliaries are alike ruinous to the ruler who must
depend upon them. They exhaust his treasury and almost invariably
fail him in a pinch. The art of war is therefore the primary concern of
a ruler, the condition of success in all his ventures. Before everything
else he must aim to possess a strong force of his own citizens, well
equipped and well disciplined, and attached to his interests by ties of
loyalty to the state.

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