Professor Steven Smith:
Last time, I ended by talking about Machiavelli as both a
revolutionary in many ways and a reformer of the moral vocabulary
about virtue and vice, good and evil.
Machiavelli seeks to replace, to transpose an older
vocabulary associated both with Plato and certainly,
perhaps more importantly, with biblical sources,
wants to transform altogether the language of virtue,
to give it a new kind of meaning, to change it from
either Platonic or Christian otherworldliness to a greater
sense of worldly power. Virtue is, for him,
or to use his term again, virtù is related with
manliness, with force, with power.
He tells us, in chapter 25 of The
Prince, the ethic of the prince must be one of audacity
and even more audacity and that famous and very volatile image
he uses, fortune is a woman and you must
know how- the prince must know how to conquer the woman,
must be used through policies of force, brutality,
audacity. This is the language of
Machiavelli. Virtue is associated with the
quest for worldly glory, with ambition,
with the desire to achieve success,
and that's what I want to talk about at greater length today.
I want to talk about what in the political and philosophical
literature about this is called the problem of "dirty hands."
And if you want to join the political game,
you must be prepared to get your hands dirty,
and what Machiavelli means by that, how he comes to this
problem. In order, he argues,
to effect a transformation of European morality,
it is, in other words,
to teach the prince, as he says in chapter 15,
how not to be good, you have to go to the source of
the morality. You have to go to the source of
morality. To affect the maxims,
to affect the standards that govern our lives,
it is necessary to go to the source of those standards and
those maxims and that can only be found in religion.
Oddly, it seems in some ways, religion does not seem to be a
major theme of The Prince.
In a memorable passage from chapter 18, Machiavelli advises
the prince always to cultivate the appearance of religion.
The prince, he writes, should appear all mercy,
all faith, all honesty, all humanity and all religion,
he writes, adding nothing is more necessary to appear to have
this last quality. The point is clear.
The appearance of religion, by which he clearly means
Christianity, is good while the actual
practice of it is harmful. Think about the way in which
that transforms what Plato says about justice in his answer to
Glaucon in Book II of the Republic where…or
Thrasymachus…where they both say it is more important,
is it not more important to have the appearance of being
just than the reality of it? And here, you see Machiavelli
in a way adding his voice to that chorus.
It is much better to have the appearance than the reality of
religion. But in order to understand or
to discover the core of Machiavelli's teachings about
religion, I have to make a slight detour
away from The Prince and to his Discourses on Livy
and in maybe the most important chapter of that book,
Book II, chapter 2, called "Concerning the Kinds of
People the Romans had to Fight and how Obstinately they
Defended their Freedom," a long title for a chapter to
be sure, but here Machiavelli develops a powerful contrast
between two opposed and mutually incompatible moral codes,
the Christian and the pagan. "If one asks oneself,"
Machiavelli writes, "If one asks oneself how it
came about that people of old," in olden--in the ancient world,
"were more fond of liberty than we are today,
I think the answer," he says, "is due to the same cause that
makes men today less bold than they used to be,"
less bold, "and this is due I think to the difference between
our education and that of bygone days."
So what precisely is the difference that Machiavelli
refers to here between our education and the education of
bygone days that makes people or that made people in the ancient
world more fond of liberty, as he says, than those of our
contemporaries or Machiavelli's contemporaries?
Machiavelli's emphasis here on education, particularly moral
and religious education, is the key difference between
the ancient times and his own. These two different ages,
he believes, advanced two very different
systems of moral and religious education,
one based on pagan worldliness and the other based on Christian
innocence. And it is that conflict,
as it were, between what we might call worldliness and
innocence that is the core of Machiavelli's moral code.
Let me quote Machiavelli's passage from the
Discourses at some length because I think it's very
revealing: "Our religion," he writes, obviously thinking
of the Catholic Christianity of his time.
"Our religion," he writes, "has glorified humble and
contemplative men, monks, priests,
humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action.
It is assigned as man's highest good humility,
abnegation, and contempt for mundane things,"
whereas the other, that is to say the ancient
moral code, "whereas the other identified it with magnanimity,
bodily strength, and everything that conduces to
make men very bold. And if our religion," he says,
"demands that in you there be strength what it asks for is the
strength to suffer rather than to do bold things."
In other words, he says Christian strength,
the strength of the Christian, is the strength to suffer,
thinking of Jesus on the Cross rather than to,
as he puts it, do bold things.
And it is not for Machiavelli simply the existence of these
two different moralities that is at stake.
By softening morals, he believes,
by making us gentler, Christianity has had some
deeply perverse effects upon politics, so he claims.
This pattern of life, Machiavelli continues,
appears to have made the world weak and to have handed it over
to the prey of the wicked. This pattern of life,
this pattern of education, of moral education,
introduced by the Bible and scripture and Christianity,
has made the world weak. In other words,
by teaching humility, self-abnegation,
purity of heart, Christianity has made it
difficult to develop qualities necessary for the defense of
political liberty. Christianity has made the world
weak or, if you want to use his again highly charged word for
that, it has made the world effeminate. Machiavelli would no doubt be
taken up against some board of offense today for using such a
term but that's his language. What can I say?
This is why he concludes there are fewer republics today than
in the time of the ancients because we do not have the same
love of freedom that they did. Now Machiavelli's explicit
referencing of the ancient civil religions, the ancient civil
theology, is a direct tribute to the role
of Numa, N-u-m-a, in Livy's famous History of
the Roman Republic. Justin, who is an authority on
this text, can tell you more about it if you like,
but in the opening books of Livy, he tells the story of how
Rome was founded by Romulus, who had murdered his brother,
Remus, but after this it required a second founding and
the second founding was the work of a man named Numa,
who, Livy writes, determined that Rome,
which had originally been established through force of
arms, should be reestablished through
justice, laws and proper observances, in other words,
religion. In order to complete the
founding of the city, it was necessary to establish
its gods and ensure proper respect for the law.
Numa was the bringer of the Roman legal codes respecting
religion, proper observances and the like.
But Machiavelli uses Livy and in the story about Rome's second
founding to bring home an important lesson about the
utility of religion. "Religion," he tells the
reader, "is not to be evaluated by its truth content but for its
consequences for society." But the story of Numa or his
use of that story tell us more than just a lesson about the
social utility of religion. At the time of the founding of
Rome, Machiavelli writes, religion was necessary to
temper and control the warlike character of the Romans.
Religion had to bring a softening effect upon against
the violent and bestial character of the early Romans.
But for us today, Machiavelli writes,
religion has to serve the opposite purpose.
It must instill something of a fighting spirit into people who
have lost their instinct to resist encroachments on their
liberty. In many ways,
this is the deeper meaning of Machiavelli's slogan,
"one's own arms." He uses in a variety of
passages the formula that a good republic depends upon one's own
arms and laws and in a deeper sense this idea of "one's own
arms" means developing the capacities to resist
encroachments on your freedom. The prince, in other words,
has to use religion to encourage his subjects to rely
upon their own arms rather than on divine promises and that
again is the teaching of his retelling of the story of David
and Goliath, the biblical story of David and
Goliath, in chapter 13 of The Prince.
You remember how Machiavelli retells and also rewrites that
story. He writes the story saying that
David went armed, went into battle with Goliath
armed only, he says, with a sling and a
knife, and those of you who know the story and checked against
the biblical account of the story know that David only went
into battle against Goliath armed with Saul's armor and his
sling. Machiavelli gives him a knife.
Where did this come from? Why does he add this?
His subtle alteration of the biblical story is hugely
revealing. Its moral seems to be "trust in
God's promises, yes, but bring a knife just in
case." It's like the old joke about
the fighter who went in to the ring and before going in to the
ring and he asked the priest to pray for him.
He said, "I'll pray for him but if he can punch it'll help." In a small respect,
that's Machiavelli. Machiavelli sensed that his own
country was deeply deficient in these martial virtues,
necessary to reassert greatness and this was a theme of a
lengthy poem he wrote. Yes.
You're surprised. Yes, Machiavelli wrote poetry
and plays. His play, The
Mandragola, is still performed,
but he wrote an interesting poem,
a lengthy poem called Ambizione,
ambition, something like Platonic thumos,
which lamented his countrymen's lack of civic spirit and their
need to be reeducated in the art of war.
I only want to read a small section to you from that poem:
"If you perchance are tempted to accuse nature,
if Italy, so wary and wounded, does not produce hard and
bellicose people, this I say is not sufficient to
erase our cowardice for education can supplement where
nature is deficient. Stern education made Italy
bloom in ancient days and made her rise and conquer the entire
world and for herself make room. But now she lives,
if tears can be called life, beneath the ruins and unhappy
fate that she has reaped from her long lack of strife.
But now she lives, if tears can be called life,
beneath the ruins and unhappy fate that she has reaped from
her long lack of strife." And just from this little
section of the poem, you can see that the theme of a
new kind of education and only that can remedy nature's
defects, as Machiavelli calls them.
It is this lack of strife, this long lack of strife,
that makes people weak. People are weakened by
prolonged peace and they are made strong, fierce and
independent through war. Only by hardening themselves,
he says, will it be possible for Italy, as he puts it,
"to rise and conquer the entire world, in ancient days again and
made her rise and conquer the entire world and for herself
make room." His point seems to be this.
If you want liberty, you have to know how not to be
good, at least as Christianity has defined goodness.
The Christian virtue of humility, turning the other
cheek, forgiveness of sins, must be rejected if you want to
do good as opposed to just being good.
You have to learn, in other words,
how to get your hands dirty. Between the innocence of the
Christian and the worldliness of Machiavelli's new morality,
there can be no reconciliation. These are just two incompatible
moral positions that Machiavelli states but he goes further than
this. The safety and security enjoyed
by the innocents, our freedom to live blameless
lives and to have untroubled sleep,
depends upon the prince's clear-eyed and even ruthless use
of power. The true statesman,
the true prince for Machiavelli, must be prepared to
mix a love of the common good, a love of his own people,
with a streak of cruelty that is often regarded as essential
for a great ruler in general, another part of knowing how not
to be good, knowing when and how to use cruelty or what
Machiavelli tellingly calls "cruelty well used."
When it's well used, it's a virtue. This is simply another example
of how moral goodness grows out of and even requires a context
of moral evil. Machiavelli's advice to you is
clear. If you cannot accept the
responsibilities of political life, if you cannot afford to
get your hands dirty, if you cannot accept the harsh
necessities that may require cruelty, deceit and even murder,
then get out of the way, then this is not for you.
Don't seem to impose, don't seek to impose your own
high-minded innocence, sometimes called justice,
your own high-minded innocence on the requirements of
statecraft because it will only lead to ruin.
In the modern era, the presidency of Jimmy Carter,
for example, is usually taken as exhibit A
of the confusion between Christian humanitarianism and
the necessities of reason of state.
If you can't do the tough thing, if you can't do the harsh
thing, Machiavelli says, then stay out of politics and
don't attempt to impose your high-minded morality on the
state. As I said at the beginning,
in the philosophical literature, this has become
known as the problem of dirty hands so named after a famous
play written by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
The problem of dirty hands refers to the conflict of
duties, again conflict of moralities between the harsh
requirements of politics and the equally demanding desire for
moral purity, to keep the world at a distance.
Machiavelli doesn't deny that there is something deeply
admirable about the desire to remain morally pure,
morally decent, morally innocent,
but he just wants to say this is a very different morality
from the morality of politics. In Sartre's play,
the action takes place in a fictional eastern European
country during World War II, probably something like
Yugoslavia, where a communist resistance fighter reproaches an
idealistic young recruit to the resistance who is resisting or
is balking at the order to carry out a political assassination.
"Why did you join us?" the communist resistance
fighter asks. "Purity is an idea for the yogi
or the monk. Do you think anyone can govern
innocently?" "Do you think anyone can govern
innocently," the phrase taken of course from Saint-Just,
one of the leaders of the Jacobin Reign of Terror during
the French Revolution. What do you think politics is,
a game of moral purity? The same kind of conflict is
really very much at the core of the great political fiction of
John le Carre, the great novelist of the Cold
War and so on, and in his great,
one of his early political thrillers,
a book called The Spy who Came in from the Cold,
he depicts there a British agent who was working undercover
and who at the same time is carrying on a love affair with
an idealistic young English librarian who has joined the
communist party. In this case,
she, the communist, is the idealistic one.
She's joined the party because she believes it will aid the
cause of nuclear disarmament and will bring international peace
and when Lemas, the spy, reveals to her that he
is a spy, he tells her his view of what politics is,
the nature of politics. "There's only one law in the
game," Lemas says, "the expediency of temporary
alliances. Who do you think spies are,
priests, saints, martyrs?
They're squalid little men, fools, queers,
sadists, drunkards, people who play cowboys and
Indians to brighten their rotten lives.
Do you think they sit like monks weighing up right and
wrong?" So both of these cases,
the Sartre case, the John le Carre case,
in a way are interesting but they're also sort of cases of
what I think of as faux Machiavellianism,
kind of intellectuals engaging in tough talk to show that they
have really lost their innocence,
which is the sort of intellectual equivalent of
losing your virginity, showing you're not really
innocent about the world. Machiavelli of course likes to
play that game and it suggests that the world is divided
between the weak and the strong, between the realists who see
things the way they are and the idealists who require the
comfort of moral illusions. Yes, Machiavelli sometimes
seems to corroborate this point of view.
Does he not say that armed prophets always win,
the unarmed prophets lose? Did he not say that he wrote to
reveal the effectual truth of things and not just what people
have imagined the case to be? Yet it seems inconceivable that
Machiavelli wrote an entire book simply to prove the obvious,
that is to say that the strong will always crush the weak and
that politics is left to those who leave their scruples at the
door. The question is,
was Machiavelli really that kind of Machiavellian?
Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian? Let's see. What kind of government did
Machiavelli think best? As he indicates at the
beginning of The Prince, there are two kinds of regimes:
there are principalities and republics.
But each of these regimes, he says, is based on certain
contrasting dispositions or what he calls humors,
umori, humors.
"In every society," he writes, this is chapter 9 of The
Prince, "two diverse humors are found from which this arise,
that the people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by
the great and the great desire to command and oppress the
people." These are the two great
political psychological dispositions,
the popular desire not to be oppressed and the disposition of
what he calls the great to command and oppress.
Machiavelli uses these two psychological and even in some
ways quasi-medical terms, humors, to designate two
classes of people on which every society is based.
His theory of the humors in chapter 9 seems in some ways to
be reminiscent of Plato's account of the three classes of
the soul or the three parts of the soul with one vivid
exception. "Each class of the city," he
says, "is bound or determined by a humor but neither humor is
anchored in reason or rationality."
Every state is divided into two classes expressing these two
qualities, these two psychological qualities,
the grandi, the rich and powerful who wish
to dominate, and the popolo,
the common people who wish merely to be left alone,
who wish neither to rule nor be ruled.
Now, one might expect that the author of a book entitled The
Prince would favor the great,
would favor the grandi, those who desire to rule.
Are not these aristocratic goals of honor and glory
precisely what Machiavelli seems to be advocating?
Yet in many ways, Machiavelli proceeds to
deprecate the virtues of the nobility, perhaps to our
surprise. The ends of the people,
the ends, the purposes of the people, is more decent than that
of the great since the great want to oppress and the people
want not to be oppressed, he says.
His advice is that the prince should seek to build his power
base on the people rather than on the nobles.
Because of their ambition for power, the nobles will always be
a threat to the prince and, in an interesting reversal of
the Platonic and Aristotelian conception of politics,
it is the nobles here who are said to be the more fickle and
unpredictable and the people are more constant and reliable.
Remember in the Platonic and Aristotelian view of politics
the democracy, the rule of the people,
the demos, was always criticized for it
being fickle and unstable and subject to whim and passion and
so on. Here, Machiavelli tells us it
is the great who are subject to this kind of inconstancy and the
people are more reliable. The worst, he writes,
that a prince can expect from a hostile people is to be
abandoned by them but from the great,
when they are hostile, he must fear not only being
abandoned but also that they may move against him. The grandi are more
dangerous and fickle. So the main business of
government consists in knowing how to control the elites
because they are always a potential source of conflict and
ambition. The prince must know how to
chasten the ambition, to humble the pride,
as it were, of the great and powerful,
and this, we will see as early as Wednesday,
becomes a major theme in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes,
humbling or chastening the pride of the few.
The rule of the prince or sovereign requires the ability
to control the ambition and to do so through selective policies
of executions, of public accusations and
political trials. Remember the example that we
read at the end of class on Friday, I believe from chapter
7, the example of Cesare Borgia
and Remirro d'Orco and how his execution, his bloody execution,
left the people, Machiavelli says,
stupefied and satisfied? Here is a perfect example of
how to control the ambitions of the nobles and to win the people
to your side. So Machiavelli's prince,
while not exactly a democrat, recognizes the essential
decency of the people and the need to keep their faith.
And by decency he seems to mean their absence of ambition,
the absence of the desire to dominate and control.
But this kind of decency is not the same as goodness for there
is also a tendency on the part of the people to descend into
what Machiavelli calls idleness or license.
The desire not to oppress others may be decent but at the
same time the people have to be taught or educated how to defend
their liberty. Fifteen hundred years of
Christianity, he says, have left people weak,
have left the people weak without their capacities to
exercise political responsibility and the resources
to defend themselves from attack.
So just as princes must know how to control the ambitions of
the multitude, how to control the ambitions of
the nobles--excuse me--they, the princes,
must know how to strengthen the desires of the common people.
Some readers of The Prince, even some very
astute readers of The Prince,
have thought that Machiavelli's work is really,
or Machiavelli's prince, is really a kind of democrat in
disguise and that the prince is intended precisely to alert the
people to the dangers of a usurpatory prince.
This is for example what the great seventeenth-century
political philosopher Spinoza believed about Machiavelli.
In his book called, simply called,
The Political Treatise, Spinoza wrote:
"Machiavelli wished to show how careful a people should be
before entrusting its welfare to a single prince.
I am led," Spinoza continues, "to this opinion concerning
that most far-seeing man because it is known that he was
favorable to liberty." That's Spinoza on Machiavelli,
because "he was favorable to liberty" and that the book,
he says, is kind of a satire on princely rule.
Or, if you don't believe Spinoza, if you don't believe
his authority is sufficient, consider someone who you'll be
reading in a couple of weeks, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
from the Social Contract. "Machiavelli was an honorable
man and a good citizen," Rousseau says,
"an honorable man and a good citizen who,
being attached to the House of Medici, was forced,
during the oppression of his homeland,
to disguise his love of freedom."
So, The Prince was written in a way that disguised
the real teaching of the book, which is the love of freedom
and presumably the freedom of the people, something of the
type that Rousseau himself spoke about. Maybe these comments go too far.
Maybe they are exaggerations and I think to some degree they
are but it's revealing that both of these very serious readers of
Machiavelli took him to be an apostle of freedom.
Spinoza taking him, taking his book to be a warning
to the people about the dangers of princely rule,
Rousseau believing that he had deliberately disguised his love
of freedom because he had to appeal to the tyrannical nature
of the Medici family. In either case,
they regard him as surreptitiously taking the side
of the people against the nobles. In any case,
whatever one makes of those examples, Machiavelli seems to
be challenging important aspects of the classical conceptions
that we've been talking about up to this point.
In the classical republic, for the ancient republic of
Plato and Aristotle, these republics were ruled by
nobilities, gentlemen possessed of wealth
and leisure, who were therefore capable of forming sound
political judgment, who will dominate,
while in Machiavelli's state it is the people who are going to
be the dominant social and political power.
Machiavelli wants to redirect power to some degree away from
the nobles and toward the people.
One wants to know why, why does he want to do that?
In the first place, he judges the people to be more
reliable, as he tells us, than the great.
Once the people have been taught to value their liberty,
have learned to oppose encroachments on their freedom,
to be fierce and vigilant watchdogs rather than humble and
subservient underlings, they will serve as a reliable
basis for the greatness and power of a state.
With the people on his side, the prince is more likely to
achieve his goals of a robust civil life for his people and
eternal glory for himself. And, as Machiavelli likes to
say, the prince must know how to adapt to the times.
What is true for princes is no less true for advisers to
princes like Machiavelli himself.
One must know the times and character of a people.
In the ancient republic, it may have been necessary to
find and impose restraints on the passions of the demos but in
the modern world, he says, where republics have
become a thing of the past, the people need to be taught
how to value their liberty above all else.
The most excellent princes of the past were those like Moses,
he tells us, who brought tables of law and
prepared people for self-government.
It is fitting and proper that The Prince concludes,
the last chapter, chapter 26, concludes with a
patriotic call to his countrymen to emancipate themselves and
liberate Italy from foreign invaders. So what did Machiavelli achieve?
What were his actual accomplishments? Did he accomplish all he set
out to do, to rewrite or to write a new moral code for
political life, to found a new political
continent, as he speaks about, to found new modes and orders
along the lines of Columbus? Did he achieve this?
First of all, one should not and cannot
underestimate his unprecedented break with both classical and
biblical antiquity. More than anyone else before
him, and perhaps more than anyone else since,
he sought to liberate politics from ecclesiastical control.
The new prince, as we've seen,
must know how to use religion but needs to learn how not to be
used by religion, must not become a dupe of the
religious. He must know how to use
religious passions and sentiments but not be used by
them. Politics must become a purely
worldly affair. It should not be limited or
constrained by any transcendent standards or moral laws that do
not derive from politics itself, whether a law of God or some
kind of transcendent moral order or code. Machiavelli's warning,
we might say today, to the religious right,
or his critique of the religious right,
cannot make politics conform to transcendent moral law.
But not only did Machiavelli bring a new worldliness to
politics, he also introduced a new kind of populism,
you might say. Plato and Aristotle imagined
aristocratic republics that would invest power in an
aristocracy of education and virtue.
Machiavelli deliberately seeks to enlist the power of the
people against aristocracies of education and virtue.
He is a kind of proto-democrat almost who sought to re-create,
not through accident and chance,
but through planning and design a new kind of republic in the
modern world. The republic that Machiavelli
imagined, and it's interesting while he tells us he's only
going to the effectual truth of things and not the imagination
of it, nevertheless Machiavelli does
himself imagine a new kind of regime, a new kind of republic
in the modern world that would not be a city at peace but would
be a city at war. It would be armed and expansive.
Machiavelli's republic feeds on conflict, on war and conquest.
It is aggressive and imperialistic.
Does it sound familiar? Is it us?
In fact, if you look at a brilliant article I think in
this week's New Republic by Robert Kagan called "Cowboy
Nation," Kagan demonstrates I think with
a great deal of conviction that the American republic from its
onset has been expansive, aggressive, imperialistic,
from the conquest of the territories, the expropriation
of the native Americans, the acquisition of Louisiana,
wars of liberation against Mexico and Spain and so on,
well into the twentieth and now the twenty first century,
an aggressive, expansive,
imperialistic republic. That, he says,
has been our history and what it should say,
what it doesn't quite say I think,
is that it has been this history not because it is
American but because it is a republic,
because of its regime type, its regime character.
That kind of behavior seems perhaps to be built in to the
natures of republic. It was Machiavelli's admiration
for the politics, what someone once called the
lupine politics, the wolf-like politics,
of republican Rome that led him to understand that all social
and moral goods have been established by morally
questionable means. Have we become or have we
always been Machiavelli's republic, Machiavelli's desire?
Think about that when you're in your sections or writing your
papers and you will get those paper topics on Wednesday,
by the way. And finally,
Machiavelli is the author of a new amoral realism.
"By whatever means necessary" I think is his motto or should be
his motto, "by whatever means necessary,"
and oddly he claims to be merely stating out loud,
merely stating aloud what all writers have known all along. It is necessary,
he says, for the prince to know well how to use the beast and
the man, he writes. "This role," he says,
"was taught covertly by ancient writers.
It was taught covertly by ancient writers," he says in
chapter 18. The idea then that Machiavelli
is doing no more than saying openly and overtly what ancient
writers had wrapped in parable and enigma and myth says
something about Machiavelli's new political science.
What was previously taught only subtly and in private will now
be taught openly and in public. What was once available only to
a few, will now be available to all.
Perhaps more than anything else, Machiavelli's new
openness, his readiness to challenge received authority,
and his willingness to consider authority as self-created,
as self-made rather than bestowed by either nature or
grace, is what fundamentally
constitutes his modernity. So I'm going to leave it on
that note and on Wednesday we will begin the study of one of
Machiavelli's greatest and most profound disciples in the modern
world, a man by the name of Thomas
Hobbes.
