True Scandal
[Niccolò Machiavelli]
HE IS STILL a scandal. Yet to read Machiavelli is also and always to take a very deep breath of fresh air, and that despite the almost 500 years that have elapsed since he wrote The Prince. How can these conflicting reactions coincide? The fresh and bracing air blows, no doubt, from our immediate sense that this man is telling the truth about realities normally sugared over with rhetoric. The scandal lies in the fact that Machiavelli himself is not scandalised by the bitter truth he tells.
The very idea behind The Prince overturns any official hierarchy of values, whether ancient or modern. Machiavelli decides to give us a manual not of how a prince, or political leader, should behave, but how he must behave if he wishes to hold on to power. Every action will be judged with reference to that one goal. Power thus becomes, at least for the prince, an absolute value. There is no talk of man’s soul. There is no question of power’s being sought in order to carry out some benevolent programme of reform. The good of the people is not an issue, or even a side issue. The prince must hold on to power … e basta.
Societies and military strategies, individual and collective psychologies are rapidly and efficiently analysed. A wide variety of possible circumstances are established and enquired into. Examples are given from classical literature and recent history. The aim is never to savour the achievements of a given culture, to assess the attractions or otherwise of this or that political system, the balance of weal and woe under this or that regime: what we need to know is how, in each specific situation, a prince can best consolidate his authority and security. The underlying assumption is that, whatever may have been written in the past, political leaders have always put power first and foremost, and indeed that any other form of behaviour would be folly.
The scandal of the book is not felt in its famous general statements: that the end justifies the means; that nothing is so self-defeating as generosity; that men must be pampered or crushed; that there is no surer way of keeping possession of a territory than by devastation. It is easy to imagine these formulations arising from the transgressive glee of the talented writer who simply enjoys turning the world upside down.
No, it is when Machiavelli gives concrete examples and then moves on rapidly without comment that we begin to gasp: the Venetians find that their mercenary leader Carmagnola is not really fighting hard any more, but they are afraid that if they dismiss him he will walk off with some of the territory he previously captured for them: ‘So for safety’s sake, they were forced to kill him.’1
Hiero of Syracuse, when given command of his country’s army, ‘realised that the mercenaries they had were useless … It seemed to him impossible either to keep them or to disband them, so he had them all cut to pieces.’2
Cesare Borgia, having tamed and unified the Romagna with the help of the cruel minister Remirro De Orco, decides to deflect the people’s hatred by putting the blame on the minister and then doing away with him: ‘one morning, Remirro’s body was found cut in two pieces on the piazza at Cesena with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside it. The brutality of this spectacle kept the people of the Romagna for a time appeased and stupefied.’3
Borgia then consolidates his position by ‘destroying all the families of the rulers he had despoiled’.4 ‘I cannot possibly censure him’, Machiavelli concludes, because ‘he could not have conducted himself other than the way he did.’5
This sense of coercion, of there being simply no alternative to brutal and murderous behaviour, is central to Machiavelli’s at once pessimistic yet strangely gung-ho vision. It involves the admission that there is a profound mismatch between the qualities that we actually appreciate in a person – generosity, loyalty, compassion, modesty – and the qualities that bring political success – calculation and ruthlessness. As Machiavelli sees it, this mismatch occurs because people in general are greedy, short-sighted and impressionable and must be treated accordingly if a leader is to survive. ‘I know everyone will agree’, he concedes, ‘that it would be most laudable if a prince possessed all the qualities deemed to be good among those I have enumerated, but, because of conditions in the world, princes cannot possess those qualities …’6
Since the modern English reader of Machiavelli has largely been brought up on a rationalist, utilitarian philosophy which ties itself in knots to demonstrate that, given the right kind of government, self-interest, collective interest and Christian values can all be reconciled, it is something of a relief to come across a writer who wastes no time with such utopian nonsense. Yet though Machiavelli never actually welcomes the world’s awfulness and certainly never rejoices in cruelty, our own upbringing prompts us to feel that he should at least have seemed to be a little shocked by it all.
Seeming is an important issue in The Prince. Given that moral qualities are no longer to be taken as guides for correct behaviour, what then is their importance? They become no more than attractions. It is attractive when a man is compassionate, generous and modest. It is attractive when a man keeps his word and shows loyalty to friends. We are in the realm of aesthetics, not moral imperatives. And what is attractive, of course, can be manipulated as a tool of persuasion. So even if a prince is actually better off without certain moral qualities, he should appear to have them, because people will be impressed. In particular, he should appear to be devout in his religious beliefs. ‘The common people are always impressed by appearances and results’7 Machiavelli tells us. But he leaves us in no doubt that if you have to choose between the two, what matters is the result.
One of the great pleasures of reading and rereading The Prince is the way it prompts us to assess contemporary politicians and the wars of our own time in the light of Machiavelli’s precepts and examples. To read The Prince in the 1980s was to have Thatcher and Reagan very much on one’s mind, to think about American interference in Nicaragua, about the British adventure in the Falklands, as Machiavelli might have thought of them. Returning to the book in 2006, the reader is struck by how many of his observations could be applied directly to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, or indeed to many other such enterprises. This for example would seem applicable to any post-invasion situation:
a prince is always compelled to injure those who have made him the new ruler, subjecting them to the troops and imposing the endless other hardships which his new conquest entails. As a result you are opposed by all those you have injured … and you cannot keep the friendship of those who have put you there. You cannot satisfy them in the way they had taken for granted, yet you cannot use strong medicine on them as you are in their debt. For always, no matter how powerful one’s armies, to enter a conquered territory one needs the good will of the inhabitants.8
Future readers, no doubt, will have other wars to think of as they turn the pages of The Prince. That fact alone is a sad confirmation of Machiavelli’s understanding of international politics. Yet after the obvious parallels have been made and we have marvelled at how applicable this Renaissance writer’s precepts still are, the further surprise is our growing awareness that, like it or not, the way we judge the wars of our times is indeed ‘Machiavellian’. Would we be so critical of Suez, of Vietnam, of Iraq, if those adventures had succeeded? Wouldn’t we rather begin to think of them as we think about Korea, or the Falklands? We do not, that is, judge the action in and for itself on a moral basis, but for the consequences it produces. Which is the same as saying that for us, as for Machiavelli, the end justifies the means.
‘The wish to acquire more’, The Prince laconically reminds us, ‘is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes.’9
If there is a difference between ourselves and Machiavelli in this regard, it is that he remembers to condemn the adventurers for their mistakes, while most of us prefer the comfort of a moral high ground, imagining that we would have condemned the adventure even had it been successful.
Are we then simply to accept Machiavelli lock, stock and barrel? In many ways he presents us with the same problem as the lesser known but even more disturbing Max Stirner who in The Ego and His Own (1845) extended the amoral Machiavellian power struggle into the life of every individual, rejecting the notion that there could be any moral limitation on anyone’s behaviour. For Stirner the only question a person must ask before doing what he wants or taking what he desires is: do I have the power to get away with this or not?
Certainly it would be foolish not to be warned by what Machiavelli has to tell us about politicians and politics in general. We must thank him for his clear-sightedness. Yet a charming ingenuity in The Prince allows us at least to imagine a response to what appears to be a closed and largely depressing system of thought. Why did Machiavelli publish the book?
Ostensibly written in the attempt to have Lorenzo de’ Medici give him a position in the Florentine government, The Prince is obviously self-defeating. Who would ever employ as his minister a man who has gone on record as presenting politics as a matter of pure power? If Machiavelli himself remarked that leaders gain from appearing to have a refined moral sense and strong religious belief, why did he not at least hint at these qualities in himself, or find some moral camouflage for his work, or put the book in Lorenzo’s hands for private consultation only?
The answer has to be that as he was writing Machiavelli allowed himself to be seduced by the desire to tell the truth come what may, a principle which thus, at least for him, in this text, takes on a higher value than the quest for power. And in exposing the amoral nature of politics he actually and rather ironically threatens the way the political game is played. If it has not been possible, for example, for our contemporary armed forces in the West simply to lay waste to the various countries they have recently invaded, that may, in some tiny measure, be due to the kind of awareness that Machiavelli stimulated with this book, not in princes, perhaps, but in their subjects.