Niccolò Machiavelli’s mirror-of-princes book, titled On Principalities but better known as the Prince,1 is also what is typically described as a “how-to” book, a genre that first came into its own in the sixteenth century and that still flourishes. All the arts, from architecture to cooking, clock-making, or medicine—often emphasizing information and formulas that are deemed secret—appeared in many, little books, usually cheap ones. The tone of these works is usually optimistic and engaging. Readers are encouraged to try the art that is being described, and they often find wild assurances of success. In the Prince, the titles of Machiavelli’s chapters take on the characteristics of a how-to book; they are inspiring, clear, and immediately comprehensible. The emphasis is on technique, not philosophical understanding. For example, how do you go about usurping power in your city or state? Addressing the new prince, Machiavelli includes a quite large segment of the elite, wealthier Italian males, some of whom are already princes by rank; but he also includes many other would-be princes. What strategies—they are described in a paradigmatic verbal, almost spatial scheme—are successful? Which ones fail? Often commonplace, the principles are supported by argument and by historical fact in the form of examples. As Machiavelli moves along, chapters become less grounded in technique and historical examples, and more grounded in moral-philosophical obiter dicta. The overarching theme is the pursuit of success, the rise to absolute power by any means necessary.
Machiavelli’s Prince and his Discourses will be our only sources for this outline of the Florentine’s thinking about tyranny. There are many reasons to read the two works separately,2 but there is a major reason to interpret them together: the remarkable presence or absence of our key term, “tyrant,” which is found in one of the texts but not in the other. Indeed, Peter Stacey has noted that “tyrant” does not appear in the Prince, but that it is frequently present in the Discourses.3 In other words, only the specific contexts establish and differentiate the new prince in the Prince from the prince in the Discourses. The new (would-be) prince seeks absolute power over a city or a population, by whatever means are necessary. That is, and I repeat, absolute power by absolute means; but the prince in the Discourses, that is, the prince who already wields absolute power, may have to use absolute means to keep it. The individualist, social, political, and cultural aspects, join with fortuna to determine success or failure.
In the would-be tyrant—the new prince in the Prince—is Machiavelli’s primary focus. If the new prince has a higher aim than exercising absolute power, and if he believes he has absolute power and fortuna , it is Machiavelli’s passionate hope that a new prince—tyrant—will come forth, somehow, somewhere, to unite Italy under his absolute power (which becomes authority by conquest). The new prince, by reason of his success, becomes the legitimate prince. He might then be able to join the great founders of new states and cities in Machiavelli’s non-globalized world view: Moses (with divine help), Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. Each led his citizen-subjects for the common good, and in that highly principled accounting, the prince is no longer a tyrant.
A remarkable clue that confirms these characterizations can be found in what Machiavelli says about Nabis,4 prince of Sparta, a tyrant discussed in the Discourses, and what he says about a new prince who figures in the Prince. We cannot know whether Machiavelli wrote this as a sort of clue to elucidating the specific meaning of the words “tyrant” and “new prince.” There are historians who argue that Machiavelli is not particularly precise in his use of concepts.5 My view is that he wrote what he meant. But what are the would-be tyrant’s actions?
First, the new prince must analyze the social and political-cultural conditions in the city (state) that he wishes to dominate. The implication is that the new prince should be a part of the entity that he seeks to rule. Thus there would be familiarity with the leading families and their past political-cultural action. Perhaps he is already part of a faction by reason of his own family’s traditions, as public actors.
Specific techniques are required to usurp power in a monarchy, an aristocracy, a republic (popular, democratic).6 If the population of a republic is in opposition to its government, it may, by election, choose a citizen and endow him with power, because there is public agreement that he is the wisest and the most just of all the citizens in the city (or country), not the strongest or bravest. As long as he governs for the common good, especially if he has created a new militia and commands it, and has made a new set of friends, he will be successful. If he starts to govern in his own interests, the population will oppose him and exile or murder him, as a tyrant.7 He may be wealthy, may have grandeur of soul and courage; but the despot-tyrant (in effect, a prince who is elected) cannot survive in the climate of discord, fear, and repression that might be unleashed if he governs for his own benefit.
In the Discourses, Machiavelli presents the forms of government far more completely and mechanistically than in the Prince; but when he discusses stability in political cultures, he has a way of associating specific political dynamics about each that are categorical or formulaic.
While hereditary monarchy is characteristically the most stable, and therefore is a good above all others, later on it becomes evident that Machiavelli considers the population ruled by a king to be living in servitude.8 While the power of the elected despot-tyrant may be effectively legitimate, it is probable that his children will not grow up to be upright citizens.
For a time, the government established as an aristocracy respects landed society, but it eventually descends into oligarchy, a government by a few nobles who are the wealthiest in the city-country and who govern in their own interest, or are perhaps governed by a single wealthy oligarch who is favored by fortuna. In short, a new person has become a prince.
We need not present the entire scheme of the forms of government to realize that in Machiavelli the new prince has a remarkable range of government, in which and through which he may usurp power. Governing in the interest of the whole is different from the way an oligarchical prince controls the creation of honors. These honors must conform to the customs, laws, and religion of the city-state. Machiavelli emphasizes the possible short duration of most governments in city-states. Ancient Rome and modern Venice are the exceptions: not only do they assimilate peoples, they expand by creating colonies, they create good laws and institutions, and their nobles have ceased being arrogant.9 The Tarquins were driven out and, by electing consuls, the Senate provided for the creation of a government with strong executive power. The Senate itself consisted of nobles and popular individuals who came together as a “mixed constitution,” the source of stability. Faced with popular opposition, Caesar would simply usurp power.10
In Athens, the popular government founded by Solon did not survive Pisistratus’s tyranny; indeed, it would end before Solon’s death. The Athenians regained the liberties they had lost thirty years earlier.
Two historical examples will be presented at this point, to strengthen the personal image of the new prince. The first example is Appius, who became popular because of his manners: he changed from being a “cruel persecutor of the people” to being someone who has assumed a “new nature and spirit.” Having favored changing the law, so that it would be more favorable to the people, Appius put himself forward in order to procure one of the new honors of recent creation.
Appius became so “urbane” that some people in the government became suspicious of him, “for they could not possibly believe that there could be such a spontaneous affability … with so much arrogance and pride.”11 It was not long before Appius dropped “… his assumed character and began to display his natural arrogance.”12 His popular supporters turned away from him. Indeed, they sensed that he was their enemy. His downfall occurred soon after that.
Machiavelli relies on his readers to sense deeply that it is the egalitarian dynamic in a popularly governed city that caught up Appius. Machiavelli had met Cesare Borgia (and counseled him?). According to Machiavelli, this new prince, a would-be tyrant, employed all the proper techniques for carving out a state that he could govern as a prince. Protected by his father, Pope Alexander VI, the prince combined seduction, diplomacy, and military repression. Support from a French army boded well for success. The petty lords of the Romagna, with their ties to the Orsini and the Colonna families, were toppled, defeated, or killed.
destroyed everyone who was of the same blood as the previous governing families;
acquired new friends among the Roman nobles;
obtained as much influence as he could in the College of Cardinals; and
raced to acquire as much power as possible before the demise of his father the pope.
Machiavelli adds that Borgia had almost carried out the first three objectives, mainly by murdering as many petty lords as he could. There is nothing ironic about the Borgia historical example. However, dramatic changes in manners can be acceptable for only so long. The would-be new prince-tyrant may have had trouble maintaining his new persona, as he gained power; but the people had not forgotten the old Appius. The austere public life-style of Cosimo de Medici comes to mind. As is quite frequently the case, the inferences that Machiavelli wants his readers to make are in the title of the chapter that follows: “It is imprudent and unprofitable suddenly to change from humility to pride and from gentleness to cruelty.”13
Even with fortuna ’s help, the new prince would have to call upon every possible technique in order to succeed at conquering and uniting all of Italy under his legitimate powers. In this mirror of princes that celebrates the political art as success, Machiavelli reverses himself and shows eagerness for a tutorial relationship with the new prince, the tyrant.
In the Prince, and also in the Discourses, there is an emphasis on social and moral-civic conditions of which the Borgia example is the most extreme in its detail; but in fact, this great example, from the Prince, of the misfortunes that befell a new prince prefigures the fate of conspirators that are described in the Discourses. The same intensity of thought and action appears in a person who conspires as a result of a personal offense, such as an attack on personal dignity, on one’s wife, or on property that inspires the noble aim of restoring a non-tyrannical government by killing the tyrant.14
There are madmen who conspire and murder, but Machiavelli is not really interested in them. To be successful, the plotter ought to be of high social rank and should join with others to change a government, either individually or collectively. The individual (the favorite) who has received many gifts from the person or the persons in power is dangerous, because the more he receives, the more he wants, and he will conspire. In somewhat corrupt republics, a conspiracy may entail less physical violence, owing to the very conditions that prompt intrigues and conspiracies. Republics are slow to be aroused. The analytical construct that is the new prince is not brought up formally in Machiavelli’s study of conspiracies, yet some historical examples conform to the new prince’s tendency to be conspiratorial.
And Machiavelli points out that simply emphasizing deceit and cunning may not suffice. Caesar, Agathocles, and Cleomenes had armies to strengthen their plotting.
As the historical exemplarity diminishes in the Prince, moral-philosophical issues come to the fore. The argument of necessity becomes the answer to almost all the choices which Machiavelli frames as being between good and bad. Machiavelli casuistically defends how bad actions can produce good results, and vice versa, and he asserts that being feared is better than being loved, or being miserly is better than being generous, even though they are not specifically linked to tyranny.
The association between fear and the presence of tyranny is often noted by Machiavelli,15 but he does not suggest an Orwellian public climate. Other strong emotions come into play in conspiracies.16 In the mind of the bad ruler, however, “they are in constant fear lest others conspire to inflict upon them the punishment which they are conscious of deserving.”17
Rare it is to find Machiavelli writing about something because someone whom he is reading writes about it. Unless, that is, he himself is interested. His creation and elaboration of the new prince, without referring to him as a tyrant, altered understandings about how his four forms of government evolve into tyranny. In the Prince, he strove to encourage and to instruct an intensely individualized form of political action.