THE PERPETUAL REPUBLIC
WE TURN NOW to Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), the first modern thinker. He was the first modern because he had the amazing ambition to bring politics, and with politics all other human problems, under a greater degree of human control than had ever before been thought possible. He launched a movement of modern philosophers who, despite their disagreements with him and even their disavowals of his influence, followed him in the essential point he set forth. From now on, politics would be less chancy, less subject to shifts of fortune, and human life would be better. More than that, Machiavelli indicated that an irreversible course of progress would be set in motion so that politics would never again regress to corruption and partisan excess. This new state of affairs he called the “perpetual republic,” a remedy for political ills that he characteristically first denies and then affirms to be possible, leaving to the reader the job of seeing what he means. Machiavelli thought that men could have much greater power over events if they were “wised up,” a teaching process known later, in the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment. This grand project has not worked out as intended—which we know simply from observing the horrifying totalitarian regimes that disfigured the twentieth century. Somehow the fruits of science in these regimes were poison to liberty. But even before this grievous spectacle, the Enlightenment was subjected to two great criticisms which I shall discuss presently, from Rousseau and from Nietzsche.
But ever since Machiavelli, the central idea expressed in modern political philosophy—agree with it or not—has been the focus of debate. Politics not only in the West but everywhere on earth has been dominated by Machiavelli’s promise of “new modes and orders,” of modernity, issued first in the two books he wrote containing, he said, “everything he knows”—The Prince and the Discourses on Livy.
It is thus of the utmost importance to understand what modernity is, how the moderns opposed the ancients (and the Christians, who in the moderns’ view derived from the ancients), how modernity developed in stages, the history it experienced, and the crises it has suffered. Yet none of these matters are obvious in Machiavelli—as they are somewhat later in Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Machiavelli lived during and participated in the Renaissance, a rebirth of the influence of the ancients and a time that could easily be seen as reactionary rather than progressive. He spoke of the ancients and moderns, but he called the moderns weak and supposed they could become strong only by imitating the ancients in politics, not only in humane letters as other Renaissance thinkers believed. Although Machiavelli opposed the utopian views of the Socratic tradition, referring to them as imaginary republics and principalities, with later modern philosophers he agreed that politics was the focus of human life. The modern revolution in political philosophy against the tradition was based partly on agreement with the tradition.
To imitate the ancients, Machiavelli chose the Romans rather than the Greeks, and he analyzed their actual politics as opposed to their political philosophy. For this purpose he wrote his Discourses on Livy, a loose commentary on the Roman historian Titus Livy. As you read along in that book, you realize that Machiavelli is gradually replacing Livy’s analysis with his own; these are Machiavelli’s Romans, not the Romans as they were, or as they appeared to themselves. At the same time you begin to see that the ancients were not so strong after all, for they lost out to the Christians—the ancient Romans succumbed to the modern Romans. Yet it was Christianity that Machiavelli accused as the cause of weakness in his own time. In a day when all feared the power of the Church, he was easily its boldest critic, or better to say, attacker. The Church caused weakness, he believed, by teaching men to despise worldly glory and to seek salvation in humble contemplation instead of manly virtue. Still, there must be some reason why the Christian Church was so powerful, some reason why the effeminate moderns could conquer the strong ancients. One source of power, perhaps, was in Christian propaganda, the ability of Christians to take their message directly to peoples without having to conquer a country militarily as did the Muslims. Machiavelli wondered whether he might not adopt this method himself, and oppose Christian ends by Christian means. This was the germ of the Enlightenment, a conversion of peoples away from faith in God to faith in human control, led by philosophers (of the type we now call “intellectuals”) and oriented against priests.
How does Machiavelli propose to improve permanently the control we humans exercise through politics? Machiavelli examines the partisanship of politics that was so important to Plato and Aristotle. He appreciates that Christianity tried to put an end to such partisanship with belief in God, who is above parties and directs human justice to an end above itself; but he notes that partisanship continues and that Christians actually inflame it by claiming that God is on their side—not above them, but behind them. Early in the Discourses on Livy Machiavelli looks at parties in Rome and Florence very differently than did Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle. He pays no attention to the opinions expressed by partisans but instead turns to their underlying motives, or “humors,” as he calls them, using a medical or psychological term relating to the body, not the soul. Rather than follow partisan opinions to what they imply for the best regime, he undercuts them, reducing their pretensions to the actual effects that result from their talk. This is what Machiavelli meant in The Prince when he spoke of seeking the “effectual truth” rather than imagined magnifications of fact. The strategy of reducing human pretensions to motives underlying and undercutting them was imitated by later modern thinkers, and is often called “reductionism.”
The motives Machiavelli found were two opposed but not contrary humors: that of the few, or the princes, who desire to command or dominate; and that of the many, the people, who desire only not to be dominated. For Machiavelli, as opposed to Aristotle, there is no contest as to who should rule, but only a conflict between those who want to rule and those who do not want to be ruled. Neither side understands, or can be brought to understand, the other. Political men do not see why anyone could be satisfied with a life without glory, and nonpolitical types do not see the reason why they should bother. No justice can ever come about between two such humors, as the rulers always want too much and the ruled are never willing to concede enough. Obviously, then, rulers can rule only by concealing their rule from the ruled, only by a kind of fraud. Let’s not go into the dirty details of Machiavelli’s little tricks. It’s enough to say that he has a “remedy” (his word) for the problem of partisanship as he has redefined it, a remedy in which justice has been abandoned and the common good newly understood as not including those few who on occasion may need to be murdered so as to keep everyone on his toes, ready to obey. We may be intrigued and impressed by Machiavelli, but I am obliged to say it would be wrong to approve of him. The real remedy he provides is a cold bath for those—most all of us at one time or another—who are guilty of complacent moralism and find it easy to condemn others and hard to examine themselves. But doesn’t the Bible say some such thing?