I am Machevill . . . And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Christopher Marlowe1
In order to reconsider Machiavelli’s thought in the light of contemporary science, it is first necessary to understand what he meant to teach us. In the last chapter, I sought to establish that Machiavelli is a serious political thinker who had reason to write with what Rousseau called a “hidden intention.” Although many scholars in recent times have criticized the method of reading associated with deceptive or so-called “esoteric” writing, historical evidence indicates that after his imprisonment and torture, Machiavelli had good reasons to hide his opinions. I have argued that when Machiavelli himself points out how “ancient writers” taught princes “covertly,” he is suggesting The Prince should be studied as a book with a covert meaning. In fact, I have tried to show that any other approach to the text leads either to hopeless confusion or to the conclusion that Machiavelli is not a major thinker whose theories could claim to be true.
The evidence that Machiavelli wrote in a devious manner does not, however, itself demonstrate that he had a coherent or systematic theory of human nature and politics. Because Machiavelli so openly endorses republican regimes in the Discourses, if he is consistent, The Prince must also contain a republican political teaching despite its superficial endorsement of autocratic princely rule. To discover Machiavelli’s meaning, therefore, it will be necessary to show that a consistent philosophical teaching underlies the apparently diverse perspectives set forth in his works.
Because The Prince seems to be addressed to a particular individual under specific circumstances, is it appropriate to focus the restatement of Machiavelli’s general understanding of human nature and politics on this work? There are at least three main reasons for doing so: First, any interpretation of Machiavelli that is not based on The Prince could be challenged on the grounds, so often used by commentators, that he changed his mind from one work to another. If Machiavelli wrote in a devious or “covert” manner, hiding a consistent philosophical position in diverse messages, we should be able to understand his theory by focusing on a single text, rereading passages with more care than a supporter of the Medici might have done in 1513. Second, in the intellectual and political history of the West, The Prince has been Machiavelli’s most influential work. Since many commentators focus on the question of whether Machiavelli sought to restore ancient pagan traditions, reflected his times, or was the first “modern,” it seems reasonable to focus on the work that is most likely to have played a role in the emergence of modernity.2 Finally, because The Prince has become Machiavelli’s best-known work, most of those familiar with the Western intellectual tradition will have read the book; hence a careful reading of The Prince provides the most convenient way to reconsider Machiavelli’s theory in the light of contemporary knowledge of human behavior.
These arguments also imply that if Machiavelli did have a coherent theory, it is presented in different ways in his various writings. In effect, Machiavelli introduces each of the major works as giving a specific perspective on human affairs. If we are to understand The Prince and its relation to his thought as a whole, it will be necessary to bear in mind Machiavelli’s explicit description of the intended audience or point of view that is elaborated in some other writings:
The Discourses on Titus Livy is the most extensive presentation of Machiavelli’s teaching, directed to “those who know how to govern a kingdom” and who, “on account of their innumerable good qualities, deserve to be” princes or rulers.3 Because it is to explore all human political life, both ancient (pagan) and modern (Christian), the Discourses focus on the greatest regime known to have existed: republican Rome.
The Florentine Histories focus on the relationship between domestic and foreign policy in a single human community, a perspective that is “useful to the citizens who govern republics.” Because Machiavelli is himself a citizen of Florence, the Histories focus on his native city, but it is intended to be “understood in all times.”4
The Prince emphasizes the founder or legislator who, like Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, or Romulus, established “altogether new principalities” or regimes (Prince, ch. 6; pp. 21–25). Although each of these leaders was “a man rising newly” whose honor came from “the new laws and the new orders found by him,”5 The Prince also explores—and is dedicated to—the ruler who, like Cesare Borgia, seeks to achieve his ends through “fortune and the arms of others” rather than “virtue and his own arms” (Prince, ch. 7; pp. 25–33).
The Art of War presents in dialogue form the teaching of The Prince (chs. 12–14) and Discourses (Book II, esp. chs. 16–18) concerning the “good arms” required in any lasting state as “defenses” of “all the arts that are provided for in a state for the sake of the common good of man.”6 Since Machiavelli’s own experience in Florentine politics was centered on military and diplomatic matters—and since he saw to it that this work was published in his own lifetime—the tendency to ignore The Art of War may be a reflection of scholarly bias. Attention to this work is especially important if one is to understand Machiavelli’s novel analysis of the emerging political transformations due to artillery and other new military technology.7
As I will suggest at the end of this chapter, even the Mandragola, Machiavelli’s famous comedy, fits this pattern—presenting his teaching in a form that would lead the general “audience” or common people to “understand a new case born in this city” and to be “tricked” as Lucrezia is in the play.8
While my restatement of Machiavelli’s principles is based on The Prince, it will therefore take into consideration these other works.
From the outset of The Prince, we are told that human things look different depending on one’s point of view:
For just as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains and high places and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains, similarly, to know well the nature of peoples one needs to be prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people. (The Prince, Dedicatory Letter; p. 4)
The diversity of perspectives in Machiavelli’s works, which I have claimed is crucial to understanding his thought, therefore reflects a basic problem in human affairs—namely the tendency for one’s judgment to be influenced by one’s point of view or situation.
In comparing himself to “those who sketch landscapes,” Machiavelli may have had a specific artist in mind. In the first chapter, it was shown that Leonardo da Vinci was serving as military architect for Cesare Borgia when the Florentine Republic sent Machiavelli to Cesare’s court in 1502, and that after Leonardo’s return to Florence in 1503, Machiavelli sent Leonardo on several technical missions of great importance. In addition, Machiavelli played a role in negotiating the terms for Leonardo’s painting of a large fresco in the Palazzo della Signoria of Florence, the famous Battle of Anghiari.9
The possibility that Machiavelli as author of The Prince is comparing himself to the artist Leonardo da Vinci is suggested by a passage in the latter’s Treatise on Painting: “The painter is lord of all types of peoples and of all things. If he wants valleys, if he wants from high mountain tops to unfold a great plain extending down to the sea’s horizon, he is lord to do so; and likewise if from low plains he wishes to see high mountains.”10 While this parallel between the description of “those who sketch landscapes” by Leonardo and Machiavelli might be accidental, further evidence that Leonardo’s thought and writings influenced Machiavelli will be noted below. As a result, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the implications of Leonardo’s view of the landscape painter.
In the passage of the Treatise on Painting just cited, Leonardo goes on to add that the multiplicity of perspectives makes possible “a proportioned and harmonious view of the whole, that can be seen simultaneously, at one glance, just as things in nature.”11 By his ability to imagine a scene from more than one angle, moreover, Leonardo created an “aerial perspective” which transcends the distinction between mountain top and plains;12 among examples of this new technique are the background of the Mona Lisa (Fig. 3.1) and maps that “seem to have been drawn from the air, as if Leonardo had been able to construct and pilot aloft his flying machine.”13 It is likely that Machiavelli knew of this perspective from the maps portraying the site of the Florentines’ attempt to rechannel the Arno, since he seems to have used Leonardo’s map to critique the plan adopted by Colombino (cf. Figures 1.6, 1.11, and 3.2).14 Does Machiavelli’s comparison of his writing with the work of “those who sketch landscapes” imply the claim to understand human life from an olympian or god-like detachment?
As a former statesman reduced to private life due to “a great and continuous malignity of fortune,” Machiavelli has experienced both the perspective of power and that of the common “people.” Like Leonardo’s painter, who can present “a proportioned and harmonious view of the whole,” Machiavelli’s unusual capacity to see things from different points of view gives him a deeper knowledge of human nature than others, and especially than a hereditary ruler.15 Machiavelli can therefore claim he understands the nature of both common men and rulers—and thus has a more inclusive perspective than either taken alone.16
Figure 3.1. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (c. 1505–1513), oil on wood panel, 30 x 20 7/8 inches (77 x 53 cm). Courtesy of Musée du Louvre, Paris. Note the aerial perspective used for the background, creating the illusion that the figure of Mona Lisa is floating in the air.
Figure 3.2. Leonardo da Vinci, Bird’s Eye View of Part of Tuscany (c. 1502–1503), pen, ink, and watercolor, 10 7/8 x 15 7/8 inches (27.5 x 40.1 cm). Windsor Castle, Royal Library 12683. Courtesy of The Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
As if to underscore the importance of multiple perspectives for gaining general knowledge of political life, Machiavelli uses the grammatical device of direct address (“you”), sometimes shifting from singular to plural without apparent reason in a way that many commentators have found puzzling.17 Consider how Machiavelli presents one of his broadest descriptions of human nature:
For one can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours, offering you their blood, property, lives, and children, as I said above, when the need for them is far away; but when it is close to you, they revolt. (Prince, ch. 17; p. 66)
As a general rule, humans are unreliable or selfish. From the perspective of the prince or ruler, this disembodied perspective means that offers of support only last as long as “you do them good” and do not prevent “them” from rebelling in the time of need.
In this passage, “you” is the singular and familiar Tu.18 Since elsewhere Machiavelli often uses the impersonal point of view when speaking about the prince,19 such direct address, as if Machiavelli were talking personally to a ruler like Lorenzo de’ Medici or Cesare Borgia, connotes a perspective, not a subject matter. Thus the earlier passage to which Machiavelli refers in chapter seventeen (“as I said before”) seems to be in chapter nine, which makes the same substantive point with different pronouns:
For such a prince [a prince “about to ascend from a civil order to an absolute one” who governs “by means of magistrates”] cannot found himself on what he sees in quiet times, when citizens have need of the state, because then everyone runs, everyone promises, and each wants to die for him when death is at a distance; but in adverse times, when the state has need of citizens, then few of them are to be found. (p. 42)
This passage corresponds to the formula in chapter seventeen, but uses “him” rather than “you” to describe the situation of the Medici in Florence, in which princes seek to transform a republic (“civic order”) to absolute rule but rule with the aid of magistrates.20
The ability to see things from the perspective of either the common people or the prince thus permits Machiavelli to understand human nature in a more general way than either. This means, however, that any specific statement needs to be qualified by its context. Earlier in chapter nine, for example, Machiavelli seems to contradict the general rule about the fickle nature of the people which occurs later in that chapter and is restated in chapter seventeen.
He who comes to the principality with the aid of the great maintains himself with more difficulty than one who becomes prince with the aid of the people . . . And let no one resist my opinion on this with that trite proverb, that whoever founds on the people founds on mud. For that is true when a private citizen lays his foundation on them, and allows himself to think that the people will liberate him if he is oppressed by enemies or by the magistrates . . . But when a prince who founds on the people knows how to command and is a man full of heart, does not get frightened in adversity, does not fail to make other preparations, and with his spirit and his orders keeps the generality of people inspired, he will never find himself deceived by them and he will see he has laid his foundations well. (Prince, ch. 9; pp. 39, 41)
The “general” rule of human unreliability applies to private citizens, and to princes who seek to establish absolute rule or to rule with the aid of the aristocrats or nobles (the “great”); it does not apply to a prince who “knows how to command and is a man full of heart.” If such a ruler bases his power on the people, “he will never find himself deceived by them.”
On the surface, Machiavelli teaches that humans are generally unreliable and selfish—and so they are. But he also gives us examples of princes whose survival depended on extraordinary faithfulness and courage on the part of the people. In chapter nine, he cites “Nabis, prince of the Spartans” as one who “withstood a siege by all Greece and by one of Rome’s most victorious armies, and defended his fatherland and his state against them” (p. 41).21 Agathocles the Sicilian was able to “live for a long time secure in his fatherland, defend himself against external enemies, and never be conspired against by his citizens” (Prince, ch. 7; p. 37).22 Since both of these rulers are elsewhere described as “tyrants,” the point is not that human nature is inherently or usually good or virtuous in the traditional sense. Rather, Machiavelli seems to be emphasizing a diversity or malleability that depends on individuals and circumstances.
Because humans are generally selfish, it is a mistake to rely on goodness: “a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good” (Prince, ch. 15; p. 61). But human nature itself is variable in at least two important ways. Some individuals are good, brave, or faithful by “nature.” And in some situations, most or all people can be led to behave in ways that are good—though to do so requires a political art, the creation of “good laws and good arms” by effective political leaders. As Machiavelli puts it explicitly, “the nature of peoples is variable” (Prince, ch. 6; p. 24).
That individuals differ by “nature” as well as by “nurture” is implied by the twin requirements of the successful ruler who bases his power on the people because he “knows how to command and is a man full of heart” (cited above). While the knowledge may depend on instruction, it would seem that bravery or “spirit” is a personal characteristic of a different order. People “proceed variously: one with caution, the other with impetuosity; one with violence, the other with art; one with patience, the other with its contrary” (Prince, ch. 25; p. 99). Elsewhere, with regard to himself Machiavelli speaks of “the natural desire I have always had to labour . . . on that which I believe to be for the common benefit of all” (Discourses, I, Pref.; p. 97), and comments that “whoever has been faithful and good for forty-three years, as I have, ought not to be able to change his nature” (letter to Vettori, Appendix II). As observation confirms, it is often the case that a man “cannot deviate from what nature inclines him to” (Prince, ch. 25; p. 100).23
In an important chapter of the Discourses, Machiavelli explains the political importance of these differences, which we would describe as matters of “personality” or “temperament.”
For one sees that in what they do some men are impetuous, others look about them and are cautious; and that, since in both cases they go to extremes and are unable to go about things in the right way, in both cases they make mistakes. On the other hand, he is likely to make fewer mistakes and to prosper in his fortune when circumstances accord with his conduct, as I have said, and one always proceeds as the force of nature compels one. (Discourses, III, 9; p. 430)
Good fortune or success is often a matter of the accidental “conformity” between a person’s “behavior” and “the times”; indeed, this is one of the major advantages of leadership in “a republic” in which there are “diverse citizens with diverse dispositions” (ibid., pp. 430–431).24
In addition to individual differences among humans, social circumstances change. What Machiavelli calls the “variability of the good” arises because the “quality of the times” changes (ibid., pp. 99–100). Human nature is thus malleable to the degree that the natural selfishness and shortsightedness of most people can be overcome. Such successful manipulation of human nature is particular illustrated by “the highly virtuous actions performed in ancient kingdoms and republics, by their kings, their generals, their citizens, their legislators, and by others who have gone to the trouble of serving their country” (Discourses, I, Pref.; p. 98).25 But what Machiavelli calls “human conditions” do not permit rulers either to rely on the goodness of their subjects, or to be good themselves in every respect (Prince, ch. 15; p. 61). The result is that “great variability of things which have been seen and are seen every day, beyond human conjecture” which most people describe as “fortune” or chance (Prince, ch. 25; p. 98).
Human nature is thus characterized by selfishness and shortsightedness, by ambition and conflict, but also sometimes by knowledge and bravery, by virtue and devotion to the common good. The consequence is a world of change and unpredictability. In many matters, it is not possible to have fixed rules of conduct because of the diversity and complexity of situations. As a result, for example, a “prince can gain the people to himself in many modes, for which one cannot give certain rules because the modes vary according to circumstances” (Prince, ch. 9; pp. 40–41).
Because of the “variability of things” produced by the differences in human character and the frequent propensity to selfishness, it is difficult to predict the outcome of events. As a consequence,
many have held and hold the opinion that worldly things are so governed by fortune and by God, that men cannot correct them with their prudence, indeed that they have no remedy at all; and on account of this they might judge that one need not sweat much over things but let oneself be governed by chance. (Prince, ch. 25; p. 98)
While this unpredictability of history can be attributed to “fortune” or to “God,” in the famous chapter that follows this statement Machiavelli speaks only of “fortune”: provisionally, we might say that “God” is merely one of the popular names for “fortune” or “chance.”
Machiavelli’s comparison between fortune and a “river” is well known, but it needs careful reconsideration. Because human events so often seem unpredictable,
I liken her [fortune] to one of those violent rivers which, when they become enraged flood the plains, ruin the trees and the buildings, lift earth from this part, drop in another; each person flees before them, everyone yields to their impetus without being able to hinder them in any regard. (Prince, ch. 25; p. 98)
History is thus like the River Arno, which occasionally floods the city of Florence: most of the time tranquil; on rare but overpowering occasions, utterly destructive of human life and well-being.
Sometimes, however, the “river” of fortune can be controlled. Machiavelli goes on:
And although they [rivers] are like this, it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is not so wanton nor so damaging. It happens similarly with fortune, which shows her power where virtue has not been put in order to resist her and therefore turns her impetus where she knows that dams and dikes have not been made to contain her. (Prince, ch. 25; pp. 98–99)26
If the effects of floods can be controlled by understanding the nature of rivers, then the effects of historical unpredictability or fortune should likewise be limited by understanding human nature.
Although most commentators and readers have stopped their consideration of the analogy at this point, there are good reasons to analyze it more closely. The comparison between fortune and a river brings to mind the plan to channel the river Arno with “dikes and dams” to defeat Pisa that was executed by Florence under Machiavelli’s direction in 1503/4. Not only was this ill-fated attempt to control a river part of the “effectual reality” of Machiavelli’s experience as Second Secretary to the Florentine Republic, but it specifically concerns the extent to which human knowledge (in this case, Leonardo’s scientific knowledge as a military architect and expert in hydraulics) can control the historical events (a long and inconclusive war between Florence and Pisa which ultimately did not end until 1509).
A good summary of the events discussed in chapter one is contained in Heydenreich’s account of Leonardo’s career as a “military architect”:
In the spring of 1503 Leonardo was again in Florence, having given up his post with Cesare Borgia probably during the course of the winter. His native town took him forthwith into its service as military engineer. Florence was then engaged in a troublesome and protracted war with Pisa. . . . In 1503 the Florentine Republic opened a new campaign against Pisa, and here emerged the daring plan to divert the course of the Arno River in order to cut off the Pisans from access to the sea, since from this the besieged town was constantly able to obtain supplies. Historical sources and documents reveal that the forceful project was especially promoted by Machiavelli, the secretary of state for war in the Florentine governing council, and that it won the support of Piero Soderini, the chief official of the Republic of Florence.27
While some sources suggest that Leonardo originated or directed the plan, the evidence published by Fachard (reproduced in part in Appendix I) shows that work in the field was directed by an architect named Colombino. Although Leonardo visited the site in July 1503 to assess the feasibility of the plan, it was Machiavelli who was responsible for overseeing its execution.28 After the canal filled with water and collapsed in October 1504, Machiavelli sought unsuccessfully to persuade the Signoria to continue.29
Leonardo’s technical expertise on the diversion of the Arno was extensive because years before he had developed in detail another, essentially peaceful plan of a similar kind (see Figure 1.6):
Leonardo had an abiding interest in changing the course of the Arno—but not to cut Pisa off from the sea. He wanted to create a great waterway to open Florence to the sea and bring agricultural and economic benefits to all Tuscany. The Arno was nonnavigable from Florence to Pisa because of its tortuous bends and sudden variations in level. The idea of diverting a long section of it into a man-made canal dated back more than a century before Leonardo’s birth. From about 1490 on, Leonardo made it his own, and drew a number of maps, and studies.30
Whatever the extent of communication between Machiavelli and Leonardo during the unsuccessful military project of 1503/4, there can be no question that both men devoted extensive energy to conceptualizing human efforts to channel the Arno for political purposes.31
In November 1504, immediately after the abandonment of the scheme to divert the Arno, Leonardo was dispatched—again apparently by Machiavelli—on a mission to Piombino, where he spent six or seven weeks consulting on the military fortifications and port facilities; some of this work also required expertise in the control of water, as is evident from Leonardo’s notes taken at the time.32 Whatever the extent of the friendship between Machiavelli and Leonardo, therefore, the technology of redirecting rivers seems to be a practical interest they shared.
These facts in Machiavelli’s political career reinforce the need to look more closely at the comparison between fortune and a river—and the notion of controlling chance with “dikes and dams”—in chapter twenty-five of The Prince. Detailed analysis of this famous allegory is rendered all the more necessary because Machiavelli also uses it in a poem “On Fortune”:
As a rapid torrent, swollen to the utmost, destroys whatever its current anywhere reaches,
and adds to one place and lowers another, shifts its banks, shifts its bed and its bottom, and makes the earth tremble where it passes,
so Fortune in her furious onrush many times, now here now there, shifts and reshifts the world’s affairs.33
In another poem, which Allan Gilbert suggests may have been written around 1509, Machiavelli speaks of “all Italy” as “shattered by a strong sea of troubles.”34 Machiavelli clearly thought of human history and fortune as resembling the flow of water—often calm but occasionally erupting into overpowering violence and chaos.
Because chapter twenty-five of The Prince seeks to show that prudent leaders can control history, the ultimate failure of the diversion of the Arno might explain why Machiavelli does not mention either the project or Leonardo in The Prince.35 For that very reason, however, Leonardo’s theories of nature and technology—and particularly his analysis of the role of floods in human history—may have been profoundly important for Machiavelli. Like Plato’s allegory of the Cave, therefore, careful analysis of Machiavelli’s comparison between fortune and a river is needed to reveal its meaning.
If the chance events in history can be compared to the natural forces of a flood, can we decode the equivalence of the other terms? Most specifically, what is the human equivalent of the “dikes and dams” that can control flooding rivers? And, if this passage provides one of Machiavelli’s central statements of the relationship between human endeavor and inanimate nature, why does he end the same chapter of The Prince by comparing fortune with a woman, using a metaphor of rape that seemingly contradicts the analogy between fortune and a river?
Since the “violent river” obviously corresponds to the unforeseen events of human history, the moment at which it is “enraged” would correspond to warfare. Moments of either foreign invasion or civil unrest destroy the plans and tranquillity of individuals. Such eruptions “flood the plains”—that is, they inundate the community with soldiers. Wars “ruin the trees and the buildings”—that is, they destroy both the natural resources and the human constructions on which civilization rests. Invasions “lift earth from this part, drop in another”—that is, some individuals, groups, or states benefit and rise in status and power while others fall. And “each person flees before them, everyone yields to their impetus”—that is, both as individuals and as a community, humans cannot control the effects of violence and war.
In the analogy between fortune and a river, then, the “earth” seems to represent human beings, the “trees” the natural resources, and the “buildings” the arts, sciences, and civilizations made by humans. “Water” stands for events, which at flood tide exceed human control; hence, in the last chapter of The Prince, foreign invasions of Italy are described as “these floods from outside” (ch. 26; p. 105). But “virtue can be put in order to resist” fortune and “turn her impetus”: precisely because human nature is malleable, there are excellent or praiseworthy human possibilities that can limit the effects of war and violence. The essential question, then, is how should we interpret the “dikes and dams” that prudent men can use so that the river’s waters, “when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is not so wanton nor so damaging”?
The immediate sequel in the analogy provides the clue.
And if you consider Italy, which is the seat of these variations and that which has given them motion, you will see a country without dams and without any dike. If it had been diked by suitable virtue, like Germany, Spain, and France, either this flood would not have caused the great variations that it has, or it would not have come here. (Prince, ch. 25; p. 99)36
Italy has neither “dams” nor “dikes”; Germany, Spain, and France have “dikes”—but Machiavelli is silent here on whether they also have fully developed “dams.”
The difference between Italy on the one hand and Germany, Spain, and France on the other is thus a key to the provisions that can be made against fortune. Italy, which has repeatedly been invaded and devastated by foreign troops, symbolizes the vulnerability of human societies. Since Germany, Spain, and France have diverse political systems—the Germans are “free,” whereas the Spanish and French have monarchies—what they share cannot be a form of government. In chapter three of The Prince (p. 8), Machiavelli discusses the French king Louis XII’s short-lived conquest of Italy, indicating that he apparently had “the strongest of armies” but could not maintain control because he lost the “support of the inhabitants.” Apparently, the “dikes” in the famous analogy of a river are the military forces which permit rulers to conquer and societies to defend themselves from foreign invasion. If so, then the “dams” would be the means by which “the inhabitants” are “channeled”: if “dikes” are armies, “dams” seem to be laws.37
As is demonstrated by Machiavelli’s other works, the image of the “flood” to describe “fortune” is part of a broader theory of human history. In one of the most important general discussions of history in the Discourses, Machiavelli argues that there are recurrent cycles in which “records of times gone by are obliterated by diverse causes, of which some are due to men and some to heaven” (II, 5; p. 288). Whereas the human causes arise “when a new religious institution comes into being” and its “founders” seek to “wipe out” traces of older beliefs and institutions (ibid., pp. 288–289),
The causes due to heaven are those which wipe out a whole generation and reduce the inhabitants in certain parts of world to but a few. This is brought about by pestilence or by famine or by a flood and of these the most important is the last. (Ibid., pp. 289–290)
Like the biblical story of Noah and the flood, Machiavelli’s analogy between fortune and a river is a way of reflecting on what actually happened.
The pattern of these cycles is described in the Florentine Histories:
Usually provinces go most of the time, in the changes they make, from order to disorder and then pass again from disorder to order, for worldly things are not allowed by nature to stand still. As soon as they reach their ultimate perfection, having no further to rise, they must descend; and similarly, once they have descended and through their disorders arrived at the ultimate depth, since they cannot descend further, of necessity they must rise. Thus they are always descending from good to bad and rising from bad to good. (V, 1; p. 185)
Or, as Machiavelli put it in the Discourses, even the natural “floods, pestilences and famines” have a political function,
when the craftiness and malignity of man has gone as far as it can go, the world must needs be purged in one of these three ways, so that mankind, being reduced to comparatively few and humbled by adversity, may adopt a more appropriate form of life and grow better. (Discourses, II, 5; p. 290)
Knowledge of these changes makes it possible to form “composite bodies” like “states and religious institutions” that are “better constituted and have a longer life” (Discourses, III, 1; p. 385). The analogy between fortune and a river in The Prince stands for a deeper theory of history that Machiavelli elaborated more fully in the Discourses and the Florentine Histories.
Machiavelli’s view of the effects of natural catastrophe on history could well have been influenced by discussions with Leonardo, who wrote that floods are—in actual fact—the main agency of historical disaster and political change:
Amid all the causes of the destruction of human property, it seems to me that rivers hold the foremost place on account of their excessive and violent inundations . . . against the irreparable inundation caused by swollen and proud rivers no resource of human foresight can avail; for in a succession of raging and seething waves gnawing and tearing away high banks, growing turbid with the earth from ploughed fields, destroying the houses therein and uprooting the tall trees, it carries these as its prey down to the sea which is its lair, bearing along with it men, trees, animals, houses, and lands, sweeping away every dike and every kind of barrier, bearing along the light things, and devastating and destroying those of weight, creating big landslips out of small fissures, filling up with floods the low valleys, and rushing headlong with destructive and inexorable mass of waters. (Notebooks, ed. I. Richter, 26–27)
Leonardo’s view, first drafted in the 1490s, resembles Machiavelli’s image of fortune as a river and may also help to explain why, at the end of chapter twenty-five, Machiavelli provides an apparently contradictory analogy by saying that “fortune is a woman” (p. 101).
After Machiavelli’s description of the need to build “dikes and dams” to channel the river of fortune “when times are quiet,” it should strike the reader as puzzling that Machiavelli should use the image of a rape to symbolize the control of fortune.
I judge this indeed, that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down. (Prince, ch. 25; p. 101)
It should be obvious that, if fortune is like a river, it cannot be treated like a woman: beating and striking the flooding waters won’t keep the rising river within its banks. As Leonardo puts it in his Notebooks,
That a river which is to be turned from one place to another must be coaxed and not treated roughly or with violence; and to do this a sort of dam should be built into the river, and then lower down another one projecting farther and in like manner a third, fourth, and fifth so that the river may discharge itself into the channel allotted to it, or by this means it may be diverted from the place it has damaged as was done in Flanders according to what I was told by Niccolò di Forzore. (Notebooks, ed. I. Richter, 351–352)
The two metaphors for history—a river and a woman—seem flatly in contradiction.38
The paradox can be resolved if the image of raping “fortune” is considered as a description of the violent actions by the individual leader which are needed at the foundation of “new laws and new arms.”39 As Machiavelli emphasizes when discussing the great founders in chapter six of The Prince:
the nature of peoples is variable, and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion. And thus things must be ordered in such a mode that when they no longer believe, one can make them believe by force. Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus would not have been able to make their peoples observe their constitutions for long if they had been unarmed, as happened in our times to Brother Girolamo Savonarola. (p. 24)
Machiavelli might have added that the same thing had happened to him personally, when the proposed canal to divert the Arno was abandoned as soon as the Florentine Signoria could no longer be persuaded that the plan would ultimately work.40 Science or technology without political prudence is useless, and without the political will to use force on occasion, cautious attempts to rechannel events will ultimately fail.
For Machiavelli, what is often called the relationship between “man and nature” is ultimately political. Without control over human nature, all control over inanimate nature can be lost.41 The “state” (lo stato) is the arena of stability which humans, with art, can construct as a defense against the natural changeability of circumstances.42 In another of the best-known lines of The Prince (ch. 7, p. 48), Machiavelli asserts that “the principal foundations all states have, new ones as well as old or mixed, are good laws and good arms.” It is from the combination of control over foreign invasion and domestic unrest that stability arises. “Dikes” (good armies) protect a society against the flood of foreign invaders; “dams” (good laws) channel the passions of the society’s own citizens.
Most readers of The Prince have, of course, stressed the sentence of chapter twelve immediately following the statement that “good laws and good arms” are the “principal foundations” of all states:
And because there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws, I shall leave out the reasoning on laws and shall speak of arms. (p. 48)
The logic of this disingenuous phrase needs attention. There “cannot be good laws where there are not good arms”: military force is a necessary condition of civil peace. “All the armed prophets conquered and the unarmed ones were ruined” (Prince, ch. 6; p. 24). But this necessary condition is not necessary and sufficient: it is “armed prophets” who conquer, not all those—including King Louis XII of France—who merely have “the strongest of armies.”43
If good armies are necessary but not sufficient conditions of a stable state, what is the role of the laws, symbolized by the “dams” of the allegory of the river? Machiavelli’s phrase is tantalizing: “where there are good arms there must be good laws.” The Italian has the sense of “there ought to be” or “there should be”: one expects good laws to exist in a community with good armies—but this expectation may not always be fulfilled. Good laws are sufficient for good armies, but they are not necessary for them. In other words, communities with good laws all have good armies, but some good armies exist in societies without good laws. France and Spain have “dikes”—the “strongest of armies”—yet they do not have “dams.”
This interpretation of the phrase “where there are good arms there must be good laws” is confirmed at the outset of the book Machiavelli devotes to “good arms.” In the Preface to The Art of War, Machiavelli stresses the need for a citizen army in which the “civilian life and the military life” are “closely united,” as they were under the “ancient ways” of pagan political virtue. Hence, the principal reason why the ancient military virtues have not been recovered in the centuries following the corruption and fall of Rome is “that our way of living today, as a result of the Christian religion, does not impose the same necessity for defending ourselves as antiquity did.”44
Machiavelli elsewhere confirms the need to go beyond the purely military preconditions of political stability. In Florentine Histories, he emphasizes that consideration of military conflict and war without an understanding of domestic politics makes it impossible to understand human events. The histories of Florence written by d’Arezzo and Poggio explained “everything in detail” about the “wars waged by the Florentines with foreign princes and peoples,” but “as regards civil discords and internal enmities, and the effects arising from them, they were altogether silent about the one and so brief about the other as to be of no use to readers or pleasure to anyone” (Florentine Histories, Pref.; p. 6). This matters because:
if no other lesson is useful to the citizens who govern republics, it is that which shows the causes of the hatreds and divisions in the city, so that when they become wise through the dangers of others, they may be able to maintain themselves united. (Ibid.)
Domestic affairs (”civil discords and internal enmities”) are sources of violence and unpredictability—indeed, they can lead to foreign invasion, as in the discontents that led Italians to invite Louis XII to invade them the first time (Prince, ch. 3; p. 8).
The control over unforeseen events thus requires both good laws and good arms. Indeed, while Machiavelli does not discuss good laws in chapter twelve of The Prince (“I shall leave out the reasoning on laws and shall speak of arms”), he includes both when he directly addresses potential rulers in chapter eighteen:
Thus you must know that there are two kinds of combat: one with laws, the other with force. The first is proper to man, the second to beasts . . . a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting. (p. 69)45
The specifically human constraint on selfishness is the law. While law is not sufficient by itself, for the reason that “all unarmed prophets fail,” force also has only limited efficacy (though to be sure the limitations of brute force differ from those concerning laws).46
The “state,” then, is that domain of stability in the sea of chaos produced by the variations in human passion and natural events. The land, however, only remains dry insofar as human action has produced the “dikes and dams”—the armies and the laws—which constrain ambition and selfishness both within and outside the community. Human societies are what Machiavelli calls “compound” or unnatural bodies, created by human art or convention. But this creation cannot be the product of collective deliberation, since collective deliberation presupposes the existence of accepted rules. Hence, as Machiavelli puts it in the Discourses:
One should take it as a general rule that rarely, if ever, does it happen that a state, whether it be a republic or a kingdom, is either well-ordered at the outset or radically transformed vis-à-vis its old institutions unless this be done by one person. (Discourses, I, 9; p. 132)
Because it is possible to be “a prince in a republic” (e.g., Discourses, I, 10; p. 136), the same prudential rules are appropriate for “rulers of a republic or of a kingdom” (ibid., I, 12; p. 143; I, 16; p. 155; I, 25; p. 176, et passim). An individual with such “sole authority” (ibid., p. 134) or “founder” (ibid., I, 10; pp. 134–135) is, in The Prince, discussed in the context of “altogether new principalities, where there is a new prince” (ch. 6; p. 32).
The highest examples of leadership discussed in The Prince thus concern the individual leader whose actions form a community, providing a domain of respite against the chaos and uncertainty of the “human condition.” Since new principalities “are acquired either with the arms of others or with one’s own, either by fortune or by virtue” (ch. 1; p. 6), there are two principal situations in which it is possible for an individual to create an “entirely new” state:
And because the result of becoming prince from private individual presupposes either virtue [virtù] or fortune, it appears that one or the other of these two things relieves in part many difficulties; nonetheless, he who has relied less on fortune has maintained himself more. (Prince, ch. 6; p. 22)
Dependence on “fortune” or chance apparently means that a leader has benefited from the good luck that his natural inclination or choice of action has coincided with the external circumstances. What, then, does Machiavelli mean by virtù, that most difficult of terms in his lexicon?
For ancient Greek philosophers in the Socratic tradition, one form of virtue (arete) was human excellence in a moral and political sense. Many modern translators, accustomed to the Christian understanding of “virtue,” have difficulty applying the same connotations to Machiavelli’s use of the word: hence some render his use of virtù by “ingenuity” or “cleverness” as well as “virtue.” While I will return to this issue below, it should be evident that Machiavelli views human virtue as associated with the ability to control fortune. For example, if fortune “had been diked by suitable virtue,” war would not have had as serious effect in Italy—or, indeed, might not have occurred there at all (Prince, ch. 25; p. 99). The two principal types of “new princes” are those who rise to power through “virtue and their own arms” (Prince, ch. 6) or through “fortune and the arms of others” (Prince, ch. 7). Virtue, then, concerns the ability of human prudence, will, and action to control the effects of human nature and history.
Machiavelli writes as if “virtue” and “fortune” were two distinct attributes, parallel to having “one’s own arms” or “the arms of others.” But Machiavelli’s virtù is not a trait an individual can possess, like courage, intelligence, or moderation. Because virtue represents the control over fortune, not only is the definition of the former merely the absence of the latter, but the circumstance supposedly defining the means of gaining power is only known by the historical results: “in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court to appeal to, one looks to the end” (Prince, ch. 18; p. 71). The temptation to read “end” (fine) here as goal or intention should be resisted in the light of the next sentence: “So let a prince win and maintain his state: the means will always be judged honorable, and will be praised by everyone” (ibid.). “It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good, as it was in the case of Romulus [who killed his brother], it always justifies the action” (Discourses, I, 9; p. 132). Not only do the “ends justify the means”; the end or results virtually define the means.
To understand this point, it is well to follow Rousseau’s advice and consider more precisely the possibility that Machiavelli’s “choice of his execrable hero”—Cesare Borgia—“is in itself enough to make manifest his hidden intention.”47 In chapter seven of The Prince (pp. 25ff), Machiavelli discusses “New Principalities That Are Acquired by Others’ Arms and Fortune.” He uses as his principal example “Cesare Borgia, called Duke Valentino by the vulgar,” adding “I do not know what better teaching I could give to a new prince than the example of his actions” (Prince, ch. 7; pp. 26–27).
Chapter six makes clear that the highest and most praiseworthy princes gain power through virtue and their own arms, as did Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus. As a result, Cesare would seem to be the highest exemplar of the wrong kind of prince. From the structure of the argument, therefore, one might presume that his “example” will indicate something to avoid, not something to be imitated. At first, however, this seems not to be the case:
Cesare Borgia, called Duke Valentino by the vulgar, acquired his state through the fortune of his father [Pope Alexander VI] and lost it through the same, notwithstanding the fact that he made use of every deed and did all those things that should be done by a prudent and virtuous man to put his roots in the states that the arms and fortune of others had given him. (Ibid., pp. 26–27)
After cataloguing Cesare’s deeds, Machiavelli adds that “the duke had laid very good foundations for his power” (ibid., p. 29) and “he would soon have succeeded, if Alexander had lived” (ibid., p. 30).
As we first read chapter seven, it appears that Cesare failed because of events he could not have foreseen or prevented.
But if at the death of Alexander the duke had been healthy, everything would have been easy for him. And he told me, on the day that Julius II was created, that he had thought about what might happen when his father was dying, and had found a remedy for everything, except that he never thought that at his death he himself would also be on the point of dying. (Ibid., p. 32)
Bad luck—fortune, in Machiavelli’s terms—cannot always be controlled. Cesare’s failure “was not his fault” (ibid., p. 27), or so it would seem.
In the next and last paragraph of the chapter, Machiavelli seemingly reinforces the view that Cesare could not have done otherwise and is thus a model to follow:
Thus, if I summed up all the actions of the duke, I would not know how to reproach him; on the contrary, it seems to me he should be put forward, as I have done, to be imitated by all those who have risen to empire through fortune and by the arms of others. (Ibid.)
The astute reader needs to remember, here, that Cesare is called “the duke” (the term of address used “by the vulgar”—ibid., p. 27); that he rose “to empire” (that is to power not based on popular support or republican ideals); and above all that he is an example of coming to power “through fortune and by the arms of others” (modes that contrast, unfavorably, with those of the founders described in chapter six).
Only with these things in mind is one prepared for the end of the chapter, for having just said “I would not know how to reproach” Cesare, Machiavelli concludes:
One could only indict him in the creation of Julius as pontiff, in which he made a bad choice; for, as was said, though he could not make a pope to suit himself, he could have kept anyone from being pope. (Ibid., p. 33)
And, after explaining in detail why Cesare should have blocked the election of Julius II,48 Machiavelli concludes:
So the duke erred in this choice and it was the cause of his ultimate ruin.
The assertion is flat and uncompromising: Cesare made a mistake in “this choice,” and that mistake—not fortune beyond human control—“was the cause of his ultimate ruin.”49 After all, Machiavelli does “know” something about the reasons for Cesare’s failure.50
One is thus encouraged to go back to the earlier statement that led the reader to believe that Cesare had no way of avoiding the election of Julius II. Machiavelli tells us that “he told me”—the evidence is first hand51—that he “had found a remedy for everything” that might happen when his father was dying, “except that he never thought that at his death he himself would also be on the point of dying.” In other words, Cesare was either relying on his own last-minute intervention during the conclave to elect a successor to Alexander VI or had concluded that Giuliano delle Rovere, the future Julius II, need not be blocked. Either way, Cesare is twice described by Machiavelli has having made a “choice” and, by not preventing the election of an Italian “whom he had offended,” Cesare caused his own defeat.52
This interpretation is confirmed by Machiavelli’s diplomatic dispatches at the time of these events. If the comparison of fortune and a river in chapter twenty-five of The Prince is illuminated by Machiavelli’s experience of attempting to divert the Arno in 1504, the analysis of Cesare in chapter seven is also a reflection of events Machiavelli witnessed first hand. For example, on 23 October 1503 (before the election of Julius II), Machiavelli wrote his superiors in Florence that “the government of this Lord [Cesare] since I have been here has rested only on his good fortune.”53 On 30 October, just before the conclave to elect a new pope, “the belief that it must be San Piero in Vincola [the future Julius II] has so much increased that there are those who give odds of sixty to a hundred on him.”54 Finally, on 4 November 1503, after the election of Julius II, Machiavelli reports the judgment of some “prudent” observers that:
this Pontiff, having for his election had need of the Duke, to whom he made big promises, can do nothing else than keep him expectant in this way; yet they fear, if the Duke does not adopt some other plan than remaining in Rome, that he will be deceived, because they know the natural hatred which His Holiness has always had for him; the Pope cannot so soon have forgotten the exile in which he spent ten years. Yet the Duke lets himself be carried away by that rash confidence of his.55
In fact, Cesare did stay in Rome—and Julius did trick him, effectively putting him under arrest and taking control of his cities and troops. Cesare’s failure was his own fault.56
To appreciate fully the importance of this evidence, we need to consider several additional points:
The “fortune” that brought Cesare to power was the ambition of his father, Pope Alexander VI. Later Machiavelli describes Cesare as merely the “instrument” of his father; indeed, it was Alexander who “did all the things I discussed above in the actions of the duke” (Prince, ch. 11; p. 46).
In this circumstance, the question of who controlled the papacy should have been the primary concern for Cesare; as Machiavelli puts it, “the duke, before everything else” should have secured a Spanish or French pope. If the goal was the creation of a large central Italian state based on the papacy, rivalry with other Italians and considerations of the balance of power should have made this choice perfectly obvious.
Even if ill, Cesare could have vetoed Julius II had this been a clearly determined policy: “though he was half-alive, he remained secure . . . if he could not make pope whomever he wanted, at least it would not be someone he did not want” (Prince, ch. 7; p. 32). Having always been dependent on his father—the “fortune” that brought him to power—Cesare did not know enough to have made the correct choice.
Cesare Borgia was in the same situation as Lorenzo de’ Medici: The Prince is dedicated to a close relative of the pope (nephew rather than son, to be sure), and it was the pope (Leo X, Giovanni de’ Medici) who had designs to use Lorenzo (and before him, Giuliano de’ Medici) to establish a large central Italian state. Machiavelli underscores this parallel by explicitly connecting Leo X to the tradition of Alexander VI (Prince, ch. 11; pp. 46–47).
Insofar as there is an irony in the dedication to Lorenzo (as has been argued above), the apparent praise of Cesare takes on a new tone. If we read The Prince as “a book of republicans” (to use Rousseau’s phrase), the Medici leaders in Florence are “new princes” like Cesare Borgia, not founders in the true sense who can claim to establish a lasting regime.57 And if this is possible, Machiavelli could be highly ironic when he says “I do not know what better teaching I could give to a new prince than the example of his actions” (ch. 7, p. 27). Cesare is indeed an outstanding example of something the new prince should avoid.
This interpretation of the text is confirmed by another historical detail that seems to have escaped most modern commentators. Machiavelli quotes Cesare as saying that “he never thought that at his [father’s] death he himself would also be on the point of dying” (Prince, ch. 7; p. 32). It was reasonable that Cesare did not expect to be “dying” when his father died in August 1503, since he was only twenty-six at the time. But Cesare actually did not die until 1507. Cesare seems to have exaggerated the cause of his own failure—as ambitious men often do—when he told Machiavelli he was so sick that he was “on the point of dying.”58
Cesare’s singular “bad luck”—the cause of Alexander’s death—was widely rumored in Rome in 1503: after describing the poison used by the Borgias to kill many rivals (”a white powder of an agreeable taste . . . which did not work on the spot, but slowly and gradually”), Burckhardt adds that “at the end of their career father and son poisoned themselves with the same powder by accidentally tasting a sweetmeat intended for a wealthy cardinal.”59 Whether true or not, such a rumor would have been known not only to Machiavelli, but to the Medici and other informed contemporaries. In this light, Cesare’s remark that “he never thought that at his [Alexander’s] death he himself would also be on the point of dying” takes on particular irony.
Why then the praise of Cesare’s “virtue”? The “example” of Cesare Borgia in chapter seven is complex. The specific deeds of Duke Valentino, which had generated his reputation as a totally unscrupulous and violent man, are not at issue for Machiavelli. The “spirit” and boldness to use force as a means to create a new regime are identical to the actions of the praiseworthy founders described in chapter six; without such actions, it is impossible to conquer fortune. While in this sense Borgia’s actions illustrate political virtue, it is the absence of the correlative goal of establishing “good laws” which seems to be associated with the defect of Borgia’s procedure. Borgia illustrates the problem of treating fortune as a woman without also building “dikes and dams” against the flood.
To be an “entirely new prince,” Cesare Borgia would have had to come to power with his “own arms” and with “virtue.” Why does Machiavelli characterize Cesare, who might be considered a leader seeking to create his own armies, among those who relied on “the arms of others”? Like Romulus, who killed his own brother in order to found Rome, did Cesare need to plan his father’s murder in order to ensure that the papacy was entirely under his control? Only in this case could Cesare have controlled the timing of Pope Alexander’s death and avoided the unexpected coincidence of his father’s death and his own illness, of which Machiavelli says Cesare complained.60
According to this interpretation, the defect of Borgia might be attributed to a lack of understanding of politics and his failure to establish an “entirely new principality.” These faults reflect, in turn, Cesare’s dependence on his father and his failure to combine “good laws” (the form of “combat” that is “proper to man”) with the use of force (which is natural to “beasts”). As Burckhardt describes the events in 1503, “Cesare isolated his father, murdering brother, brother-in-law, and other relations and courtiers whenever their favour with the Pope or their position in any other respect became inconvenient to him”; as a result, Alexander VI is said to have “lived in hourly dread of Cesare.”61 Moreover, a contemporary reported that Alexander VI told the Venetian ambassador that he planned to have Cesare succeed him as pope: “I will see to it,” Alexander is reputed to have said, “that one day the Papacy shall belong either to him or to you [the Venetian ambassador].” Is Machiavelli’s praise of Cesare due to Duke Valentino’s secret goal of killing his father and becoming pope himself, with the aim of secularizing the states controlled by the Church and annihilating the papacy? If so, Machiavelli’s subtle criticism of Cesare might concern the way the plan was bungled.62
The true founders, deserving of the highest praise, combine both force and law. Moses, Romulus, Cyrus, and Theseus were all willing to kill or deceive if need be, but the result was a lasting regime. Only such leaders are “great men” who provide the “greatest examples” (Prince, ch. 6; p. 22). Such founders, like “armed prophets,” not only “remain powerful, secure, honored, and prosperous,” but they are “held in veneration” (ibid., pp. 24–25). The discussion of Cesare Borgia in chapter seven can only be understood in the context of the praise of Moses, Romulus, Cyrus, and Theseus in the preceding chapter—and Cesare’s failure to succeed in creating a new order equivalent to the Mosaic Law or the Roman republic.
There is a crucial difference between those who combine force and law (and hence whose success can be attributed to “virtue”) and those who, like Cesare, use only force (and, when they fail, blame “fortune”). To underline this contrast, Machiavelli’s next chapter is “Of Those Who Have Attained a Principality Through Crimes” (Prince, ch. 8; pp. 34–38). Here, he focuses on the career of Agathocles the Sicilian, who “became king of Syracuse not only from private fortune but from a mean and abject one” by means of “a life of crime at every rank of his career” (p. 34).
After cataloguing the crimes of Agathocles, which included having “all the senators and the richest of the people killed by his soldiers,” Machiavelli notes that he “held the principate of that city without any civil controversy” (pp. 34–35). Since Moses, Romulus, Cyrus, and Theseus were classified as having come to power by “virtue,” whereas Cesare is described as depending on “fortune,” we might wonder whether Agathocles will be classified along with those described in chapter six or in chapter seven. Instead, Machiavelli claims that “one cannot attribute to fortune or to virtue what he [Agathocles] achieved without either” (p. 35).
The apparent puzzlement arises because different criteria are involved in using the terms “fortune” and “virtue.” On the one hand, “whoever might consider the actions and virtue of this man will see nothing or little that can be attributed to fortune”: Agathocles was not like Cesare Borgia because, “after infinite betrayals and cruelties” he still “could live for a long time secure in his fatherland, defend himself against external enemies, and never be conspired against by his citizens” (p. 37). But Agathocles cannot be classified along with Moses, Romulus, Cyrus, and Theseus either: “one cannot call it virtue to kill one’s citizens, betray one’s friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; these modes can enable one to acquire empire, but not glory” (p. 35).
If Machiavelli were as “Machiavellian” as is often proclaimed, why should this be? Later, we are told that Agathocles was successful because his cruelties were “well used”; such praiseworthy acts of violence are “done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself, and then are not persisted in” (pp. 37–38). One is reminded of the description of Moses when, coming down Mount Sinai with the Tables of the Law for the first time, he confronted the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf. Hence, as Machiavelli says, “if one considers the virtue of Agathocles . . . and the greatness of his spirit . . . one does not see why he has to be judged inferior to any most excellent captain” (p. 35).63
The key seems to be how we describe the actions of a leader after the fact and in light of the consequences: “one cannot call it virtue to kill one’s citizens, betray one’s friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion.” These deeds may be—and typically are—necessary at the founding of “new modes and orders.” But such deeds themselves cannot be called virtue. Indeed, when Machiavelli refers to them in discussing “the greatest examples” (like Moses), he uses indirect language: “And thus things must be ordered in such a mode that when they no longer believe one can make them believe by force” (Prince, ch. 6; p. 24).
Agathocles’ cruelty is called both “well committed” (because it was done effectively) and “savage” (because it was not done toward the end of producing good and lasting laws). As a “most excellent captain,” Agathocles—like Hiero of Syracuse (Prince, ch. 6; p. 25) or Francesco Sforza of Milan (ch. 7; pp. 26–27) and unlike Cesare or Liveretto da Fermo (ch. 8; pp. 35–36)—was successful, finding “some remedy for their state with God and with men” (p. 38). But his deeds “do not allow him to be celebrated among the most excellent men”—like Moses, Romulus, Cyrus, or Theseus—because, unlike them and like Cesare or Liveretto, he did not found a lasting regime.64
That this is the essential criterion for judging founders is made explicit in the Discourses:
the security of a republic or of a kingdom, therefore, does not depend upon its ruler governing it prudently during his lifetime, but upon his so ordering it that, after his death, it may maintain itself in being. (Discourses, I, 11; p. 142)
Indeed, the explicit criticism of Christianity lies in just such a failure:
If such a religious spirit [as that of the pagan Romans] had been kept up by the ruler of the Christian commonwealth as was ordained for us by its founder, Christian states and republics would have been much more united and much more happy than they are. (Discourses, I, 12; p. 144)65
The outcomes or results of a leader’s actions—not his goals or aims—are the only reasonable criterion for judging him.
The comparison between the leaders or princes described in chapters six through eight of The Prince will confound the reader who seeks to use language in a conventional manner. Machiavelli describes as “virtue” the “means” used by Moses or Romulus because the consequences of their actions were “excellent,” not because the acts themselves were praiseworthy. The ends—i.e., the results, rather than the intentions—define the means even more than they justify them: after the success of Moses, we tend to forget the scene described in Exodus 32.66 How many Americans are aware of the nature of the first printed reference to George Washington?67
The standards of praise and blame in human affairs are thus relative, not absolute and fixed:
in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court to appeal to, one looks to the end. So let a prince win and maintain his state: the means will always be judged honorable, and will be praised by everyone. (Prince, ch. 18; p. 71)
Success retroactively determines how we think of historical events—and presumably the same thing occurs in private life.68 Standards of “praise and blame”—in other words, standards of morality—are relative in time and place.
This general understanding of praise and blame should be kept in mind when reading “Of Those Things for Which Men and Especially Princes Are Praised and Blamed” in chapter fifteen. After emphasizing for the second time in this famous chapter that he is “leaving out what is imagined about a prince and discussing what is true” (p. 61), Machiavelli goes on:
I say that all men, whenever one speaks of them, and especially princes, since they are placed higher, are noted for some of the qualities that bring them either blame or praise. And this is why someone is considered liberal, someone mean (using a Tuscan term because avaro [greedy] in our language is still one who desires to have something by violence, misero [mean] we call one who refrains too much from using what is his); someone is considered a giver, someone rapacious; someone cruel, someone merciful; the one a breaker of faith, the other faithful; the one effeminate and pusillanimous, the other fierce and spirited; the one humane, the other proud; the one lascivious, the other chaste; the one honest, the other clever; the one hard, the other agreeable; the one grave, the other light; the other religious, the other unbelieving, and the like. And I know that everyone will confess that it would be a very laudable thing to find in a prince all of the above-mentioned qualities that are held good. (pp. 61–62)
Why does Machiavelli give us such a long list of “qualities”? And which ones of them “are held good”?69
The terms usually reserved for praise sometimes come first (“liberal,” “giver,” “humane,” “honest,” “grave,” “religious”), sometimes second (“merciful,” “faithful,” “chaste,” “agreeable”), and—in at least one pair (“effeminate and pusillanimous” versus “fierce and spirited”)—it might be wondered which ones “are held good” by most people or by “the vulgar.” That this long list is meant to emphasize the mutability of standards of praise and blame is underscored by the first pair, contrasting “liberal” with “mean”: Machiavelli tells us he is “using a Tuscan term because avaro [greedy] in our language is still one who desires to have something by violence, misero [mean] we call one who refrains too much from using what is his.” For Christians, “charity” is one of the cardinal virtues; it is “better to give than to receive.” But what is the opposite of “liberality” or being a “giver”? Either one can be “mean” or miserly, or one can be “rapacious” or “greedy”: in the first case, not giving because one keeps what one has; in the second taking from others “by violence” rather than giving to them.
Elsewhere, Machiavelli is quite explicit in advising princes to the “mean” rather than “rapacious”: (e.g., Prince, ch. 21; p. 91). Christian teachings treat both traits as equally bad or blameworthy. The Roman soldiers “loved a prince with a military spirit who was insolent, cruel, and rapacious” as a means to “give vent to their avarice and cruelty” (Prince, ch. 19; p. 76). In contrast, the Roman “people loved quiet, and therefore loved modest princes” (ibid.). In short, if one considers the triad of qualities (“liberal” or giving, “mean” or modest, “rapacious” or violent), each has been considered “good” or praiseworthy by some humans and bad by others.
Machiavelli’s use of a “Tuscan” term to underscore the variability of standards of praise and blame points to the difference between the traditions of Tuscany (the region of Florence) and those of the remainder of Italy. This difference reflects the changes in language brought by history, the subject of a chapter of the Discourses entitled “Changes of Religion and of Language, Together with Such Misfortunes as Floods or Pestilences, Obliterate the Records of the Past.” At the end of this most important chapter, Machiavelli notes that prior to the rise of the Roman republic, Tuscany had an independent civilization:
There was, then, as we have said before, a time when Tuscany was a powerful country, full of religion and of virtue, with its own customs and its own language, all of which we know was wiped out by the power of Rome, so that of it, as has been said, there remains nought but the remembrance of its name. (Discourses, II, 5; p. 290)
Earlier in this chapter, Machiavelli notes that “language” can sometimes survive to transmit remembrance of the past after “religion” has been obliterated, as “the retention of the Latin language” permitted knowledge of pagan antiquity after Christianity “abolished all pagan institutions, all pagan rites, and destroyed the records of the theology of the ancients” (ibid., p. 289).
In this contrast, “language” seems to refer to the “names” or words, whereas “religion” stands for the beliefs of a society, or the way these words are used. Among the “modes and orders” of human life, religion plays a central role by determining standards of praise and blame, and all good regimes depend decisively on the religious beliefs of the many or “vulgar.” Religions are human institutions or creations, and indeed the highest praise of any human action is reserved for the individual who founds a religion.70
Many ancient thinkers had, of course, emphasized the relativity of human affairs. Protagoras, for example, insisted that even the sensations and feelings most people consider to be natural are ultimately dependent on human habit and custom: “sweet and sour are by convention.” Unlike the pre-Socratics and sophists, for whom the relativity of all standards of praise and blame led to a denial of natural criteria of judgment, Machiavelli insists that there is a human nature, that it is knowable, and that knowledge of the human condition is essential to prudent and successful action.
The very first sentence of The Prince should be enough to show that some human things are unchanging and independent of convention: “All states, all dominions that have held and do hold empire over men have been and are either republics or principalities” (ch. 1; p. 5). The double repetition of a past tense and a present tense, so apparently redundant, can only reinforce the impression that on some matters, times do not change the human condition. When Machiavelli remarks in the dedication that his knowledge is based on “long experience with modern things and a continuous reading of ancient ones,” he implies that knowledge of the “ancient” (pagan) times is relevant to “modern” (Christian) life.
The point is made explicit in the Discourses: “men are born and live and die in an order which remains ever the same” (I, II; p. 142).71 This constancy of the human condition is, indeed, a corollary of the constancy of nature more broadly: hence, in the Preface, Machiavelli explains his focus on ancient things as an attempt to show that his contemporaries are foolish to believe the deeds of pagan Romans are impossible to imi-tate, “as if the heaven, the sun, the elements and man had in their motion, their order, and their potency, become different from what they used to be” (Discourses, I, Pref.; pp. 98–99). Nature—and human nature—have a constant “order” despite the varying conventions of praise and blame. Indeed, without this conception of the “nature” (and “natures”) of men, embedded in a broader view of the “nature” of “things,” Machiavelli could not elaborate a definition of human “excellence” as a guide to political action.
Standards of praise and blame provide us with the view of human action from the perspective of society at large or of the “vulgar.” Reflection on the variability of these standards and of their origins shows that humans create religious and political institutions, which have the effect of forming standards of praise and blame. And since the creation of religious and political institutions is in almost all cases the work of individuals, the study of human nature leads to distinction between the perspective of the ruler or prince and that of the people. The Prince is particularly important because it examines human “things” from the perspective of the prince, and especially the “entirely new” prince who is shaping or reshaping the “modes and orders” of a human community.
From the perspective of the “people” or the “vulgar,” judgments depend on varying standards of praise and blame; from the perspective of the ruler (or those capable of being or judging rulers), judgments depend on the unchanging maxims or rules concerning human nature and politics. These rules, which form the substance of Machiavelli’s prudential teaching about politics, comprise a science that could be called the “economy of power.”
The name is easily justified. Immediately after Machiavelli’s well-known statement that “generally” men are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain” (Prince, ch. 7; p. 66) he adds:
And that prince who has founded himself entirely on their words, stripped of other preparation, is ruined; for friendships that are acquired at a price and not with greatness and nobility of spirit are bought, but they are not owned and when the time comes they cannot be spent.
There are two modes of acquiring “friendship”: another person can be “acquired at a price” or “with greatness and nobility of spirit.” The former would seem to be actions of cost and benefit as measured by pleasure and pain (or what Plato calls “desire”); the latter concern those relations based on honor and glory (in Platonic psychology, thymos or spirit). While Machiavelli seems to share the psychological categories developed in Plato’s Republic,72 it seems that desire or appetite needs to be at the center of the leader’s concern.
The calculus of appetite is of primary concern for the prince because “utility” is more fundamental than “obligation.” Machiavelli goes on:
And men have less hesitation to offend one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligation, which, because men are wicked, is broken at every opportunity for their own utility,73 but fear is held by a dread of punishment that never forsakes you. (Ibid., pp. 66–67)
Since most men are primarily concerned “with their own utility,” Machiavelli directly addresses the prince or leader and reminds him that “you” should rely on the “dread of punishment.” Fear is more reliable than love because it can be controlled by the ruler: “a wise prince should found himself on what is his, not on what is someone else’s” (Prince, ch. 17; p. 68).
Human emotions have a constant nature, in contrast to the terms of praise and blame which vary from one time or place to another. In assessing the feelings or principles of behavior on which princes should rely, Machiavelli can thus claim to answer universal or general questions. These answers are formulated as his famous teaching about love, fear, and hate:
[A] dispute arises whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would want to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to put them together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two. The prince should nonetheless make himself feared in such a mode that if he does not acquire love, he escapes hatred, because being feared and not being hated can go together very well. (Ibid., pp. 66–67)
In the exercise of power, fear is preferable to love, and love is preferable to hate. For princes or rulers, Machiavelli replaces the Christian “law of love” with a new calculus in which being feared is to be preferred.
This economy of power settles, at least from the ruler’s perspective, the issue of praise and blame which Machiavelli had described in relativist terms in chapter fifteen. Hence, in chapter seventeen, Machiavelli adds that the prince can combine “being feared and not being hated”
if he abstains from the property of his citizens and his subjects, and from their women; and if he also needs to proceed against someone’s life, he must do it when there is suitable justification and manifest cause for it. But above all, he must abstain from the property of others, because men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony; Furthermore, causes for taking away property are never lacking, and he who begins to live by rapine always finds cause to seize others’ property; and, on the contrary, causes for taking life are rare and disappear more quickly. (p. 67)
Of the triad of terms which introduces the list of “qualities” of praise and blame (Prince, ch. 15; p. 61), being “greedy” (avaro) or desiring to “have something by violence” is worse for a ruler than being “mean” (misero) or refraining “too much from using what is his”).
The economy of power arises from predictable or natural tendencies: “men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony.” Honor or “spirit,” which would lead men to avenge the rape of their wives or the murder of their kinsmen, is of course a danger in politics; elsewhere, Machiavelli gives many examples of the way such passionate behavior has destroyed lives and careers.74 But material “utility” is an even stronger incentive for most humans. By assuring the “citizens” of a republic or the “subjects” of a monarchy their “patrimony,” rulers of any regime can avoid “being hated” and hence prevent the spread of spirited opposition to a substantial portion of the society.
The same criterion explains why “liberality” or “giving” is dangerous for a ruler.
[I[f one wants to maintain a name for liberality among men, it is necessary not to leave out any kind of lavish display, so that a prince who has done this will always consume all his resources in such deeds. In the end it will be necessary, if he wants to maintain a name for liberality, to burden the people extraordinarily, to be rigorous with taxes, and to do all those things that can be done to get money. This will begin to make him hated by his subjects. (Prince, ch. 16; p. 63)
Giving (unless based on conquest of foreigners) and taking are equally dangerous, for both will give rise to hatred and contempt. Neither Christian “love” and charity, nor selfish “greed” are prudent for the political leader. “In our time, we have not seen great things done except by those who have been considered mean” (Prince, ch. 16; p. 63).
In much the same way, Machiavelli resolves the question of praise and blame with regard to being “cruel” or “merciful,” contradicting the Christian doctrine according to which mercy is good and cruelty bad. With citizens, cruelties that are “well used” or “done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself” are praiseworthy (Prince, ch. 8; pp. 37–38); with soldiers, “it is above all necessary not to care about a name for cruelty” (ch. 17; p. 67). Similarly, praise and blame with regard to the fourth pair of qualities introduced in chapter fifteen—”the one a breaker of faith, the other faithful” (p. 62)—is decided against Christian doctrine: “one sees by experience in our times that the princes who have done great things are those who have taken little account of faith” (ch. 18; p. 69).
Machiavelli seeks a fundamental transformation in the standards of praise and blame that dominate “modern” times or “our times,” which is to say the Christian era. Having shown how “breaking faith” is superior to “faithfulness,” “meanness” is superior to either “liberality” or “greed,” and “cruelty” superior to “mercy,” Machiavelli adds that he has “spoken of the most important of the qualities mentioned above” (Prince, ch. 19; p. 71). Of the cardinal Christian virtues—“faith, hope, and charity”—two are qualities of blame in the actions of princes and the third is focused on human affairs. Although some commentators argue that Machiavelli was a believing Christian opposed to the corruption of the Catholic Church, his target was the entire “education” associated with the decline in the love of “liberty” and declining esteem for “worldly honour” created by “our religion”—i.e., by the basic principles of Christianity.75 At the risk of anachronism, one can almost speak of what Nietzsche called “the transvaluation of values.”
That Machiavelli sought such a radical transformation of the moral standards of European society can be shown in many other ways. Perhaps the most interesting concerns the first of his major writings to be published in his own lifetime. Unlike The Prince or the Discourses, we are less in doubt about Machiavelli’s responsibility for our texts of The Art of War (published in Florence in 1521), and Mandragola (his play, first produced in 1517 and published in 1518). Although The Art of War has already been mentioned at several points, his famous comedy—ignored by many conventional political theorists—can be read as a symbolic epitome of Machiavelli’s teaching. Such an interpretation of Mandragola is particularly justified by the Prologue, in which the author himself comes on stage and informs the audience that he hopes they “might be tricked” as the character Lucrezia is in the play.76
To understand Mandragola and its relationship to Machiavelli’s political writings, it will be necessary to summarize the plot. The hero is a man named Callimaco Guadagni, who was sent to Paris at the age of ten and, after the French invasion of Italy in 1494 resolved to remain there to study; in 1504, now thirty, he has returned to Florence because he has been told that a woman named Lucrezia, the wife of Nicia Calfucci, is so beautiful that he is “burning with such a desire to be with her, that I don’t know where I am.”77 “Messer Nicia” is an old, impotent man, but “Madonna Lucrezia” is an extraordinary virtuous wife as well as a great beauty. The action of the play concerns the way Callimaco, through a character named Ligurio, solicits the assistance of the priest Timoteo, who convinces the elderly Nicia that his wife must sleep with a man in order to have an heir. Lucrezia is resistant,78 but with the help of the priest, who promises absolution in return for alms, Nicia agrees to convince his wife and supervise the act.79 Callimaco seduces the lovely Lucrezia, who falls in love with him without Nicia realizing that he has been the agent of his own cuckoldry. As the play ends with everyone content, Timoteo leads them all “into the Church” where they are to “say the regular prayers” and then “go dine.”80
The comedy of the play is of course that an old husband (Nicia) uses every stratagem to overcome the virtue of his beautiful wife (Lucrezia) so that she will be unfaithful to him. The priest (Timoteo) is the knowing accomplice in the seduction. And because the act is perfectly planned and executed, everyone is happy by the end of the play: Nicia (who now thinks he will have a son), Lucrezia (who has discovered the joys of sexuality), Callimaco (whose desires have been satisfied), and Timoteo (who has received a generous payoff for the Church).
Symbolically, I would interpret the play as follows: the audience of the play represents the city of Florence; Nicia the old, established standards of praise and blame; Lucrezia the possibility of human desire; and Friar Timoteo the Catholic Church. Callimaco—his name is that of the first head of Ptolemy’s great library of Alexandria, the man reputed to have put in order all the works of Greek poetry and philosophy—represents learning; Ligu-rio, the “link” or connection between the characters who makes it possible for each to achieve his or her goals, is Machiavelli himself.
What does it mean for the audience to be “tricked” as was Lucrezia, which the Prologue makes the explicit intention of the author? The “people” are to adopt new standards of morality, abandoning the otherworldliness of Christ’s teaching in favor of tasting the pleasures of the body. Machiavelli achieves this by releasing the desires that had been hidden in the traditional secular knowledge of the West, epitomized by Callimaco (whose attentions are redirected from his studies in Paris to the conquest of Lucrezia in Florence). And this is to be done within the context of the traditional religion: Machiavelli does not pretend to overthrow the Church, but rather promises it material benefits (Lucrezia’s gift of ten grossi to Timoteo in the final scene).
That something of this sort is the meaning of the play is confirmed by a song for the outset of the play which Machiavelli wrote in 1526:
Because life is brief
and many are the pains
which, living and struggling, everyone sustains,
let us follow our desires,
passing and consuming the years,
because whoever deprives himself of pleasure
to live with anguish and with worries
doesn’t know the tricks
of the world, or by what ills
and by what strange happenings
all mortals are almost overwhelmed.81
Machiavelli’s goal is to allow humans to “follow our desires” in this world because “life is brief” and the afterlife apparently irrelevant.
By channeling desire, an effective political order can make it possible to achieve happiness. The song added by Machiavelli in 1526 concludes:
Besides, we have been brought here
by the name of him82 who governs you,
in whom can be seen all
the goods gathered in the eternal countenance.
For such heavenly grace,
for so happy a state,
rejoice, and give thanks—to the one who gave him to you.83
A secularized church and a government dedicated to the “new case” described in Machiavelli’s play can give humans “heavenly grace” on earth and make humans “glad, rejoice, and give thanks.”
Machiavelli’s innovation is thus an astute combination of ancient knowledge and desire (symbolized by Callimaco), cleverness (Ligurio), and Christianity (Friar Timoteo), by which material pleasure (Lucrezia)—repressed by the established, barren traditions (Nicia)—becomes accessible to “you” (the audience). The Roman republic had been founded after the rape of Lucrezia (cf. Discourses, III, 2, 5, and 26). The new republic will be based on a seduction of Lucrezia that is aided and abetted by a Machiavellian alliance between the Christian Church and pagan knowledge.
Machiavelli remarks in The Prince that perfection or an “imagined principality”—one thinks of Paul’s “kingdom of heaven” or Augustine’s City of God as well as of Plato’s Republic—is impossible. He frequently counsels accepting necessity: “a prince who wants to maintain his state is often forced not to be good” (Prince, ch. 19; p. 77). It is necessary to learn to choose “the less bad as good” (Prince, ch. 21, p. 91). But these counsels are not merely the political prudence of the ancient pagans. They are also a new kind of religion, which turns Christian values upside down rather than obliterating them openly. In a letter to his friend Guiccardini dated 17 May 1521, Machiavelli writes:
I was on the privy seat when your messenger came, and just then I was thinking of the absurdities of this world, and I was giving all my attention to imagining for myself a preacher after my mind for the place at Florence, and he would be just what would please me, because in this I intend to be as obstinate as in my other opinions. And because I never failed that city by not benefiting her when I could—if not with deeds, with words, if not with words, with gestures—I do not intend to fail her this time either. It is true that I know I am opposed, as in many other things, to the opinion of the citizens there: they would like a preacher who would show them the road to Paradise, and I should like to find one who would teach them the way to go to the house of the Devil because I believe the true way of going to Paradise would be to learn the road to Hell in order to avoid it.84
