Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, into a family of modest means and humanist learning. In 1498, after the fall of the friar Savonarola, he became Second Chancellor of the Florentine Republic and secretary to its war committee. For fourteen years he was a diplomat — sent to the court of Louis XII of France, to the Emperor Maximilian, to Pope Julius II, and, crucially, to Cesare Borgia, the ruthless son of Pope Alexander VI, whose swift, cunning, brutal methods fascinated him. He organized a Florentine citizen militia to replace unreliable mercenaries.

In 1512 the Medici returned to power with Spanish troops; the republic fell. Machiavelli was dismissed, then arrested on suspicion of conspiracy and tortured with the strappado (hoisted by the wrists tied behind his back, then dropped). Released in an amnesty, he retired to his small farm at Sant’Andrea in Percussina outside Florence. In a famous letter of 10 December 1513 to his friend Francesco Vettori, he describes his days — snaring thrushes, quarrelling over cards at the inn — and his evenings:

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I take off my everyday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born… and for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not fear poverty, and I am not terrified by death.

There he wrote The Prince (Il Principe, 1513, published 1532), dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici in hope of employment, and the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy. He also wrote comedies (La Mandragola), The Art of War, and the Florentine Histories. He never regained real office, and died in 1527.

The Prince

See The Prince. A short handbook in twenty-six chapters on how principalities are acquired and kept. What shocked readers was not that rulers behaved ruthlessly — everyone knew that — but that Machiavelli described it without moral disguise and recommended it when necessary:

Since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth. (ch. 15)

A prince who wants to maintain himself must learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity.

Feared or loved?

It is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two. For one can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain… Love is held by a chain of obligation, which, because men are wicked, is broken at every opportunity for their own utility; but fear is held by a dread of punishment that never forsakes you. (ch. 17)

But the prince must avoid being hated — which comes chiefly from seizing subjects’ property and women: “men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony.”

The lion and the fox

A prince must know how to use the beast well; he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves. So one needs to be a fox to recognize snares and a lion to frighten the wolves. (ch. 18)

Virtù and fortuna

Machiavelli’s key concepts: virtù — not moral virtue but manly vigour, ability, boldness, the capacity to seize opportunity and shape events; and fortuna — chance, circumstance. Fortune is like a violent river that floods the plains; but in quiet times, prudent men can build dikes and embankments (ch. 25). And, in a notorious image: “fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down” — the young and bold succeed with her better than the cautious.

The republican Machiavelli

The Discourses on Livy present a different Machiavelli: a republican who admires the Roman Republic, holds that the people are wiser and more constant than princes, that the conflict between the plebs and the senate was the cause of Rome’s liberty, and that a free republic with good laws and good arms is the best and most durable form of state. Which is the real Machiavelli? Many scholars (Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock) see The Prince as a work for an emergency and the Discourses as his considered view. Others think The Prince was a trap or a satire — Rousseau and the Italian patriots read it so.

Machiavellianism

“Machiavellian” became a byword for cunning, duplicity and amoral politics. Elizabethan dramatists made the “Machiavel” a stage villain — Marlowe’s Jew of Malta has him speak the prologue — and Shakespeare’s Richard III and Iago are his heirs. The Catholic Church put his works on the Index of Forbidden Books (1559). Yet modern political science — the study of politics as it is — begins with him, and “realists” from Hobbes to Henry Kissinger read him closely. Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Originality of Machiavelli” (1972) argued that his real shock was to show that there are two incompatible moralities — Christian and pagan-civic — between which one must choose.

Using Machiavelli in conversation

• On realism: look at the “effectual truth of the thing”, not imagined republics.
• On reputation: better feared than loved — but never hated.
• On strategy: be both the lion and the fox.
• On luck: fortune governs half our affairs; build the dikes before the flood.