Machiavelli

“ In Machiavelli's time it was indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair. But the days of the Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all power are ended. We are in a condition of affairs infinitely more complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince. No magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for secretarial hopes.
In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense wonderful how it has increased. ”

“ Whoever was to accomplish the salvation of Italy must be ready to sacrifice his private convictions and to ignore the rights of conscience. The methods which Machiavelli advocated were, he readily admitted, opposed to the life of a Christian, perhaps even to the life of a human being. Were the morally good to be set side by side with the morally evil, no one would ever be so mad or so wicked, that if asked to choose between the two, he would not praise that which deserved praise and blame that which deserved blame. ”

“ In our age, when we think of the chequered course of human time, of the shocks of irreconcilable civilisations, of war, trade, faction, revolution, empire, laws, creeds, sects, we seek a clue to the vast maze of historic and pre-historic fact. Machiavelli seeks no clue to his distribution of good and evil. He never tries to find a moral interpretation for the mysterious scroll. We obey laws that we do not know, but cannot resist. We can only make an effort to seize events as they whirl by, and to extort from them a maxim, a precept, or a principle, to serve our immediate turn. ”

“ Machiavelli recognised with regret that "it very seldom happens that a good man is willing to become prince by bad means, though his object be good." The desire for posthumous fame and the knowledge that a retrospective judgment would approve were powerful inducements, but, after all, something weightier was required. Machiavelli was prepared to be logical. An extraordinary problem cannot be solved by a tender conscience; "honest slaves are always slaves, and good men are always paupers." ”

“ What concerns Machiavelli, the Italian critic truly says, 'is not a thing being reasonable, or moral, or beautiful, but that it is.' Yet at the bottom of all the confused clamour against him, people knew what they meant, and their instinct was not unsound. Mankind, and well they know it, are far too profoundly concerned in right and wrong, in mercy and cruelty, in justice and oppression, to favour a teacher who, even for a scientific purpose of his own, forgets the awful difference. Commonplace, after all, is exactly what contains the truths that are indispensable. ”

“ At any rate, Machiavelli does not leave human nature out, and this is one secret of his hold. He does not argue pale opinions, but passions and interests in all the flush of their action. It is, in truth, in every case,—Burke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and the rest—always the moralist who interests men most within the publicist. Machiavelli was assuredly a moralist, though of a peculiar sort, and this is what makes him, as he has been called, a contemporary of every age and a citizen of all countries. ”

“ It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well acquainted with the history and literature of Italy, to read without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise winch has brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked yet not ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men. ”

“ The common attribute of all such fortunate masters of men was force of arms, while the mission of an unarmed prophet such as Savonarola was foredoomed to failure. In such politics Machiavelli is positive and ruthless: force is and must be the remedy and the last appeal, a principle which indeed no later generation has in practice set at naught. But in the hard dry eyes of the Florentine Secretary stood, above all others, one shining figure, a figure to all other eyes, from then till now, wrapped in mysterious and miasmatic cloud. ”

“ To sum up in a word, it was on the model of this society, and for this society, that Machiavelli wrote his "Prince." The complete development of all the faculties and all the lusts of man, the complete destruction of all the restraints and all the shame of man, are the two distinguishing marks of this grand and perverse culture. To make man a strong being, endowed with genius, audacity, presence of mind, astute policy, dissimulation, patience, and to turn all this power to the acquisition of every kind of pleasure, pleasures of the body, of luxury, arts, literature, authority ”

“ Failure was the seal of Divine disapproval, and to Machiavelli, as to all Italian politicians at his time, the one unpardonable sin. The essential requisite for success was, in his judgment, a constant adaptation between the individual and the surroundings of his life. Sufficient versatility of character, thus understood, would imply a perpetual adjustment of means to the needs of the moment, the ability to reverse a policy or a principle at the call of expediency, and a readiness to compromise or renounce the ideal. The world is rich in failures, because character is too rigid. ”

“ Not only did Leo Strauss write favorably of Machiavelli, Michael Ledeen, a current leader of the neoconservative movement, did the same in 1999 in his book with the title, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, and subtitled: Why Machiavelli’s iron rules are as timely and important today as five centuries ago. ”

“ Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that was by seizing the imagination of a Prince. Directly these men turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became—what shall I call it?—secretarial. ”

“ If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries, let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth. ”

“ Machiavelli had formed definite opinions upon some of the fundamental questions of moral science. He has recorded his views upon what is now called the origin of morality, and also attempted to determine the real nature of good and evil. Believing men naturally bad, and holding therefore that morality is non-natural, in the sense that it is distasteful to the untrained impulses in men and not to be arrived at by evolving anything of which perhaps they are, in some unexplained way, capable, the question confronted him, How is right action to be enforced? ”

“ To Machiavelli all these questions would have been futile. Yet the world, in spite of a thousand mischances, and at tortoise-pace, has steadily moved away from him and his Romans.
The modern conception of a State has long made it a moral person, capable of right and wrong, just as are the individuals composing it. Civilisation is taken to advance, exactly in proportion as communities leave behind them the violences of external nature, and of man in a state of war. The usages of war are constantly undergoing mitigation. ”

“ Then—to pass to a higher plane—Machiavelli reiterates that, although crimes may win an empire, they do not win glory. Necessary wars are just wars, and the arms of a nation are hallowed when it has no other resource but to fight.
It is the cry of a far later day than Machiavelli's that government should be elevated into a living moral force, capable of inspiring the people with a just recognition of the fundamental principles of society ”

“ It is true that to-day we would not advise a man to serve his country if, in so doing, he must commit acts of murder, or treachery. We would not tell a man to kill his brother even if that brother threatened to overthrow the state. We require first of all that a man live an honest life. But is there not something noble in Machiavelli's theory that a man should sacrifice not only his life but also his very soul in the service of his country? It seems that in some respects Machiavelli holds a broader view than our own, and if we condemn one we must condemn the other also. ”

“ But Machiavelli believed that a state should be an end in itself. He believed that citizenship should dominate all the other relations. Where the safety of one's country is at stake no consideration of just or unjust, merciful or cruel, glorious or shameful should be taken into account. If necessary, kill those who can not be cheated, for "he who is dead can not think of revenging himself." Any course of action is justified if only it succeeds in obtaining a result propitious to the interests of the state. A man's first concern should not be the salvation of his soul ”

“ Is man no more than a beast who at the slightest provocation flies at his brother's throat ? Was Machiavelli right when he said, "Man is more prone to evil than to good? We read of the awful atrocities with which each side charges its foe. ”

“ The truism "Circumstances alter cases," was interpreted by Machiavelli to mean that the pressure of external forces is usually stronger than the resistance of individual principle. This formed the rational basis of his complaints that no one who attempted to govern in Italy would alter the courses to which his genius inclined him, when facts had altered; yet any one who was sufficiently versatile would always have good fortune, and the wise man would at last command the stars and fate. In political life such reasoning led to the rejection of morality, as the plain man understands it. ”

“ They have achieved the apotheosis of individual forgetfulness, and Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with his tradition. They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every humbug takes his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recent and less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother—and at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the desk. ”

“ XV.: "Public affairs are easily managed in a city where the body of the people is not corrupt; and where equality exists, there no principality can be established; nor can a republic be established where there is no equality."
No man has been more harshly judged than Machiavelli, especially in the two centuries following his death. But he has since found many able champions and the tide has turned. The Prince has been termed a manual for tyrants, the effect of which has been most pernicious. But were Machiavelli's doctrines really new? ”

“ For though Machiavelli inferred that ethics and politics are distinct, and that the art of government is out of relation to morals, he founded both upon the same assumptions. The ethical portion of his work is, of course, of little importance in comparison with the political, and is usually wholly ignored.
The conception which had the widest influence upon Machiavelli's teaching is that of the essential depravity of human nature. Men are born bad, and no one does good, unless obliged. ”

“ Machiavelli, who records these four points with approbation, adds: 'He therefore, who finds it needful in his new authority to secure himself against foes, to acquire allies, to gain a point by force or fraud, etc., etc., could not discover an ensample more vigorous and blooming than that of Cesare.' Such is the panegyric which Machiavelli, writing, as it seems to me, in all good faith and innocence, records of a man who, taken altogether, is perhaps the most selfish, perfidious, and murderous of adventurers on record. ”

“ We have hardly yet discovered that political economy has unavoidable points of contact with ethics.
From the foregoing criticism it will be perceived that all the questions whether Machiavelli meant to corrupt or to instruct the world, to fortify the hands of tyrants or to lead them to their ruin, are now obsolete. He was a man of science—one who by the vigorous study of his subject matter sought from that subject-matter itself to deduce laws. The difficulty which remains in judging him is a difficulty of statement, valuation, allowance. ”

“ It is the old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen fellowship about him. ”

“ At what stage of development have these nations arrived? Surely no one will maintain that they are in the period of Idleness, or Peace, or yet of complete Ruin. According to Machiavelli's classification they must be either in the period of Virtue or in the period of Disorder. If in the period of Disorder we may hope for only Ruin to follow. Here again we must remember that Machiavelli drew his inferences from a careful study of history and reached his conclusions by a method of reasoning as perfect as that of Aristotle. The Greek civilization in many ways was superior to that of today. ”

“ Above all, and in any case, the ruler, whether hereditary or an usurper, can have no safety unless he founds himself on popular favour and good-will. This he repeats a hundred times. 'Better far than any number of fortresses, is not to be hated by your people.'
It is then to the free Roman commonwealth that Machiavelli would have his countrymen turn. ”