Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Machiavelli

With Machiavelli we are thrust into modernity and the modern man. The state, in Machiavelli, is something man creates with his will and not with God's will.


There is no other way of guarding one's self against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth; but when everyone can tell you the truth, you lose their respect.


Machiavelli not only avoided talk of natural law or the ideal ends of life, he offered little evidence of what has come to be known as "essentialism"—any kind of a priori notion of an inherent quality in men or states or goals implanted by God. Men, being alone on this earth, could do—would do—what they willed. That is what most modern people, religious or not, actually believe, yet it was certainly new in the early sixteenth century. This brazen, unillusioned embrace of things as they are was both immensely exciting and, in its insistence on actuality, almost moral; it was irresponsible, Machiavelli was saying, to deny that life was like this, irresponsible to act as if men were good in the Christian sense—kind, loving, merciful, unselfish, forgiving. 

For it must be noted, that men must either be caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance.

Now that isn't simply cynical. More than anything, it's funny. And daring. Men cannot "revenge themselves" for great injuries because, as the beginning of the sentence suggests, and the last confirms, they will be dead. The humor of it was derived as much from the balanced economy of the clauses as from the idea itself; the syntax has the finality of murder.

…one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting. For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain; as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours; they offer you their blood, their goods, their life, and their children, as I have before said, when the necessity is remote; but when it approaches, they revolt. And the prince who has relied solely on their words, without making other preparations, is ruined; for the friendship which is gained by purchase and not through grandeur and nobility of spirit is bought but not secured, and at a pinch is not to be expended in your service. And men have less scruple in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails.

Which is a stunning application of reason to nasty thoughts. God, what a mind! Unillusioned, he had attained a false reputation for callous amorality. He outraged the dull, who thought his work a mere handbook for dictators. But in his immense meditation on Roman history, The Discourses, parts of which we also read, Machiavelli spoke of republicanism and even of separate powers—people, rulers, senate—holding one another in check. And it became clear that Machiavelli, as Isaiah Berlin has pointed out, was no amoralist at all but a man who believed in an earlier, pagan sense of morality, the qualities of boldness, courage, dutifulness, stoicism, and so on, shared by Pericles and the leaders of the Roman Republic." These qualities would lead a state to glory. Christian morality was not wrong but generally useless in a leader and might even lead to greater disaster—in the sense of anarchy or chaos—than outright ruthlessness. What was paramount in the private realm might be hapless, even destructive, in the public realm. "We tend to reduce Machiavelli to a realist or power-mad tradition in which the end always justifies the means," said Stephanson. "But this is not true of Machiavelli. Sometimes it is justified to be ruthless, sometimes to be good. It's a pragmatic view, the opposite of a morality in which certain things are universal—such as that killing is always bad. But Machiavelli never says that the end justifies the means."

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