Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli

For two thousand years, books of advice to rulers had told them to be good. Be just, be merciful, be honest, be pious; model yourself on the virtuous king and the ideal republic; govern as the philosophers say you ought. Then, in 1513, an out-of-work Florentine diplomat sat down in bitter exile and wrote a short book that threw all of it out the window. He was not interested, Machiavelli announced, in imagined republics and princes who never existed; he would write instead about the "effectual truth," the way things actually work, "for the gap between how people live and how they ought to live is so wide that a man who abandons what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation." It is one of the most consequential changes of subject in the history of thought. Machiavelli stopped asking how a ruler should behave in an ideal world and started asking, coldly and empirically, what rulers who actually succeed really do, what it really takes to seize power, hold a state together, and survive among people who are not good. He looked at politics the way a doctor looks at a disease, without flinching and without sermon, and in doing so he more or less invented the modern study of power.

A diplomat's education. Machiavelli did not learn about power from books. For fourteen years he served the free republic of Florence as a working diplomat, sent to the courts of kings and popes to watch the great players of his age up close, and the most important thing he ever saw was a ruthless young duke named Cesare Borgia building a state by any means that worked, and then losing it all to a single stroke of bad luck. Then the republic fell, the Medici came back, and Machiavelli's world collapsed: he lost his post, was arrested on a false charge of conspiracy, and was tortured before being released, broken, into exile on a small farm. It was there, shut out of the public life he loved, that he wrote. In a famous letter he describes his evenings: he sheds his mud-stained farm clothes, puts on the robes he once wore at court, and steps into his study to "converse with the ancients," asking the great men of the past the reasons for their actions. His chilling realism is not the cynicism of an armchair; it is the hard-won knowledge of a man who had stood in the room while power was made and unmade, and who refused, even in disgrace, to lie about what he had seen.

The truth nobody wanted said. What made the book scandalous, and keeps it bracing, is that Machiavelli says out loud the things everyone knows and no one admits. Is it better for a ruler to be loved or feared? Both, ideally, he says; but since you can rarely have both, it is safer to be feared, because love is a bond men break the instant it costs them, while the fear of consequences is a bond that holds. A prince must learn, he writes, "how not to be good," and to use or withhold that knowledge as necessity demands. He must be both the lion and the fox, strong enough to frighten off wolves and cunning enough to see the traps, and he must be willing to break his word when keeping it would destroy him, since the world is full of men who will break theirs. None of this is offered as a celebration of cruelty; Machiavelli is not gleeful, he is grim. His point is that a ruler who insists on being good in all things, surrounded by the many who are not, will be destroyed, and will pull his people down with him. The hard, unwelcome truth at the core of the book is that in politics clean hands and good outcomes cannot always be had together, and that pretending otherwise gets people killed.

Fortune is a river. Beneath the shocking advice runs a deeper and more universal idea, Machiavelli's great pairing of virtù and fortuna. Fortuna is luck, chance, the flood of circumstance no one controls, the accidents and reversals that wreck the best-laid plans. Virtù, which does not mean moral virtue but something closer to skill, boldness, decisive force of character, is what a person brings to meet it. And his image for their relationship is unforgettable. Fortune, he says, is like a river in flood, which when it rises sweeps away everything in its path; but a river can be mastered, if you do the work in the calm season, building the dikes and digging the channels that will direct the torrent when it comes. The person of virtù does not wait passively on fate or trust to providence; they read the situation, prepare before the crisis, and act boldly when the moment arrives, because fortune, Machiavelli says in his most notorious line, favors the bold. This is a philosophy of agency in an uncertain world, and it reaches far beyond politics. It is counsel for anyone facing a future they cannot control: you cannot abolish luck, but you can prepare for it, and the difference between the people fortune destroys and the people it rewards is very often just the work they did before the flood arrived.

The republican in the room. And now the thing the word "Machiavellian" makes everyone forget. The Prince is short, notorious, and addressed to a single ruler; but it is not Machiavelli's main work, and it is not where his loyalties lay. His longer and deeper book is the Discourses on Livy, and it is one of the great defenses of liberty and republican self-government ever written. Machiavelli had served the free Florentine republic for fourteen years; he loved it, and he hated the tyranny that replaced it. In the Discourses he argues that the best and strongest states are not principalities but republics, where power is shared and no single man rules; that a free people will out-build and outlast any prince; and, most originally, that the noisy conflict between rich and poor, the tumults that look like pure disorder, was actually the secret of Rome's freedom and greatness, because it stopped any one faction from seizing total control. This is the other Machiavelli, and he is the real one every bit as much as the author of The Prince: a passionate republican who taught later lovers of liberty, from the English commonwealthmen to the American founders, how free states are built and how they rot. Rousseau saw it plainly, and said that Machiavelli, "while pretending to instruct kings, taught great lessons to the people," and that The Prince is in truth the book of republicans, an exposé of how tyranny works, written so that free men would know it on sight.

The price of honesty. The room reads Machiavelli in the old translations of The Prince and the Discourses, cited by chapter, and the chat will steer you to read the two together, because reading The Prince alone is exactly how the caricature is born. His reception has been a centuries-long quarrel. The Church banned him; "Machiavellian" became a synonym for treachery almost within his own lifetime; and ever since, readers have split between those who see a cynical teacher of evil and those who see a clear-eyed patriot telling hard truths in a brutal age. The most emphatic voice on the second side was Hegel, who read The Prince against the misery of a partitioned Italy and called it "the supremely great and true conception of a genuine political mind of the greatest and noblest disposition," adding that gangrenous limbs are not healed with lavender water. What is beyond dispute is that he was the first to insist that politics be studied as it is rather than as we wish it were, and that insistence, however uncomfortable, founded a science. Every later realist, Hobbes, the framers weighing how to check power with power, the modern analyst who asks not whether a policy is noble but whether it will actually work, is laboring in the space Machiavelli cleared. He paid for his honesty, in his own good name, a price he is still paying five hundred years later. But he would likely have taken the bargain, because the one thing he could not abide was the comfortable lie, and he chose, at real cost, to tell the truth about power instead.