Machiavelli, Niccolò 1469-1527

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Renaissance political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli shocked Christian Europe by declaring that success in politics both necessitates and excuses any means used to achieve it. Born in 1469 in Florence to a family of some prominence but modest means, Machiavelli probably received a humanistic education in his youth, enabling him to become head of the Second Chancery of the Florentine Republic in 1498. This office brought him into close contact with a number of Renaissance potentates, inciting his penetrating mind to form a stern, indeed, cynical view of politics. After the republic’s fall in 1512, Machiavelli retired to his small landed property to study ancient writers and reflect on political affairs.

In 1513 Machiavelli wrote The Prince, a slender book in the traditional mirror-of-princes genre. His advice to princes, however, was far from traditional. Rather than exhorting them to practice the virtues, he encouraged them to “know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity” (Chap. XVIII), on the grounds that “a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good” (Chap. XV). In particular, he argued that princes should not hesitate to use deceit and violence to maintain their state and secure their subjects. This advice transformed the European tradition of “reason of state” (Lat. ratio status, Fr. raison d’état ). Whereas the medieval proponents of this tradition had considered the necessity to break moral rules for the common good to be exceptional, and thus reconcilable with a community of virtue, Machiavelli assumed necessary evil to be a regular aspect of politics, thus separating it from ethics. Machiavelli’s pithy maxims to this effect inspired generations of writers who called for strong measures to build the modern state, such as Gabriel Naudé in France and Johann Gottlieb Fichte in Germany. His approach also legitimized the ruthlessness of many statesmen who constructed it, including Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Richelieu, Napoleon, and Mussolini.

From roughly 1515 to 1520, Machiavelli belonged to a circle of educated Florentines who met in the Oricellari Gardens and whose political views reflected the civic strand of Renaissance humanism. Drawing on the Aristotelian and Ciceronian notion of citizenship, civic humanism advocated vivere civile, a life of intense involvement with public affairs, based on a humanistic education and framed by the institutions of a republic. Accordingly, they believed that men ought to deliberate wisely and serve capably in the offices of their city, while also practicing the virtues, fostering concord, upholding liberty, and attaining greatness. Machiavelli’s exposure to this ideal prompted his major republican writings, the Discourses on Livy (c. 1518), the Art of War (1521) and the Florentine Histories (1525). In these works Machiavelli followed Renaissance fashion by taking the Roman republic as a model. According to Machiavelli, Rome maintained its liberty because it provided the commoners with a representative, the Tribune of the Plebs, who checked the tyrannical ambitions of the nobles with his power to veto any law and intercede with any action of the magistrate. Having this share in authority also made the commoners loyal enough to be armed for war in large numbers, enabling Rome to conquer a vast empire and attain unprecedented greatness. Moreover, Rome’s superior institutions were brought to life by the “good customs” of its citizens, allowing nobles and commoners to conduct their struggles over wealth and power without bloodshed and settle them by compromise.

The fact that civic humanism formed Machiavelli’s historical context has led a number of historians, most prominently J. G. A. Pocock (1975) and Quentin Skinner (1978), to conclude that Machiavelli was a civic humanist himself. More penetrating analysis, however, reveals that Machiavelli’s republican writings rest on the same premises on human nature and ethics as The Prince, and they consequently propose corresponding maxims of action: “As all those demonstrate who reason on a vivere civile, and as every history is full of examples, it is necessary to whoever disposes a republic and orders laws in it to presuppose that all men are bad” (Discourses on Livy I.3.1). To found, as well as to reform a republic, an autocrat must therefore kill all those opposed to equality before the law. The good customs of the citizens are not only acquired by habituation under threat of punishment, they also are continuously degraded by their natural ambition and thus must be constantly renewed by exemplary and excessive punishments. Republics can execute policies more effectively than principalities because the majority can easily crush the minority, regardless of the harm done to individuals. Republics wage aggressive wars because the citizens need to satisfy their ambition abroad in order to mitigate conflict at home, and because security rests on striking first and acquiring empire. In other words, the “reason of state” forms the core of Machiavelli’s republican thought as well. He made this fact most explicit when he claimed that “where one deliberates entirely on the safety of his fatherland [i.e., republic], there ought not to enter any consideration of either just or unjust, merciful or cruel … one ought to follow entirely the policy that saves its life and maintains its liberty” (Discourses on Livy III.41).

Preference must therefore be given to the older view of Machiavelli as a bold, if not reckless, thinker who broke with civic humanism and the entire classical tradition by limiting political thought to what men do rather than what they ought to do. According to the German historian Friedrich Meinecke (1924), this impulse led Machiavelli to probe and reveal the full extent of the reason of state, while the philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1946) believed that it prepared the ground for the empirical approach of modern political science by making no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate states. According to the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1953), it led Machiavelli to undermine the Western belief in a cosmos unified by reason. The political scientist Sheldon Wolin (1960) noted that it made Machiavelli conceive of politics as a struggle between conflicting interests. The philosopher Leo Strauss (1963) observed that this impulse prepared Machiavelli to lower the ethical standards that human beings ought to follow. It was in these ways that Machiavelli lit the flame of modernity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1513. The Prince. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. c. 1518. Discourses on Livy. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1521. Art of War. Trans. Christopher Lynch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1525. Florentine Histories. Trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

SECONDARY WORKS

Berlin, Isaiah. 1953. The Originality of Machiavelli. In Studies on Machiavelli, ed. Myron P. Gilmore, 147–206. Florence: Sansoni, 1972.

Cassirer, Ernst. 1946. The Myth of the State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Meinecke, Friedrich. [1924] 1984. Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History. Trans. Douglas Scott. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Pocock, J. G. A. 1975. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Skinner, Quentin. 1978. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. 1, The Renaissance. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Strauss, Leo. 1987. Niccolò Machiavelli: 1469–1527. In History of Political Philosophy, 3rd ed., ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 296–317. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wolin, Sheldon S. 1960. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Boston: Little, Brown.

Markus Fischer