Niccolò Machiavelli, (born May 3, 1469, Florence, Italy—died June 21,
1527, Florence) Italian Renaissance political philosopher and statesman,
secretary of the Florentine republic, whose most famous work, The Prince (Il
Principe), brought him a reputation as an atheist and an immoral cynic.
Early life and
political career
From the 13th century onward, Machiavelli’s family was wealthy and
prominent, holding on occasion Florence’s most important offices. His father,
Bernardo, a doctor of laws, was nevertheless among the family’s poorest
members. Barred from public office in Florence as an insolvent debtor, Bernardo
lived frugally, administering his small landed property near the city and
supplementing his meagre income from it with earnings from the restricted and almost
clandestine exercise of his profession.
Bernardo kept a library in which Niccolò must have read, but little is
known of Niccolò’s education and early life in Florence, at that time a
thriving centre of philosophy and a brilliant showcase of the arts. He attended
lectures by Marcello Virgilio Adriani, who chaired the Studio Fiorentino. He
learned Latin well and probably knew some Greek, and he seems to have acquired
the typical humanist education that was expected of officials of the Florentine
Chancery.
In a letter to a friend in 1498, Machiavelli writes of listening to the
sermons of Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), a Dominican friar who moved to
Florence in 1482 and in the 1490s attracted a party of popular supporters with
his thinly veiled accusations against the government, the clergy, and the pope.
Although Savonarola, who effectively ruled Florence for several years after
1494, was featured in The Prince (1513) as an example of an “unarmed prophet”
who must fail, Machiavelli was impressed with his learning and rhetorical
skill. On May 24, 1498, Savonarola was hanged as a heretic and his body burned
in the public square. Several days later, emerging from obscurity at the age of
29, Machiavelli became head of the second chancery (cancelleria), a post that
placed him in charge of the republic’s foreign affairs in subject territories.
How so young a man could be entrusted with so high an office remains a mystery,
particularly because Machiavelli apparently never served an apprenticeship in
the chancery. He held the post until 1512, having gained the confidence of
Piero Soderini (1452–1522), the gonfalonier (chief magistrate) for life in
Florence from 1502.
During his tenure at the second chancery, Machiavelli persuaded Soderini
to reduce the city’s reliance on mercenary forces by establishing a militia
(1505), which Machiavelli subsequently organized. He also undertook diplomatic
and military missions to the court of France; to Cesare Borgia (1475/76–1507),
the son of Pope Alexander VI (reigned 1492–1503); to Pope Julius II (reigned
1503–13), Alexander’s successor; to the court of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian
I (reigned 1493–1519); and to Pisa (1509 and 1511).
In 1503, one year after his missions to Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli wrote
a short work, Del modo di trattare i sudditi della Val di Chiana ribellati (On
the Way to Deal with the Rebel Subjects of the Valdichiana). Anticipating his
later Discourses on Livy, a commentary on the ancient Roman historian, in this
work he contrasts the errors of Florence with the wisdom of the Romans and
declares that in dealing with rebellious peoples one must either benefit them
or eliminate them. Machiavelli also was a witness to the bloody vengeance taken
by Cesare on his mutinous captains at the town of Sinigaglia (December 31,
1502), of which he wrote a famous account. In much of his early writings,
Machiavelli argues that “one should not offend a prince and later put faith in
him.”
In 1503 Machiavelli was sent to Rome for the duration of the conclave
that elected Pope Julius II, an enemy of the Borgias, whose election Cesare had
unwisely aided. Machiavelli watched Cesare’s decline and, in a poem (First
Decennale), celebrated his imprisonment, a burden that “he deserved as a rebel
against Christ.” Altogether, Machiavelli embarked on more than 40 diplomatic
missions during his 14 years at the chancery.
In 1512 the Florentine republic was overthrown and the gonfalonier
deposed by a Spanish army that Julius II had enlisted into his Holy League. The
Medici family returned to rule Florence, and Machiavelli, suspected of
conspiracy, was imprisoned, tortured, and sent into exile in 1513 to his
father’s small property in San Casciano, just south of Florence. There he wrote
his two major works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy, both of which were
published after his death. He dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo di Piero de’
Medici (1492–1519), ruler of Florence from 1513 and grandson of Lorenzo de’
Medici (1449–92). When, on Lorenzo’s death, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici
(1478–1534) came to govern Florence, Machiavelli was presented to the cardinal
by Lorenzo Strozzi (1488–1538), scion of one of Florence’s wealthiest families,
to whom he dedicated the dialogue The Art of War (1521; Dell’arte della
guerra).
Machiavelli was first employed in 1520 by the cardinal to resolve a case
of bankruptcy in Lucca, where he took the occasion to write a sketch of its
government and to compose his The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (1520;
La vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca). Later that year the cardinal agreed
to have Machiavelli elected official historian of the republic, a post to which
he was appointed in November 1520 with a salary of 57 gold florins a year,
later increased to 100. In the meantime, he was commissioned by the Medici pope
Leo X (reigned 1513–21) to write a discourse on the organization of the
government of Florence. Machiavelli criticized both the Medici regime and the
succeeding republic he had served and boldly advised the pope to restore the
republic, replacing the unstable mixture of republic and principality then
prevailing. Shortly thereafter, in May 1521, he was sent for two weeks to the
Franciscan chapter at Carpi, where he improved his ability to “reason about
silence.” Machiavelli faced a dilemma about how to tell the truth about the
rise of the Medici in Florence without offending his Medici patron.
After the death of Pope Leo X in 1521, Cardinal Giulio, Florence’s sole
master, was inclined to reform the city’s government and sought out the advice
of Machiavelli, who replied with the proposal he had made to Leo X. In 1523,
following the death of Pope Adrian VI, the cardinal became Pope Clement VII,
and Machiavelli worked with renewed enthusiasm on an official history of
Florence. In June 1525 he presented his Florentine Histories (Istorie
Fiorentine) to the pope, receiving in return a gift of 120 ducats. In April
1526 Machiavelli was made chancellor of the Procuratori delle Mura to
superintend Florence’s fortifications. At this time the pope had formed a Holy
League at Cognac against Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (reigned 1519–56), and
Machiavelli went with the army to join his friend Francesco Guicciardini
(1482–1540), the pope’s lieutenant, with whom he remained until the sack of
Rome by the emperor’s forces brought the war to an end in May 1527. Now that
Florence had cast off the Medici, Machiavelli hoped to be restored to his old
post at the chancery. But the few favours that the Medici had doled out to him
caused the supporters of the free republic to look upon him with suspicion.
Denied the post, he fell ill and died within a month.
Writings
In office Machiavelli wrote a number of short political discourses and
poems (the Decennali) on Florentine history. It was while he was out of office
and in exile, however, that the “Florentine Secretary,” as Machiavelli came to
be called, wrote the works of political philosophy for which he is remembered.
In his most noted letter (December 10, 1513), he described one of his days—in
the morning walking in the woods, in the afternoon drinking and gambling with
friends at the inn, and in the evening reading and reflecting in his study,
where, he says, “I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born
for.” In the same letter, Machiavelli remarks that he has just composed a
little work on princes—a “whimsy”—and thus lightly introduces arguably the most
famous book on politics ever written, the work that was to give the name
Machiavellian to the teaching of worldly success through scheming deceit.
About the same time that Machiavelli wrote The Prince (1513), he was
also writing a very different book, Discourses on Livy (or, more precisely,
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy [Discorsi sopra la prima deca
di Tito Livio]). Both books were first published only after Machiavelli’s
death, the Discourses on Livy in 1531 and The Prince in 1532. They are
distinguished from his other works by the fact that in the dedicatory letter to
each he says that it contains everything he knows. The dedication of the Discourses
on Livy presents the work to two of Machiavelli’s friends, who he says are not
princes but deserve to be, and criticizes the sort of begging letter he appears
to have written in dedicating The Prince. The two works differ also in
substance and manner. Whereas The Prince is mostly concerned with
princes—particularly new princes—and is short, easy to read, and, according to
many, dangerously wicked, the Discourses on Livy is a “reasoning” that is long,
difficult, and full of advice on how to preserve republics. Every thoughtful
treatment of Machiavelli has had to come to terms with the differences between
his two most important works.
The Prince
The first and most persistent view of Machiavelli is that of a teacher
of evil. The German-born American philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) begins
his interpretation from this point. The Prince is in the tradition of the
“Mirror for Princes”—i.e., books of advice that enabled princes to see
themselves as though reflected in a mirror—which began with the Cyropaedia by
the Greek historian Xenophon (431–350 bc) and continued into the Middle Ages.
Prior to Machiavelli, works in this genre advised princes to adopt the best
prince as their model, but Machiavelli’s version recommends that a prince go to
the “effectual truth” of things and forgo the standard of “what should be done”
lest he bring about his ruin. To maintain himself a prince must learn how not
to be good and use or not use this knowledge “according to necessity.” An
observer would see such a prince as guided by necessity, and from this
standpoint Machiavelli can be interpreted as the founder of modern political
science, a discipline based on the actual state of the world as opposed to how
the world might be in utopias such as the Republic of Plato (428/27–348/47 bc)
or the City of God of Saint Augustine (354–430). This second, amoral
interpretation can be found in works by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke
(1862–1954) and the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). The amoral
interpretation fastens on Machiavelli’s frequent resort to “necessity” in order
to excuse actions that might otherwise be condemned as immoral. But Machiavelli
also advises the use of prudence in particular circumstances, and, though he
sometimes offers rules or remedies for princes to adopt, he does not seek to
establish exact or universal laws of politics in the manner of modern political
science.
Machiavelli divides principalities into those that are acquired and
those that are inherited. In general, he argues that the more difficult it is
to acquire control over a state, the easier it is to hold on to it. The reason
for this is that the fear of a new prince is stronger than the love for a
hereditary prince; hence, the new prince, who relies on “a dread of punishment
that never forsakes you,” will succeed, but a prince who expects his subjects
to keep their promises of support will be disappointed. The prince will find
that “each wants to die for him when death is at a distance,” but, when the
prince needs his subjects, they generally decline to serve as promised. Thus,
every prince, whether new or old, must look upon himself as a new prince and
learn to rely on “one’s own arms,” both literally in raising one’s own army and
metaphorically in not relying on the goodwill of others.
The new prince relies on his own virtue, but, if virtue is to enable him
to acquire a state, it must have a new meaning distinct from the New Testament
virtue of seeking peace. Machiavelli’s notion of virtù requires the prince to
be concerned foremost with the art of war and to seek not merely security but
also glory, for glory is included in necessity. Virtù for Machiavelli is virtue
not for its own sake but rather for the sake of the reputation it enables
princes to acquire. Liberality, for example, does not aid a prince, because the
recipients may not be grateful, and lavish displays necessitate taxing of the
prince’s subjects, who will despise him for it. Thus, a prince should not be
concerned if he is held to be stingy, as this vice enables him to rule.
Similarly, a prince should not care about being held cruel as long as the
cruelty is “well used.” Machiavelli sometimes uses virtù in the traditional
sense too, as in a famous passage on Agathocles (361–289 bc), the self-styled
king of Sicily, whom Machiavelli describes as a “most excellent captain” but
one who came to power by criminal means. Of Agathocles, Machiavelli writes that
“one cannot call it virtue to kill one’s citizens, betray one’s friends, to be
without faith, without mercy and without religion.” Yet in the very next
sentence he speaks of “the virtue of Agathocles,” who did all these things.
Virtue, according to Machiavelli, aims to reduce the power of fortune over
human affairs because fortune keeps men from relying on themselves. At first
Machiavelli admits that fortune rules half of men’s lives, but then, in an
infamous metaphor, he compares fortune to a woman who lets herself be won more
by the impetuous and the young, “who command her with more audacity,” than by
those who proceed cautiously. Machiavelli cannot simply dismiss or replace the
traditional notion of moral virtue, which gets its strength from the religious
beliefs of ordinary people. His own virtue of mastery coexists with traditional
moral virtue yet also makes use of it. A prince who possesses the virtue of
mastery can command fortune and manage people to a degree never before thought
possible.
In the last chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli writes a passionate
“exhortation to seize Italy and to free her from the barbarians”—apparently
France and Spain, which had been overrunning the disunited peninsula. He calls
for a redeemer, mentioning the miracles that occurred as Moses led the
Israelites to the promised land, and closes with a quotation from a patriotic
poem by Petrarch (1304–74). The final chapter has led many to a third
interpretation of Machiavelli as a patriot rather than as a disinterested
scientist.
The Discourses on Livy
Like The Prince, the Discourses on Livy admits of various
interpretations. One view, elaborated separately in works by the political
theorists J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner in the 1970s, stresses the work’s
republicanism and locates Machiavelli in a republican tradition that starts
with Aristotle (384–322 bc) and continues through the organization of the
medieval city-states, the renewal of classical political philosophy in
Renaissance humanism, and the establishment of the contemporary American
republic. This interpretation focuses on Machiavelli’s various pro-republican
remarks, such as his statement that the multitude is wiser and more constant
than a prince and his emphasis in the Discourses on Livy on the republican
virtue of self-sacrifice as a way of combating corruption. Yet Machiavelli’s
republicanism does not rest on the usual republican premise that power is safer
in the hands of many than it is in the hands of one. To the contrary, he
asserts that, to found or reform a republic, it is necessary to “be alone.” Any
ordering must depend on a single mind; thus, Romulus “deserves excuse” for
killing Remus, his brother and partner in the founding of Rome, because it was
for the common good. This statement is as close as Machiavelli ever came to
saying “the end justifies the means,” a phrase closely associated with
interpretations of The Prince.
Republics need the kind of leaders that Machiavelli describes in The
Prince. These “princes in a republic” cannot govern in accordance with justice,
because those who get what they deserve from them do not feel any obligation.
Nor do those who are left alone feel grateful. Thus, a prince in a republic
will have no “partisan friends” unless he learns “to kill the sons of Brutus,”
using violence to make examples of enemies of the republic and, not
incidentally, of himself. To reform a corrupt state presupposes a good man, but
to become a prince presupposes a bad man. Good men, Machiavelli claims, will
almost never get power, and bad men will almost never use power for a good end.
Yet, since republics become corrupt when the people lose the fear that compels
them to obey, the people must be led back to their original virtue by
sensational executions reminding them of punishment and reviving their fear.
The apparent solution to the problem is to let bad men gain glory through
actions that have a good outcome, if not a good motive.
In the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli favours the deeds of the ancients
above their philosophy; he reproaches his contemporaries for consulting ancient
jurists for political wisdom rather than looking to the actual history of Rome.
He argues that the factional tumults of the Roman republic, which were
condemned by many ancient writers, actually made Rome free and great. Moreover,
although Machiavelli was a product of the Renaissance—and is often portrayed as
its leading exponent (e.g., by 19th-century Swiss historian Jacob
Burckhardt)—he also criticized it, particularly for the humanism it derived
from Plato, Aristotle, and the Roman orator Cicero (106–43 bc). He called for
“new modes and orders” and compared himself to the explorers of unknown lands
in his time. His emphasis on the effectual truth led him to seek the hidden
springs of politics in fraud and conspiracy, examples of which he discussed
with apparent relish. It is notable that, in both The Prince and the Discourses
on Livy, the longest chapters are on conspiracy.
Throughout his two chief works, Machiavelli sees politics as defined by
the difference between the ancients and the moderns: the ancients are strong,
the moderns weak. The moderns are weak because they have been formed by
Christianity, and, in three places in the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli
boldly and impudently criticizes the Roman Catholic church and Christianity
itself. For Machiavelli the church is the cause of Italy’s disunity; the clergy
is dishonest and leads people to believe “that it is evil to say evil of evil”;
and Christianity glorifies suffering and makes the world effeminate. But
Machiavelli leaves it unclear whether he prefers atheism, paganism, or a
reformed Christianity, writing later, in a letter dated April 16, 1527 (only
two months before his death): “I love my fatherland more than my soul.”
The Florentine
Histories
Machiavelli’s longest work—commissioned by Pope Leo X in 1520, presented
to Pope Clement VII in 1525, and first published in 1532—is a history of
Florence from its origin to the death of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici in 1492.
Adopting the approach of humanist historians before him, Machiavelli used the
plural “histories,” dividing his account into “books” with nonhistorical introductions
and invented speeches presented as if they were actual reports. His history,
moreover, takes place in a nonhistorical context—a contest between virtue and
fortune. The theme of the Florentine Histories is the city’s remarkable party
division, which, unlike the divisions in ancient Rome, kept the city weak and
corrupt. Like the Discourses on Livy, the Florentine Histories contains (less
bold) criticism of the church and popes and revealing portraits of leading
characters, especially of the Medici (the book is organized around the return
of Cosimo de’ Medici [1389–1464] to Florence in 1434 after his exile). It also
features an exaggeratedly “Machiavellian” oration by a plebeian leader,
apparently Michele di Lando, who was head of the 1378 Revolt of the Ciompi
(“wool carders”), a rebellion of Florence’s lower classes that resulted in the
formation of the city’s most democratic (albeit short-lived) government.
Although not a modern historian, Machiavelli, with his emphasis on “diverse
effects,” exhibits some of the modern historian’s devotion to facts.
The Art of War and
other writings
The Art of War (1521), one of only a few works of Machiavelli to be
published during his lifetime, is a dialogue set in the Orti Oricellari, a
garden in Florence where humanists gathered to discuss philosophy and politics.
The principal speaker is Fabrizio Colonna, a professional condottiere and
Machiavelli’s authority on the art of war. He urges, contrary to the literary
humanists, that the ancients be imitated in “strong and harsh things, not
delicate and soft”—i.e., in war. Fabrizio, though a mercenary himself, inveighs
against the use of mercenaries in modern times and presents the Roman army as
his model of military excellence. The dialogue was later praised by the
Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) and has achieved a
prominent place in the history of writings on war.
Among Machiavelli’s lesser writings, two deserve mention: The Life of
Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (1520) and The Mandrake (1518; La Mandragola).
The former is a sketch of Castruccio Castracani (1281–1328), the Ghibelline
ruler of Lucca (a city near Florence), who is presented as the greatest man of
postclassical times. It concludes with a list of witty remarks attributed to
Castruccio but actually taken from ancient philosophers, providing a rare
glimpse of Machiavelli’s view of them. The Mandrake, the best known of
Machiavelli’s three plays, was probably composed in 1518. In it a foolish old
jurist, Messer Nicia, allows himself to be cuckolded by a young man, Callimaco,
in order to produce a son he cannot beget himself. His wife, Lucrezia, is
persuaded to comply—despite her virtue—by a crooked priest, and the conspiracy
is facilitated by a procurer. Since at the end of the play everyone gets what
he wants, the lesson is that immoral actions such as adultery can bring
happiness—out of evil can come good.
Assessment
Machiavelli’s influence on later times must be divided into what was
transmitted under his own name and what was known through the works of others
but not acknowledged as Machiavelli’s. Since his own name was infamous, there
is little of the former kind. “Machiavellian” has never been an epithet of
praise; indeed, one of the villains of the play Henry VI, by William
Shakespeare, claims to surpass “murtherous Machevil.” For moral lessons like
the one described above and for attacks on the church, Machiavelli’s works were
put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Forbidden Books”) when it was
first drawn up in 1564. Nonetheless, his works were read by all the modern
philosophers, though only a few of them were brave enough to defend him: the
English lawyer and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) discussed Machiavelli
in his The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (1625), noting his boldness;
the English political philosopher James Harrington (1611–77), in his The
Common-wealth of Oceana (1656), speaks admiringly of Machiavelli as the “prince
of politicians” and the disciple of ancient prudence; the Dutch-Jewish
philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77) defended Machiavelli’s good
intentions in teaching tyrants how to gain power, claiming in his Political
Treatise (1677) that Machiavelli was a republican; likewise, the French
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) asserted in his Social Contract
(1762) that Machiavelli was, despite appearances, “an honest man and a good
citizen” and The Prince “the book of republicans.” The contemporary republican
interpretation of Machiavelli, less mindful of his evil reputation, presents
him as a communitarian alternative to self-interested liberalism.
More powerful, however, was Machiavelli’s underground influence on
thinkers who avoided using his name. One may suspect that some used his
doctrines even while joining in attacks on him. One such scholar, for example,
was the Italian philosopher Giovanni Botero (1540–1617), who was among the
first to establish the idea of a moral exemption for the state. Authors taking
a similar approach developed, for safety’s sake, the practice of quoting
passages from the Roman historian Tacitus (ad 56–120)—thus becoming known as
“Tacitists”—when they might just as well have cited Machiavelli.
But the greater, more fundamental claim of Machiavelli’s influence, made
especially by Burckhardt and Strauss, is as the founder of modernity.
Machiavelli himself despised the moderns of his day as weak, but he also held
forth the possibility of a “perpetual republic” that would remedy the weakness
of the moderns and correct the errors of the Romans and so establish a
political order no longer subject to the vicissitudes of fortune. There is no
modern science in Machiavelli, but the Baconian idea of the conquest of nature
and fortune in the interest of humanity is fully present. So too are modern
notions of irreversible progress, of secularism, and of obtaining public good
through private interest. Whether Machiavelli could have had so grand an
ambition remains controversial, but all agree on his greatness—his novelty, the
penetration of his mind, and the grace of his style.
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