Five hundred years of misreading Machiavelli

When a thinker's name turns into an adjective, it is usually a sign that he has been misunderstood.

Machiavellian: unprincipled, calculating, willing to treat any means as legitimate so long as it serves the end.

The adjective fits almost nothing in the life of the man who produced it.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) served the Florentine Republic as an official for fourteen years. When the republic fell he lost his post, was arrested, tortured and banished from the city. He wrote The Prince in that exile, hoping to be let back in — and the book was not published in his lifetime.

In the same years he was writing another and far longer book: the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. Its subject is the republic, the role of the people and the preservation of liberty.

Machiavelli cannot be read without setting those two books side by side.

Where the break comes#

Machiavelli's radicalism does not lie in a defence of wickedness. The tricks of power had been written down before him.

The break lies in his changing of the question.

Throughout the Middle Ages the books of advice written for rulers — the speculum principis, the “mirror of princes” — asked a single question: what should a good ruler be like? The answer was a list of virtues: justice, generosity, mercy, piety.

Machiavelli asked something else: how is power actually won, held and lost?

This is the move from what ought to be to what is. In his own phrase, instead of pursuing imagined republics he goes after the effectual truth of things.

And from there follows the famous conclusion. A ruler who insists on being good will come to ruin among so many who are not good. He must therefore also learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge when it is required.

Note the wording: not “always”, but “when it is required”. Machiavelli is not recommending wickedness; he is putting it in a toolbox and leaving the question of when to open it to political judgement.

Virtù is not virtue#

The most persistently mistranslated concept in Machiavelli is virtù.

In the Christian tradition the Latin virtus had become “virtue”: humility, mercy, patience.

Machiavelli returns the word to its Roman meaning: vir — man. Virtù is a person's capacity to give shape to events. Courage, resolve, a sense of timing, the ability to be ruthless when ruthlessness is needed.

In Machiavelli, therefore, virtù is not a moral quality but a capacity for effective action. A ruler may be merciful or he may not be; virtù consists in knowing which of the two the moment calls for.

Fortuna: the river and the dyke#

Against virtù stands fortuna — fortune.

The image Machiavelli uses for this pair is his thought in miniature. Fortune is like a river in flood. When it rises it drowns the plains, tears up trees, brings down houses. Nobody can stand in its way.

But while the river is calm, dykes and channels can be built. Then, when the flood comes, it runs off into the channels, or at least does less damage.

The philosophical claim here is strong. A man may govern half of what happens to him. Chance does not disappear; but whoever is prepared can cope with it.

This departs both from the ancient Stoicism that accepts fate and from the medieval view that refers everything to providence. Machiavelli's man is neither free nor determined — he is a half-and-half creature.

The Discourses: the real book#

The Prince is the famous work; but Machiavelli's political thought is built in the Discourses.

Its central theses run flatly against the cliché of “Machiavellianism”.

A republic is superior to a monarchy, because it lasts longer and is stronger.

Conflict is good. Rome owed its greatness to the standing quarrel between patricians and plebeians. No political theorist before Machiavelli had counted internal conflict a virtue. The ideal of harmony was universal. Machiavelli argues that tension is what keeps institutions alive.

The people are wiser than the prince. The people want to protect their own interest; the prince wants to crush others. Liberty should therefore be given to the people to guard.

Corruption is the real danger. A republic collapses not from outside but from within, as the virtue of its citizens rots.

That last thesis is the source of the notion of the “Machiavellian moment” in J. G. A. Pocock, whom we covered today: the moment at which a republic confronts its own fragility in time.

How do the two books fit together?#

Commentators have wrestled with this question for centuries. The main answers are these.

The reading by circumstance: The Prince is written about founding a new state in a corrupt order; the Discourses about maintaining a republic already founded. Different tasks require different instruments.

The republican reading: the thesis Rousseau advanced. The Prince is in fact a satire, a covertly republican text, warning the people by exposing the methods of tyranny.

The unified reading: both books rest on the same principle — politics is a domain with a logic of its own, independent of morality. That logic takes one form in a monarchy and another in a republic.

The third is the reading most widely accepted in the academy today.

The objections#

The most serious objection brought against Machiavelli is not the charge of immorality.

Isaiah Berlin's thesis is more disquieting. Machiavelli does not reject morality; he shows that there are two moralities. Christian morality and classical civic morality are each coherent, and they are incompatible. A politician cannot live both at once.

For Berlin this is Machiavelli's true destructiveness: he demolishes the idea that values can finally be reconciled.

A second objection is practical. Does Machiavelli's advice work? Cesare Borgia — the exemplary figure of The Prince — failed in the end and died poor. Machiavelli's own diplomatic career was hardly brilliant.

A third objection is historical. What Machiavelli calls “the effectual truth of things” is in fact the particular condition of Renaissance Italy. It is not a universal science of politics but the map of one period.

Why he is still read#

Machiavelli's durability comes from a method: thinking about politics in its own terms.

Before asking whether a political decision is moral, one asks what balance of power produced it, whose interest it serves, how long it can be sustained. That is now the default posture of political science. Its name is Machiavelli.

There is a price for it, and Machiavelli knew as much. Separating politics from morality can be pushed as far as expelling morality from politics. The twentieth century showed where that slide ends.

But Machiavelli's defence is available too: to diagnose a disease is not to approve of it.

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In Turkish: there are many translations of The Prince and of the Discourses. That the Discourses is Machiavelli's real political text is still not widely enough known in Turkey.

Note: Machiavelli lived long before photography, so the cover image is the canonical portrait painted by Santi di Tito in the sixteenth century and displayed in the Palazzo Vecchio.