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| Machiavelli |
Q: You may be interested to know that your name has survived into the 21st century more or less as a curse word used by democrats the world over. To say some clever political maneuver is “Machiavellian” is to say it is, in some disreputable sense, an evasion of the democratic ideal.
M: And the democratic ideal would be what?
Q: Rule by the people, indirectly of course. Here in the
United States, the people rule through their elected representatives.
M: You’ve just described a republic, not a democracy which,
even the ancients knew, was not possible in large states. Athens was a
democracy, Sparta an aristocratic oligarchy that survived on the strength of
the institution of slavery. Both were city-states. The Florentine republic, my
home turf, dates from 1115. The Peloponnesian Wars between Sparta and Athens,
one intensely militaristic, the other reliant on diplomacy and trade, lasted,
on and off, for about four decades, and Sparta won a temporary victory because
it afforded Athens a magnanimous peace arrangement. What it won in war it lost
in peace. I don’t know that any broad conclusions are here possible – except,
perhaps, that the fortunes of states rest on shifting sands. The United States,
the sole remaining superpower – perhaps not for long – following the collapse of
the Soviet Union, is being challenged daily by both Russia and China.
Q: I’m happy to be corrected by the man who “wrote the book,”
so to speak, on diplomacy and statecraft. Some say it was your ambition in The Prince to give succor to tyrants.
M: There are, among modern scholars, various schools of
thought on that still tender, much debated question. Some scholars believe The Prince – the title I gave the essay
was The Principalities --was subtly
subversive, in fact a satire on anti-Republican, autocratic rule.
Q: And so the answer to the question is – no.
M: One wants whatever one loves to survive the buffetings
and insults of history. I believe in subtlety. It’s helped me escape the noose,
as you westerners say, many times. Ecclesiastes advises, “Place not thy faith
in Princes.” Let the dead bury their dead. But you didn’t summon me from the
grave to discuss ancient systems of governance. You want to know what I think
is going on politically in Connecticut, “the land of steady habits.”
Q: And “the
constitution state.”
M: Both misnomers. “Steady” implies continuity, and a state
that is unsteady is one that has exchanged good habits for bad habits. A good habit is one that gives rise to
fruitful consequences. As for constitutions, the first serious progressive
president, Woodrow Wilson, thought constitutions were bunk. He believed, as does
the Prince in my essay, that government is a contest of force. A constitution is a
main mast in a storm. If departure from a rule is an indication of infidelity,
I do not see how it is possible to maintain a view that the dominant political
party in Connecticut, the land of unsteady
habits, has been faithful to constitutional prescriptions. The only constant in
your state just now appears to be rootless change. Political subversion here
has been serpentinely subtle. Ruling politicians in Connecticut want to escape
constitutional nooses and, so far, they have been disappointingly successful.
Q: It sounds as if you were, or are, a republican.
M: Does it now?
Q: Those compressed lips, that sly smile of yours, cannot
have won you many friends.
M: Place not thy faith in friends. Here in Connecticut, your
head of state has no friends, only a handful of business associates, few of
whom are concerned with the welfare of the republic. And, of course, within the
opposition party, there are some who believe Lamont has no head either; he has
been written off as a wealthy businessman whose pulsing heart is brimming over
with empathy. In politics, by the way, empathy is a means of connecting
emotionally with certain interest groups. It was the same in my day. “The more
things change,” the French say, “the more they remain the same.”
Q: Well, your Prince’s heart was brimming
with ambition rather than empathy.
M: Yes. Moderns think he might have been a touch more magnanimous,
the prerogative of the victors. They do not realize that the Borgias were
magnanimous. Art in Florence and elsewhere flourished under their touch. The
ambition of the Prince is to rule, hopefully to the betterment of his subjects,
because there is an unavoidable link between the welfare of the people and the
rule of princes. The ambition of ruling Democrats in your state is to drive
away competition from an opposing party, to maintain people in a cowed state of
fear and submission, and to crush what the founders of your country once called
“the separation of powers,” which prevents empathetic tyranny from bewitching the people. The separation of powers allow the people to be magnanimous
to each other by maintaining their liberties.
Coronavirus has crowned Governor Ned Lamont as a Machiavellian
Prince, though the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, is a touch more princely,
more Borgia-like. In what important respects do these two governors differ from
the Borgias of my day who first abolished the republic and then ruled Florence
with an iron fist and an empathetic heart for half a century and more?
The problem in modern Machiavellian research is not insoluble. It should be obvious to historians that I am a republican. I was arrested and tortured by the anti-republicans of my day. One does not forget the lash. The Prince, some scholars say, is a satirical lash. The moral imperatives in that book are descriptive only. Viewed as satire, the political ideas captured in Il Principe are no different than the forthrightly republican ideas put forth in Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy.
The Florentine
Republic was, with the aid of a Spanish army, subverted by the Borgias. I was
in charge of the local militia that attempted to thwart the destruction of the republic, but
not for long and not for good. We lost, they won. I was for fourteen years a
diplomat in Italy’s Florentine Republic, dismissed when the Borgias returned to
power and systemically destroyed the very idea of republican government, after
which I was imprisoned, tortured and banished from any role in public life.
You, in the United
States, cannot know what it means to write in the shadow of the torcher chamber.
Under the lash of oppression, satire is the only weapon that will save you from
exile and personal destruction. There is no contradiction between these two
works, a seeming contradiction only, that has distorted a proper understanding
following the publication of both works after my death. They are the heads and
tails of the same defiant republican coin. There are only and always two parties in history – a republican
and an anti-republican party, and all politics is to be understood with
reference to this tense division. Are we still a republic? That is the question
that should be foremost in the minds of political leaders and the tribunes of
the people in your state.
Q: Then let me put
the question to you: Are we any longer a republic in Connecticut?
A: You are not. It
is as plain as the nose on your face you are not. The media in your state, with
some few, very few exception, have no nose for smelling out republican rot.
With Coronavirus breathing down your neck, the very idea of a separation of
powers, indispensable to the modern republican state, has been abolished, and
the separate powers – legislative, executive and judicial – have been returned
to Il Principe. Of course there are some important differences.
Q: Such as?
A: Among the people of Florence in my time, who certainly did not place their trust in princes, the Borgias were not capable of snuffing out the flame of liberty, which took refuge in the works of pre-humanists and humanists. Boccaccio, Dante, great artists such as Michelangelo, all kept the republican fire alive, each in their own way. The humanists were humanists because they were human. The great Tertullian, writing when Christianity was yet in its cradle, used to say, “Nothing human is alien to me.” What does it mean to be human? Sin and virtue stand as sentinels over our humanity. The seven deadly sins are: lust, including but not limited to excessive sexual appetite, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. And their polar opposites are: chastity, self-restraint, charity, integrity, kindness and forgiveness. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether your politicians are chastened, self-restrained, kind, forgiving and, perhaps most important of all, whether their politics show they have integrity. The fate of your republic will rise or fall on your answer to these questions.
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