If not, what did he really think, and what might we learn from him? John opens by referring to Machiavelli as a pragmatic visionary and champion of Republican liberty, but Ken sees Machiavelli's work, The Prince , as a manual for callousness for political ends.
John regards this worry as partly a product of myth. Moreover, this idea of political strategy at the price of morals traces back to other thinkers like Plato.
John argues that we need cunning and pragmatic leaders, even if that requires lying. But Ken argues that some sort of limit on cunning leaders' power must be imposed. Maurizio argues that politicians should study Machiavelli because of his arguments against power, tyranny, and corruption, and to seek glory instead. In , he was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de'Medici to compose a History of Florence , an assignment completed in and presented to the Cardinal, who had since ascended to the papal throne as Clement VII, in Rome.
Other small tasks were forthcoming from the Medici government, but before he could achieve a full rehabilitation, he died on 21 June It has been a common view among political philosophers that there exists a special relationship between moral goodness and legitimate authority.
Many authors especially those who composed mirror-of-princes books or royal advice books during the Middle Ages and Renaissance believed that the use of political power was only rightful if it was exercised by a ruler whose personal moral character was strictly virtuous. Thus rulers were counseled that if they wanted to succeed—that is, if they desired a long and peaceful reign and aimed to pass their office down to their offspring—they must be sure to behave in accordance with conventional standards of ethical goodness.
In a sense, it was thought that rulers did well when they did good; they earned the right to be obeyed and respected inasmuch as they showed themselves to be virtuous and morally upright see Briggs and Nederman forthcoming. Machiavelli criticizes at length precisely this moralistic view of authority in his best-known treatise, The Prince.
For Machiavelli, there is no moral basis on which to judge the difference between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. Rather, authority and power are essentially coequal: whoever has power has the right to command; but goodness does not ensure power and the good person has no more authority by virtue of being good. In this sense, Machiavelli presents a trenchant criticism of the concept of authority by arguing that the notion of legitimate rights of rulership adds nothing to the actual possession of power.
The Prince purports to reflect the self-conscious political realism of an author who is fully aware—on the basis of direct experience with the Florentine government—that goodness and right are not sufficient to win and maintain political office. Machiavelli thus seeks to learn and teach the rules of political power.
For Machiavelli, power characteristically defines political activity, and hence it is necessary for any successful ruler to know how power is to be used. Only by means of the proper application of power, Machiavelli believes, can individuals be brought to obey and will the ruler be able to maintain the state in safety and security.
Machiavelli's political theory, then, represents a concerted effort to exclude issues of authority and legitimacy from consideration in the discussion of political decision-making and political judgment. Nowhere does this come out more clearly than in his treatment of the relationship between law and force. Machiavelli acknowledges that good laws and good arms constitute the dual foundations of a well-ordered political system.
But he immediately adds that since coercion creates legality, he will concentrate his attention on force. In other words, the legitimacy of law rests entirely upon the threat of coercive force; authority is impossible for Machiavelli as a right apart from the power to enforce it. Consequently, Machiavelli is led to conclude that fear is always preferable to affection in subjects, just as violence and deception are superior to legality in effectively controlling them.
Machiavelli observes that. Love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes. Prince CW 62; translation revised. As a result, Machiavelli cannot really be said to have a theory of obligation separate from the imposition of power; people obey only because they fear the consequences of not doing so, whether the loss of life or of privileges.
And of course, power alone cannot obligate one, inasmuch as obligation assumes that one cannot meaningfully do otherwise. Concomitantly, a Machiavellian perspective directly attacks the notion of any grounding for authority independent of the sheer possession of power.
For Machiavelli, people are compelled to obey purely in deference to the superior power of the state. If I think that I should not obey a particular law, what eventually leads me to submit to that law will be either a fear of the power of the state or the actual exercise of that power. It is power which in the final instance is necessary for the enforcement of conflicting views of what I ought to do; I can only choose not to obey if I possess the power to resist the demands of the state or if I am willing to accept the consequences of the state's superiority of coercive force.
Machiavelli's argument in The Prince is designed to demonstrate that politics can only coherently be defined in terms of the supremacy of coercive power; authority as a right to command has no independent status. He substantiates this assertion by reference to the observable realities of political affairs and public life as well as by arguments revealing the self-interested nature of all human conduct.
For Machiavelli it is meaningless and futile to speak of any claim to authority and the right to command which is detached from the possession of superior political power.
The ruler who lives by his rights alone will surely wither and die by those same rights, because in the rough-and-tumble of political conflict those who prefer power to authority are more likely to succeed. Without exception the authority of states and their laws will never be acknowledged when they are not supported by a show of power which renders obedience inescapable.
The methods for achieving obedience are varied, and depend heavily upon the foresight that the prince exercises. Hence, the successful ruler needs special training. Machiavelli presents to his readers a vision of political rule allegedly purged of extraneous moralizing influences and fully aware of the foundations of politics in the effective exercise of power.
Machiavelli sees politics to be a sort of a battlefield on a different scale. Fortuna is the enemy of political order, the ultimate threat to the safety and security of the state. Machiavelli's use of the concept has been widely debated without a very satisfactory resolution.
Where conventional representations treated Fortuna as a mostly benign, if fickle, goddess, who is the source of human goods as well as evils, Machiavelli's fortune is a malevolent and uncompromising fount of human misery, affliction, and disaster. While human Fortuna may be responsible for such success as human beings achieve, no man can act effectively when directly opposed by the goddess Discourses CW — Machiavelli's most famous discussion of Fortuna occurs in Chapter 25 of The Prince , in which he proposes two analogies for understanding the human situation in the face of events.
Initially, he asserts that fortune resembles. Yet the furor of a raging river does not mean that its depredations are beyond human control: before the rains come, it is possible to take precautions to divert the worst consequences of the natural elements.
Prince CW Machiavelli reinforces the association of Fortuna with the blind strength of nature by explaining that political success depends upon appreciation of the operational principles of Fortuna.
His own experience has taught him that. In other words, Fortuna demands a violent response of those who would control her. Machiavelli's remarks point toward several salient conclusions about Fortuna and her place in his intellectual universe. Throughout his corpus, Fortuna is depicted as a primal source of violence especially as directed against humanity and as antithetical to reason. Thus, Machiavelli realizes that only preparation to pose an extreme response to the vicissitudes of Fortuna will ensure victory against her.
The main source of dispute concerned Machiavelli's attitude toward conventional moral and religious standards of human conduct, mainly in connection with The Prince. For many, his teaching endorses immoralism or, at least, amoralism. Moral values have no place in the sorts of decisions that political leaders must make, and it is a category error of the gravest sort to think otherwise.
Concentrating on the claim in The Prince that a head of state ought to do good if he can, but must be prepared to commit evil if he must Prince CW 58 , Skinner argues that Machiavelli prefers conformity to moral virtue ceteris paribus. He is thereby set into the context of the scientific revolution more generally.
More recently, the Machiavelli-as-scientist interpretation has largely gone out of favor, although some have recently found merit in a revised version of the thesis e. Other of Machiavelli's readers have found no taint of immoralism in his thought whatsoever. Jean-Jacques Rousseau long ago held that the real lesson of The Prince is to teach the people the truth about how princes behave and thus to expose, rather than celebrate, the immorality at the core of one-man rule.
Various versions of this thesis have been disseminated more recently. Some scholars, such as Garrett Mattingly , have pronounced Machiavelli the supreme satirist, pointing out the foibles of princes and their advisors. The fact that Machiavelli later wrote biting popular stage comedies is cited as evidence in support of his strong satirical bent. Thus, we should take nothing Machiavelli says about moral conduct at face value, but instead should understand his remarks as sharply humorous commentary on public affairs.
A similar range of opinions exists in connection with Machiavelli's attitude toward religion in general, and Christianity in particular. Machiavelli was no friend of the institutionalized Christian Church as he knew it.
The Discourses makes clear that conventional Christianity saps from human beings the vigor required for active civil life CW —, — And The Prince speaks with equal parts disdain and admiration about the contemporary condition of the Church and its Pope CW 29, 44—46, 65, 91— Anthony Parel argues that Machiavelli's cosmos, governed by the movements of the stars and the balance of the humors, takes on an essentially pagan and pre-Christian cast.
For others, Machiavelli may best be described as a man of conventional, if unenthusiastic, piety, prepared to bow to the externalities of worship but not deeply devoted in either soul or mind to the tenets of Christian faith. During the first generations after Machiavelli, his main influence was in non-Republican governments.
A copy was also possessed by the Catholic king and emperor Charles V. Modern materialist philosophy developed in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, starting in the generations after Machiavelli. Scholars have argued that Machiavelli was a major indirect and direct influence upon the political thinking of the Founding Fathers of the United States due to his overwhelming favoritism of republicanism and the republic type of government. Hamilton learned from Machiavelli about the importance of foreign policy for domestic policy, but may have broken from him regarding how rapacious a republic needed to be in order to survive.
Skip to main content. Again, he exclaims that a ruler is entitled to use any means to attain this end. The reason being that it is the end that counts, the means used to attain it is inconsequential. The application of Machiavellianism has had its positive aspects, but some leaders have used it to promote narrow interests with a devastating impact on their respective States.
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