"Machiavelli grips us. But if by chance we want to grasp him, he evades us: he is elusive." -Althusser
Machiavelli is, by my estimation, one of the great thinkers of the Western World. However, he is not a popular figure. His name conjures up banal phrases such as "the ends justify the means" and the perennially popular "Machiavellian" with its charge of cynicism and immorality. To many, he is the diabolical thinker of dictatorship, unsuitable for a the ideal of peaceful bourgeois democracy. Such a boogeyman is suitable only for frightening certain academics. Questions over whether he ultimately supported a republic or a tyranny, or whether or not The Prince was written with satirical intent, are below the man and his method. One can only wonder if some of his critics have ever read his work with anything near the level of sincerity with which he wrote.
My reading of of Macchiavelli is from the point of view of the philosophy of history. Is Machiavelli a philosopher of history? Is there a method by which he theorizes history? These are the questions raised by Althusser in his "Machiavelli and Us", a work that has to a large degree influenced my own reading, though I do not share all of his conclusions. Althusser answered, as do I, in the affirmative. There is a historical-philosophical base to his thought, one that is essential to grasping him in his proper place. My thesis is that his place lies in the short list of the most important thinkers of History and that there is a consistent historical method in his works, a method mediates the political content. The contribution is that of a materialist approach, and, more critically, a formulation of the unity of political necessity and historical reality.
That short list of thinkers looks something like this:
Thucydides -> Machiavelli -> Hegel -> Marx
The title of the final chapter in The Prince clearly states the broad aim: Exhortation to deliver Italy from foreign barbarians. Italy is the battlefield of the French, Spanish, and Swiss and its states are divided and in various levels of mismanagement and ruin. Bands of mercenaries terrorize the countryside and hold states hostage to their services. Gentleman adventurers plot and hedge their bets on foreign interventions against their neighbors. A great prince, a world-historical individual, is needed to unify the peninsula under his command and to drive the foreigners out. He considers Lorenzo de Medici to be just the man for the job.
He spends a great deal of time discussing the failures of states and their leaders. What is needed is a new prince. In the opening lines of Ch. 24 in The Prince we are told this explicitly: through studying all that was written previously, the new prince might be regarded with the same respect and honor as a hereditary prince. The hereditary regime that can carry out the task does not exist. Furthermore, he has already noted how apt new regimes are to fall, and his aim is to establish a state that will last (Althusser makes this point well). The New Prince will unify the country with the vigor of a unique Great Man and hold it with the stability of a hereditary king.
The New Prince is new in the broadest historical sense. He is a break from the old, armed with the distilled gains of both antiquity and the middle ages. Machiavelli spends a great deal of time conversing with the ancients, but he does not simply take the Roman Republic as a model to be emulated. He reads Livy with his feet set firmly in the present. The virtues of the ancients are extracted from their source so that they might be of use in a context that the author recognizes as unsuitable for simple repetition.
His process of extraction and synthesis is seen clearly in the treatment of military matters. The New Prince cannot deliver Italy from foreign invaders without a proper tool, an army. The Prince ends with a discussion on ways in which a Prince may exploit the military weakness of the foreign armies and gain fame for himself, The Art of War is concerned with the development of a new-model citizen army, and there is much discussion of military virtue and leadership in the Discourses. In the Art of War, he acknowledges that the advances in military technology and technique would make the armament of the legionary useless. So despite all of the tactical-technological detail in the work, the main thrust is given to the question of developing the most effective, reliable soldier through social-institutional change. It is through studying the virtues of Roman society that the Prince will forge his weapon. The analysis cuts through the particular of military conduct in order to arrive at the general and the general is profitable because it has the quality of transference.
Now, if a readers deviates toward the overemphasis of the political, then the process of historical distillation instead presents as moral. The best soldier becomes the best soldier and so on. The political factor is supported by the structure of the historical.
The intent was not to "learn from history", to use that hollow phrase repeated in every classroom. Nor is there any scholarship for its own sake in his works. Machiavelli approached history with a set of conditions in order to make it useful. He has never been forgiven for that.
That short list of thinkers looks something like this:
Thucydides -> Machiavelli -> Hegel -> Marx
Political Method
Our Italian certainly dealt with history on an intimate level and handled the material with instinctive clarity and a razor insight. Yet, his work (here I am focused on Discourses, The Prince, and The Art of War) is primarily political in its aim. This is where I will begin. In order to recognize his philosophy of history, we must first formulate the political aim; without properly recognizing the latter, the former will not appear. The issue is not that the political element has been traditionally overlooked but that it has most often been improperly placed within the structure of his works. An overemphasis on the political buries the historical and renders the system unintelligible. A consequence of the deviation is an interposition of morality on the part of the reader which renders Machiavelli incoherent and contradictory.The title of the final chapter in The Prince clearly states the broad aim: Exhortation to deliver Italy from foreign barbarians. Italy is the battlefield of the French, Spanish, and Swiss and its states are divided and in various levels of mismanagement and ruin. Bands of mercenaries terrorize the countryside and hold states hostage to their services. Gentleman adventurers plot and hedge their bets on foreign interventions against their neighbors. A great prince, a world-historical individual, is needed to unify the peninsula under his command and to drive the foreigners out. He considers Lorenzo de Medici to be just the man for the job.
He spends a great deal of time discussing the failures of states and their leaders. What is needed is a new prince. In the opening lines of Ch. 24 in The Prince we are told this explicitly: through studying all that was written previously, the new prince might be regarded with the same respect and honor as a hereditary prince. The hereditary regime that can carry out the task does not exist. Furthermore, he has already noted how apt new regimes are to fall, and his aim is to establish a state that will last (Althusser makes this point well). The New Prince will unify the country with the vigor of a unique Great Man and hold it with the stability of a hereditary king.
The New Prince is new in the broadest historical sense. He is a break from the old, armed with the distilled gains of both antiquity and the middle ages. Machiavelli spends a great deal of time conversing with the ancients, but he does not simply take the Roman Republic as a model to be emulated. He reads Livy with his feet set firmly in the present. The virtues of the ancients are extracted from their source so that they might be of use in a context that the author recognizes as unsuitable for simple repetition.
His process of extraction and synthesis is seen clearly in the treatment of military matters. The New Prince cannot deliver Italy from foreign invaders without a proper tool, an army. The Prince ends with a discussion on ways in which a Prince may exploit the military weakness of the foreign armies and gain fame for himself, The Art of War is concerned with the development of a new-model citizen army, and there is much discussion of military virtue and leadership in the Discourses. In the Art of War, he acknowledges that the advances in military technology and technique would make the armament of the legionary useless. So despite all of the tactical-technological detail in the work, the main thrust is given to the question of developing the most effective, reliable soldier through social-institutional change. It is through studying the virtues of Roman society that the Prince will forge his weapon. The analysis cuts through the particular of military conduct in order to arrive at the general and the general is profitable because it has the quality of transference.
Now, if a readers deviates toward the overemphasis of the political, then the process of historical distillation instead presents as moral. The best soldier becomes the best soldier and so on. The political factor is supported by the structure of the historical.
Historical Method
Machiavelli is difficult to grasp because he does not neatly formulate his method. Instead, bits and pieces are sown across his works. Nevertheless, the brilliance of the whole grips the reader and keeps him searching for the driving mechanics. What we find is a materialist approach at the core of his thought. There is a consistency which fuses the three pieces. An outline of his historical method might look like the following:
- Man acts based on a combination of necessity and personal capability, necessity being the compulsion to action and ability.
- This is developed in Book I, Ch 1 of Discourses, "men act either out of necessity or by choice, and since ability is greater where choice has less authority", and more fully in Ch 25 of The Prince. I would like to quote at length from the latter below.
- "I compare [the balance of fate and will] to a swollen river...Everyone flies before the flood, and yields to its fury, unable to resist it;and notwithstanding this state of things, men do not when the river is in its ordinary condition provide against its overflow by dikes and walls, so that when it rises it may flow either in the channel provided for it, or at any rate its violence may not be entirely unchecked...It is the same with fortune who displays her power where there is no organized valor to resist her..."
- States are subject to the constant drives of different groups
- He does not recognize class as a category - he could not have - nor is he the first to recognize the different drives of nobles and commoners. The depth of his thought on this point comes from viewing these drives as a constant and not just something that breaks out periodically.
- Therefore, they cycle through forms
- In the the Discourses (1.2), Machiavelli gives an outline of the different types of government, and how social forces drive the changes from one to the other "forced by necessity or by the suggestion of some good man". If any state could survive long enough, it would cycle through these forms over and over. The state is in a constant state of change due to its social ingredients.
- The Great Man is great only so long as the conditions allow it
- "Men almost always follow the beaten track of others...and yet cannot altogether follow the ways of others, nor attain the high qualities of those they imitate." (The Prince, Ch 6). Every man is historical, hoping to imitate the great men of the past, but unable to do so.
- In the same chapter, he discusses the deeds of four men, Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. "We shall also find in examining their acts and lives, that they had no other favor from fortune but opportunity, which gave them the material which they could mold into whatever form seemed to them best; and without such opportunity the great qualities of their souls would have been wasted, whilst without those great qualities the opportunities would have been in vain." He notes that "it was necessary for Cyrus to find the Persians dissatisfied with the rule of the Medes, and the Medes effeminate and enfeebled by long peace" and so on with the others. Situation is a necessary prerequisite for the great man.
- He recognizes ( The Prince, Ch 7) that men attain power by fortune alone with regularity. However, fortune is never enough to maintain the hold on power when challenged.
- The historical situation poses the political question and furnishes the material to answer it
- He spends a great deal of time discussing the virtues of the ancients, but he is under no crude illusion that they can simply be replicated. In the Art of War he notes as much - conditions have changed and they cannot become like they were in antiquity again! Nor does he simply see all of antiquity as some golden age of good. He recognized decline of virtu and general health under the principate. Caesar is further connected (brilliantly) with the spread of mercenary service, a symptom of an unhealthy state.
- So, the task of the New Prince is a task posed by the real conditions of Italy, but he is educated by a serious reading of what allowed for the vitality and unity of Rome and armed with the transferable essence of virtu.
The intent was not to "learn from history", to use that hollow phrase repeated in every classroom. Nor is there any scholarship for its own sake in his works. Machiavelli approached history with a set of conditions in order to make it useful. He has never been forgiven for that.
