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. A few dissenting voices, most notably Sebastian de Grazia and Maurizio Viroli [] , have attempted to rescue Machiavelli's reputation from those who view him as hostile or indifferent to Christianity.
Cary Nederman 28—49 extends and systematizes Grazia's insights by showing how such central Christian theological doctrines as grace and free will form important elements of Machiavelli's conceptual structure.
Viroli considers, by contrast, the historical attitudes toward the Christian religion as manifested in the Florentine republic of Machiavelli's day. Certainly, the term lo stato appears widely in Machiavelli's writings, especially in The Prince , in connection with the acquisition and application of power in a coercive sense, which renders its meaning distinct from the Latin term status condition or station from which it is derived.
Machiavelli's name and doctrines were widely invoked to justify the priority of the interests of the state in the age of absolutism. Yet, as Harvey Mansfield has shown, a careful reading of Machiavelli's use of lo stato in The Prince and elsewhere does not support this interpretation. Machiavelli is at best a transitional figure in the process by which the language of the state emerged in early modern Europe, as Mansfield concludes. Thus, the Machiavellian prince can count on no pre-existing structures of legitimation, as discussed above.
This is a precarious position, since Machiavelli insists that the throes of fortune and the conspiracies of other men render the prince constantly vulnerable to the loss of his state. The idea of a stable constitutional regime that reflects the tenor of modern political thought and practice is nowhere to be seen in Machiavelli's conception of princely government.
MP Yet Machiavelli himself apparently harbored severe doubts about whether human beings were psychologically capable of generating such flexible dispositions within themselves.
While The Prince is doubtless the most widely read of his works, the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy perhaps most honestly expresses Machiavelli's personal political beliefs and commitments, in particular, his republican sympathies.
The Discourses certainly draw upon the same reservoir of language and concepts that flowed into The Prince , but the former treatise leads us to draw conclusions quite different from—many scholars have said contradictory to—the latter. A minimal constitutional order is one in which subjects live securely vivere sicuro , ruled by a strong government which holds in check the aspirations of both nobility and people, but is in turn balanced by other legal and institutional mechanisms.
In a fully constitutional regime, however, the goal of the political order is the freedom of the community vivere libero , created by the active participation of, and contention between, the nobility and the people.
As Quentin Skinner , — has argued, liberty forms a value that anchors Machiavelli's political theory and guides his evaluations of the worthiness of different types of regimes. Only in a republic, for which Machiavelli expresses a distinct preference, may this goal be attained. Machiavelli adopted this position on both pragmatic and principled grounds.
Although Machiavelli makes relatively little comment about the French monarchy in The Prince , he devotes a great deal of attention to France in the Discourses. The work has been regarded as a handbook for politicians on the use of ruthless, self-serving cunning, and inspired the term "Machiavellian. One excerpt from the book reads: "Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
In addition to The Prince , Machiavelli wrote the treatise On the Art of War , among others, and several poems and plays, including 's satirical The Mandrake. In his later years, Machiavelli resided in a small village just outside of Florence. He died in the city on June 21, His tomb is in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, which, ironically, he had been banned from entering during the last years of his life.
Today, Machiavelli is regarded as the "father of modern political theory. We strive for accuracy and fairness. Still more calculatedly, had the author superseded description in ably providing a legacy for despots?
A single conclusion concerning the author's motive has not been drawn, though patterns of conjecture have certainly appeared within Machiavelli's critical heritage. Lord Macaulay, in emphasizing the writer's republican zeal and those privations he suffered in its behalf, has contended that it is "inconceivable that the martyr of freedom should have designedly acted as the apostle of tyranny," and that "the peculiar immorality which has rendered The Prince unpopular According to Harold J.
Laski, The Prince "is a text-book for the house of Medici set out in the terms their own history would make them appreciate and, so set out, that its author might hope for their realization of his insight into the business of government.
Macaulay has affirmed that the "judicious and candid mind of Machiavelli shows itself in his luminous, manly, and polished language.
Without looking for Italian prose he found it. For sheer volume and intensity, studies of The Prince have far exceeded those directed at Machiavelli's Discourses, though the latter work has been acknowledged an essential companion piece to the former. All of the author's subsequent studies treating history, political science, and military theory stem from this voluminous dissertation containing the most original thought of Machiavelli.
Less flamboyant than The Prince and narrower in its margin for interpretation, the Discourses contains Machiavelli's undisguised admiration for ancient governmental forms, and his most eloquent, thoroughly explicated republicanism. Commentators have noted the presence of a gravity and skillful rhetoric that at times punctuate The Prince but are in full evidence only in that work's final chapter, a memorable exhortation to the Medicis to resist foreign tyranny.
The Discourses also presents that methodical extrapolation of political theory from historical documentation which is intermittent in The Prince. Max Lerner has observed that "if The Prince is great because it gives us the grammar of power for a government, The Discourses are great because they give us the philosophy of organic unity not in a government but in a state, and the conditions under which alone a culture can survive.
For Machiavelli regarded comedy exactly as he conceived history: an interplay of forces leading unavoidably to a given result. Machiavelli's Mandragola, his only work in the comedic genre, clearly reflected this parallel.
De Sanctis has remarked that "under the frivolous surface [of Mandragola ] are hidden the profoundest complexities of the inner life, and the action is propelled by spiritual forces as inevitable as fate.
It is enough to know the characters to guess the end. Masquerading as a doctor, Callimaco advises Nicia to administer a potion of mandrake to Lucrezia to render her fertile, but also warns that the drug will have fatal implications for the first man to have intercourse with her. He slyly suggests to Nicio that a dupe be found for this purpose. Persuaded by her confessor, a knavish cleric, to comply with her husband's wishes, the virtuous Lucrezia at last allows Callimaco into her bed, where he has no difficulty convincing her to accept him as her lover on a more permanent basis.
Tales of this sort" replete with transparent devices, mistaken identities, and cynical, often anticlerical overtones" were already commonplace throughout Europe by the Middle Ages, though critics have remarked that Machiavelli lent freshness to even this hackneyed material. Sydney Anglo has commended his "clear, crisp repartee" and ability "to nudge our ribs at improprieties and double-meanings," despite characterization that is "rudimentary, haphazard, and inconsistent, with even protagonists going through their motions like automata.
A decided influence on the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Sir Francis Bacon and on the thought of such modern political theorists as Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, and Robert Michels, Machiavelli has been called the founder of empirical political science, primarily on the strength of the Discourses and The Prince.
As a supporter of the Soderini government, Machiavelli was removed from his office by the new regime, fined, and forbidden to travel outside Florentine territory. A few months later, two young malcontents were arrested and found with a list of supposed conspirators against the Medici.
Machiavelli's name was on the list. Although there is no indication he was actually involved, Machiavelli was imprisoned and tortured to extract information.
From prison, he wrote two sonnets to Giuliano de Medici, asking him to intercede. He was sentenced to remain in prison pending payment of a fine. However, when Giuliano's uncle, Giovanni, was elected Pope Leo X in March , a general amnesty was declared in celebration, and Machiavelli was released.
He retired to the relative safety of his home in the country outside Florence to rest and consider his future. During this time, he wrote many letters to his friend and fellow Florentine diplomat Francesco Vettori, who had been appointed ambassador to Rome, looking for news of the outside world and hoping Vettori could recommend him to the Medici family.
In this self-imposed exile, he wrote The Prince Il Principe , which distilled his observations about human behavior, leadership, and foreign policy. He dedicated the work to the Medici family in an effort to demonstrate his support, but without success.
It was clear by that the Medici would have nothing to do with him and that his diplomatic career was over. Over the next ten years, deprived of the political activities that were his life's work, Machiavelli turned his attention to writing.
During this period, he produced a treatise on the art of war, one that draws on his experience as organizer of the militia, and a commentary on the writings of the classical Roman historian Livy. Examining Livy's account of the Roman republic, Machiavelli discussed at length the concept of republican government. In contrast with The Prince , which supports monarchy or even tyranny, the Discourses on Livy are often cited as evidence of Machiavelli's republican sympathies.
He also wrote many poems and three comedic plays. His writing attracted the attention of Cardinal Giulio de Medici, who had for several years been in control of Florence and who commissioned him to write a history of Florence.
He worked on his Florentine History from to Reconciliation with the Medici brought about Machiavelli's brief return to public service. He was put in charge of military arrangements for Clement in Florence.
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