Hello, I’m Dr. Anadale from Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
What follows is a long excerpt from Maurizio Viroli’s 1998 book, Niccolò’s Smile:
A Biography of Machiavelli.
Viroli summarizes Machiavelli’s teachings in The Prince, and gives a sympathetic interpretation
of his claims.
Machiavelli rejects classical political ideas on at least four topics: virtue, generosity,
cruelty, and being feared.
As you read or listen, try to answer these questions.
First, classical writers claimed that to retain power, a prince must be good and virtuous.
What reasons does Machiavelli give for rejecting this advice?
Second, Machiavelli rejects the view that princes must be generous and give expensive
gifts to their supporters.
What is his argument against this practice, and what advice does he give instead, regarding
gift giving?
Third, Cicero and others insist that “no cruelty can be expedient.”
That is, cruelty never plays a part in good government.
Machiavelli disagrees.
What sort of cruelty does he think could be useful, and under what circumstances?
Fourth, classical thinkers taught that being hated and feared by the people is dangerous
for a prince, while being loved and respected makes him secure from overthrow.
Machiavelli famously claims that, while it is best to be both feared AND loved, if a
leader had to choose only one, he should prefer to be feared.
What are his reasons for this conclusion?
And lastly, this excerpt ends with Viroli’s defense of Machiavelli’s point of view.
According to Viroli, what is Machiavelli’s true teaching about great political leaders?
And are you persuaded by him?
Now, an excerpt from Niccolò’s Smile.
When The Prince began to circulate in handwritten copies, and again when it was first printed,
it found very few discerning readers who understood its value.
At the same time, it found a host of enemies who saw it as an evil work, inspired directly
by the devil, in which a malevolent author teaches a prince how to win and keep power
through avarice, cruelty, and falseness, making cynical use of religion as a tool to keep
the populace docile.
There were others who saw the work as a satire whose author pretended to teach a prince how
to defend his state while actually showing the people that the prince's power was based
on force, cruelty, and deception and thus exhorting them to hate their ruler.
But this last view was rare; for most people, The Prince was a work of evil and its author,
as one of the more obtuse critics wrote, a "master of evil."
What had Machiavelli written to stir up such indignation?
He had explained that the ideas set forth by thinkers who had written advice books for
princes before him were simply wrong, even though they were considered great experts;
if not wrong, their ideas were relevant to certain circumstances but not to others.
These writers maintained that a prince who wishes to keep power and win glory must always
follow the path of virtue—must be prudent, just, strong, and moderate—and must possess
those qualities proper to princes, specifically mercy, generosity, and fairness.
Machiavelli, in contrast, stated that a prince who followed such advice in all circumstances
not only would not conserve his power but would surely lose it and be scorned and soon forgotten.
He knew he was going against a centuries-old school of thought, long endorsed by illustrious writers.
I hope I shall not be considered “presumptuous,” he writes in chapter XV, if I abandon the
ideas of the many writers who have preceded me in treating this subject.
My purpose, he adds, is “to write something useful to whomever understands it”; I must,
therefore, offer advice based on reality, not imagination.
Those who have written about the qualities a prince must possess have imagined “republics
and principalities that have never been seen or been known to exist in truth” and have
insisted on teaching princes how to be good in their actions, forgetting that a prince
who is always and unfailingly good amid “so many who are not good” will inevitably lose his realm.
The conclusion of his reasoning is persuasive: “it is necessary” for a prince, if he
wants to maintain his realm, “to learn to be able not to be good” and to use or not
use this, “according to necessity.”
Having set forth the general thesis, Machiavelli, with the courage and irreverence that only
great thinkers possess, demolishes conventional wisdom brick by brick.
A good prince, it has been said for centuries, repeating ancient precepts, should emulate
neither the lion, fierce and brutal, nor the fox, cunning and deceptive, but rather should
govern with virtue; he should try not to instill fear in but to win the love of his subjects;
no prince, in conclusion, is more secure on his throne than one surrounded by loving subjects.
Subverting this conventional wisdom, Machiavelli argues that a prince, especially one who has
not yet consolidated his power, should “know well how to use the beast and the man.”
Of the beasts, he should follow the examples of “the fox and the lion, because the lion
does not defend itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves”;
and so “one needs to be a fox to recognize snares and a lion to frighten wolves” (XVIII).
This was just the opposite of what was said by writers who took their inspiration from
the ancients, especially Cicero.
With similar daring, he discarded the second doctrine, that a good prince must be generous,
lavishing gifts and favors on his friends, and himself live in luxury.
A prince who follows that advice, seeking to win a reputation for “liberality,”
will succeed only in flattering a few hangers-on and bankrupting his estate.
To preserve his reputation, he will have to burden the people with taxes (literally, “be fiscal”).
These taxes will engender hatred and disrespect and greatly endanger the prince’s power.
It is therefore far wiser, he concludes, to maintain “a name for meanness,” which
begets infamy without hatred, than “to be under a necessity, because one wants to have
a name for liberality, to incur a name for rapacity, which begets infamy with hatred” (XVI).
Machiavelli treats the question of cruelty analogously.
A prince should certainly hope to be considered merciful and kind, as classical doctrine teaches,
but he must “take care not to use this mercy badly.”
Out of fear of being considered cruel, for instance, the Florentines allowed factions
to destroy Pistoia; Cesare Borgia, in contrast, was considered cruel but used that cruelty
to bring order to Romagna, making it peaceful and united.
A prince, and especially a new prince, must therefore be willing to be called cruel, if
necessary, as long as he wins the respect of his subjects and keeps them united (XVII).
As further confirmation of how radical Machiavelli’s critique of the classical doctrine of the
good prince was, suffice it to say that Cicero had written—and in the centuries that followed,
countless writers had repeated in many different ways—that “no cruelty can be expedient”
(De officiis, III, XI, 4).
Let us distinguish, shot back the impertinent Machiavelli, between cruelty “badly used”
and cruelty “well used.”
“Those [cruelties] can be called well used,” he explained, “(if it is permissible to
speak well of evil) that are done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself, and
then are not persisted in but are turned to as much utility for the subjects as one can.
Those cruelties are badly used which, though few in the beginning, rather grow with time
than are eliminated” (VIII).
Cicero and the humanists wrote that nothing is more effective “in defending and maintaining
power than being loved” and nothing “more harmful than being feared.”
Machiavelli replied: “One would want to both one and the other,” but because it
is difficult to be loved and feared at the same time, “it is much safer to be feared
than loved, if one has to lack one of the two” (XVII).
A similar consideration applies, finally, to honesty and fairness.
No one denies, Machiavelli wrote, that it would be praiseworthy for a prince to keep
his faith “and to live with honesty and not with astuteness.”
Nonetheless, the experience of the present day shows that princes who have readily broken
their word and who “have known how to get around men’s brains with their astuteness”
have “done great things” and have triumphed over princes who have kept their word (XVIII).
In pages bursting with life, energetic strength, and a wealth of historical detail, Machiavelli
delineates the features of the new prince, who must be able “not to depart from good,
when possible, but to know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity,” and explains
the basis of statecraft, the art he knew so well.
Any prince who wished to achieve greatness had to be able to fight both lions, such as
Julius II, and foxes, such as Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain, or even princes who knew
how to be both one and the other, such as Cesare Borgia.
In short he wants a prince who knows how to win, not another Pier Soderini, who lost state
and fatherland out of fear of being considered cruel.
Machiavelli explained why his prince had to learn to win, in the last chapter, “Exhortation
to Seize Italy and Free Her from the Barbarians,” which is wrongly considered an extraneous
addition by the many readers who have failed to understand The Prince.
The prince of whom Machiavelli dreamed was a rare and marvelous figure, capable of redeeming
Italy from “barbarous cruelties and insults,” that is, from foreign domination.
Like the great redeemers of old, first and foremost Moses, he could count on God’s help.
If he must enter into evil in order to win, God would stand by his side and remain his
friend, because He would know that his work was righteous.
Machiavelli never taught that the end justifies the means or that a statesman is allowed to
do what is forbidden to others; he taught, rather, that if someone is determined to achieve
a great purpose—free a people, found a state, enforce the law, and create peace where anarchy
and despotism reign—then he must not fear being thought cruel or stingy but must simply
do what is necessary in order to achieve the goal.
That is what great men do, and that is what Machiavelli wanted his new prince to do.