Power: (Mis)Reading Machiavelli

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning — cost-benefit analysis — to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives. This excerpt looks at whether Elizabethans who used Machiavelli’s ideas when determining of how to best maintain control of Ireland were read as Machiavelli intended.

It is just over five hundred years since Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince, although rather less since the book became famous — written in 1513, revised in 1515, first published in 1532, it became notorious in the Protestant world only after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572. In the context of religious warfare, Machiavelli was read (or perhaps misread) as advocating a totally unprincipled approach to politics, as approaching power in purely instrumental terms. Already in 1573 we find Gabriel Harvey in Cambridge trying to obtain a copy of “Machiavell, the greate founder and master of pollicies,” and boasting to his friend Edmund Spenser that he was familiar with people who were “pretely well acquainted,” as he put it, not just with The Prince, but with the whole of Machiavelli’s work. John Wolfe (who would later collaborate with Harvey) published editions of The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, The Art of War, The History of Florence, and Machiavelli’s minor works — all in Italian, and with fake Italian places of publication — in England in the 1580s; The Art of War was already available in English, and The Florentine Historie soon followed. And, of course, Machiavelli was available in Latin, the language of the learned.

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Everyone agrees that Machiavelli’s primary purpose in writing The Prince was to make a bid for employment by the Medici, who had taken control of Florence in August 1512. Machiavelli had lost his government job in November and, suspected of opposition to the new regime, had been confined to the territories of the Florentine state for a year. In February 1513 he had been imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of participation in a plot against the Medici. He was released from prison in March under an amnesty to celebrate the election of the new Medici pope, Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had taken the title of Leo X, and in November 1513 his period of confinement expired and he was once more free to travel, but he dared not go to Rome for fear that he would be suspected of conspiring with the Soderini family, who were in exile there, and be rearrested (and subjected to further torture). But he was desperate to obtain employment, and Rome was where the jobs were being handed out.

What is not generally understood is what this means for the interpretation of The Prince. Machiavelli, at the time he was writing The Prince, had no prospect of obtaining employment in the government of Florence, and any advice he had to offer on how to govern Florence would have been greeted with suspicion. In chapter 5 of The Prince he stressed that governing cities that are used to ruling themselves is an almost impossible task. Unless one is prepared to destroy them completely one can never be confident of succeeding. This was a pretty clear warning to the Medici against regarding Florence as a secure power base. In 1513 or 1515 such advice, written for a Medici audience, could hardly be welcome; indeed, it came close to being a threat, and could only serve to remind readers that Machiavelli himself was one of those suspected of being unable to forget the word “liberty.”

In writing The Prince, Machiavelli’s mind was not (despite what commentators generally say) on Florence. It was widely and correctly believed that the Medici were interested in repeating Alexander VI’s project of establishing a papal nephew in a territory of his own. What Machiavelli had to offer was his intimate knowledge of the strategy and tactics of Cesare Borgia — this is why Cesare plays such a central role in the argument of The Prince and why Machiavelli wrote in 1515 — when once again it seemed that the pope would try to establish a princedom in central Italy for Giuliano de’ Medici — that he thought that a new prince should always imitate the policies of Borgia. So The Prince is a book about how to establish yourself as the ruler of a territory which has previously lacked any well-defined state power, and which, because of the prevalence of feudal inequality and private fortresses, is incapable of political liberty. It is a handbook for someone who wants to establish a despotism, but a despotism in a region where there had previously been no consolidated state power.

Let us turn from The Prince to the Discourses (written 1515–1519). There Machiavelli’s prime purpose was not (as one might think from reading the standard commentaries) to provide an analysis or a defense of republican liberty. His goal was to draw from a study of politics, and particularly of Livy’s history of Rome, reliable principles of action which could be employed by any state, whether princedom or republic. Thus the preface to book 1 states clearly that the work is about both “kingdoms and republics” and its purpose is to show how either a “prince or republic” can learn from the example of the ancients. In the course of doing this he undoubtedly does provide an account of the particular characteristics of republics. His admiration for ancient Rome was founded in the claim that the Roman republic was the state which had been the best in the whole of recorded history at doing what states are supposed to do. Machiavelli sums up his entire political teaching with regard to the domestic affairs of states in Discourses, 2.22, in a passage which is, again, carefully presented as being applicable to both republics and princes: “For government is nothing other than holding your subjects in such a way that they cannot harm you or that they do not wish to. This is done either by making yourself entirely secure against them, taking from them every means for injuring you, or by bene ting them to such an extent that they cannot reasonably wish to change their fortunes.”

What preoccupied Machiavelli was how to construct a political order which was secure against both internal sedition and foreign conquest. The two fundamental strategies for preventing internal sedition which he identifies in the Discourses are coercion and co-option, and the granting of legal security and even political liberty is the best method of co-option. From the point of view of subjects or citizens, the case for political liberty is that it is the best guarantor of their security and prosperity (Discourses, 1.58, 2.2). Thus, from the point of view of both rulers and subjects, liberty can be regarded as not an end in itself but a means. As Machiavelli puts it, “It is easy to learn why this love for free government springs up in people, for experience shows that cities never have increased in dominion or in riches except while they have been at liberty.” Turning subjects into citizens is thus not only good for the citizens themselves; it is also the most effective way of co-opting them into the service of the state.

But it is not the only way, “For when men are well governed, they do not seek for nor wish any other liberty [than to be ruled by law].” One may contrast this with, for example, Francesco Guicciardini’s simple statement that “those who love liberty cannot be won by good treatment, for one cannot by any kindness uproot from their breasts that desire not to hold any man superior, and to govern themselves,” and indeed with many statements by Machiavelli himself, including his claim in The Prince that free states will always resist a government imposed upon them; by the time he wrote the Discourses it had become clear that the claim made in chapter 5 of The Prince was false at least as far as Florence was concerned.16 For Florence, it was now clear to him, had never been a proper republic, and there was no realistic prospect of introducing a well-founded liberty there unless (by same strange reversal) the Medici should decide to become the agents of republican reform, and even then the resulting republic would look nothing like that of classical Rome.