Saying Goodbye to Machiavelli
“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” In other words, hit him so hard he can’t get back up. “Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.” And the most well known piece of advice to come down to us from the famous Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli is, “It is better to be feared than loved.” We know these sayings so well, or at least their sentiments, they have become commonplace. But when they were written readers were shocked. So new and shocking was his advice in The Prince, that it ushered in what we now call modern political theory. Politics had never been discussed in this way before.
However, this is the only way we discuss politics now. Movies like J. Edgar and The Ides of Marchhardly cause the watcher to raise an eyebrow, because we expect those in power to abuse it. Opinion polls show that politicians are perceived to be among the least trustworthy among us.
When Machiavelli wrote The Prince he had two audiences in mind. The first was Lorenzo de Medici to whom he offered it as a gift and meant for Lorenzo to read the book as a how-to guide. The ostensible message, “If you want to come to power and stay there; this is what you will have to do.” The second audience was the average person. Having written the book in Italian, ‘the vulgar tongue’, and not the customary Latin, Machiavelli was signaling to this audience a different message entirely. He was exposing the means and modes of securing political power to the average person with the hope that this audience might begin to desire a republican form of government rather than rule by the Medicis. Let’s remember, Machiavelli was sent into exile by the Medicis, and wouldn’t it be perfectly Machiavellian to give his greatest political opponent a Trojan Horse? After all, it was Machiavelli who proclaimed, “It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.”
If Machiavelli wrote today, however, his book would be mundane. We have become accustomed to politicians who act badly. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Solyndra are only a few of the hundreds of examples in American politics that come to mind when we think of abuses of power. Of course, this is child’s play compared to Pol Pot, Stalin, Gaddafi, Bashar Assad, and Mubarack.
American college students are just as jaded as the rest of us, which is why I have stopped assigning The Prince. Machiavelli was under the impression that if the people knew just how nasty and deceitful political leaders were, they would rise up and demand a republican form of government in which the people could hold the leaders in check. Presumably, if the people had this power, politicians would behave themselves. I would assign The Prince to try to convince students that it was important to be politically engaged. I thought The Prince, with its tales of gruesome murders and apparent disdain for morality, would drive the point home. But, if news headlines and popular culture don’t shock students and convince them that we need to remain vigilant in the political arena, a book nearly 500 years old certainly won’t.
Read more: http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/saying-goodbye-to-machiavelli/#ixzz1p8YQ3FmJ
I have found that if you want to shock students, or really anyone, you propose the radical idea that politicians should be pillars of virtue and the end of government should be a just society.
A just society, borrowing from Plato, is one that reflects the properly ordered soul. The properly ordered soul is one in which the higher desires: moderation, wisdom, courage, guide the base desires: greed, stupidity, vanity. Society is merely the individual soul writ large. If the souls of the people are upside down then society will be too. Therefore, if we want a properly ordered society those in charge of the ordering should have properly ordered souls. Political leaders must themselves be just if society is to be just.
I can hear you laughing.
Students are shocked to read something that suggests there is a higher form of the good. They are shocked to hear one propose that we ought to strive for virtue in the political arena, that the government is something more than a provider of services and a means by which to wage war. I expose myself to good natured ridicule when I make the same suggestion to my friends and colleagues.
I don’t expect anyone to accept what I say out of hand. But it is useful to shock people for the same reason Machiavelli thought it useful. Shocking people is the only way to get them to question what they think they know about politics;about what it should be and can be. Thinking differently about important matters is the only way to move the political debate in a positive direction; which we need because the current debates are going nowhere good.
On one side of the political spectrum are those saying that we need more regulation to control the bad behavior of those who can’t regulate themselves. If history has shown us anything, it is that lawbreakers will always stay ahead of lawmakers. Also, it makes no sense to think that those who make laws will make good laws if the lawmakers are not first found to be good people. If we do not go back, before every instance of lawmaking, and ask what it is to be just, then nothing is guiding our laws but randomness. We cannot say our laws are good unless we first know what is required to be good. We do not typically ask these questions with any depth, which is why we cannot expect lawmakers or laws to be just.
On the other side of the political spectrum, we hear that we need fewer regulations; if we allow individuals the freedom to choose their own course, everything will work out for the best. The reason why government exists is because people won’t do the right thing if left alone. If you don’t believe me, ask Adam and Eve. Imagine if a society were created new, with almost no regulation, what people would make of it. The first and most lucrative operations would be those that catered to vices, and all we have to do is look at what businesses rose quickest on the Internet and still remain the most lucrative. Porn and gambling is what you get when you leave people to their own devices.
Read more: http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/saying-goodbye-to-machiavelli/page-2/#ixzz1p8YWkZsI
I overstate the point, of course, but the idea is that people need guidance if they are to make the right decisions. The government must play some role in guiding our behavior, for as James Madison wrote in his famous Federalist #10, “neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.”
But a government without checks will not do much good either. The first step in creating good government, and thus a just society, is self-examination. This might be an unrealistic solution but it is the only solution.
The only chance a government has to achieve justice is when we recognize that the source of society’s disorder does not lie in the Other, or somewhere outside of ourselves. To make things better we must first make ourselves better. “Tend to your own garden,” I think Voltaire would have said. We must govern ourselves as we would like to see our country governed. And when politicians fail to achieve the level of virtue that a just society demands, we kick them out.
Of course what I suggest is a lofty ideal, one which is perhaps never to be achieved, and never has been achieved. But to paraphrase Machiavelli, I suggest that like the prudent archer, we aim for the furthest spot on the horizon, for even if we fall short we will have still traveled a great distance further than if we started with only modest ambitions.
Read more: http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/saying-goodbye-to-machiavelli/page-3/#ixzz1p8YbWw7v
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