The Garments of Court and Palace

Machiavelli and the World that He Made

Philip Bobbitt

• Éditeur: Atlantic Books
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782391425
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Social Science Biographies

Contents

Prologue: Arte dello Stato – The Machiavelli Paradox

The Unholy Necromancer and his Koran for Courtiers

Book I: Ordini – The Important Structure of The Prince

Chapter 1: The Emergence of the Modern State

Chapter 2: Can a Statesman Get into Heaven?

Conclusion to Book I: The Prince is a Constitutional Treatise

Book II: Lo Stato – The Relation of The Prince to the Discourses on Livy

Chapter 3: A Republic’s Duty of Consequentialism

Chapter 4: Good Arms, Good Laws

Conclusion to Book II: Machiavelli’s Philosophy of State

Book III: Virtù e Fortuna – God Does Not Want to Do Everything

Chapter 5: Virtù is from Mars, Fortuna is from Venus

Chapter 6: Machiavelli’s View of History

Conclusion to Book III: Machiavelli’s Philosophy of Fate

Book IV: Occasione – The Interesting Timing of The Prince

Chapter 7: The Borgias and the Medici

Chapter 8: Machiavelli’s Constitution

Conclusion to Book IV: Machiavelli’s Vision

The Machiavelli Paradox Resolved

Epilogue: Satan’s Theologian

Dramatis Personae

Chronology¹

Acknowledgements

A Note on Translation

Notes

Select Bibliography

A Note on the Author

Index

Prologue

Arte dello Stato – The Machiavelli Paradox

THERE CONTINUES TO be enormous interest in Machiavelli and his works, but it is not entirely clear why this is so.¹ The Prince is often described as a great book that changed the world, yet while it is doubtless secure in its inclusion in a canon of such books, it has been so variously and contradictorily interpreted that any change in the world it may have brought about is likely to have been through a kind of horrible inadvertence that would have amused, though perhaps not surprised, Machiavelli.

Indeed, there remain a number of controverted questions about even the most basic of Machiavelli’s views. Was he a forthright totalitarian or a human rights-respecting republican? Was he a Christian or a pagan? Did he give priority to the lawgiver or the war fighter? Was he essentially an ethical writer or an unabashed amoralist? Was he the first political scientist, attempting to do for statecraft what Galileo sought to do for cosmology, or was he a committed sceptic where prediction is concerned? Was he a Renaissance humanist or a neoclassical realist? Did he believe that the affairs of mankind were determined or that there was a decisive role for individual free will?

There are passages in Machiavelli’s works that would appear to support each of these antinomies, and there are some writers who have concluded that his ideas were simply incoherent, while others have decided that they were written in the code of satire or of some gnosticism even more oblique. In the course of this book, my own views on each of these questions will become evident, and though I have tried to marshal evidence for my interpretive conclusions, I would be surprised if many of the facts or passages to which I draw attention, while perhaps new to some general readers, were not familiar to the large collegium of Machiavelli scholars. I hope, rather, that my particular perspective – that of a constitutional lawyer and historian of diplomacy and strategy – has offered a means of putting these excerpts, events and surmises into a persuasive and sensible pattern; and that the concepts I have elaborated in previous books and introduce again here provide a structured and useful way to understand the complex and sometimes apparently contradictory body of Machiavelli’s work.

My book is a commentary, which Harvey Mansfield – one of the most gifted scholars of Machiavelli – has trenchantly defined: ‘A commentary,’ he writes, ‘attempts to bring forth and interpret the author’s intent, and so supposes that he has one, that it is worth finding, and that it is not manifest on the surface.’² My principal objective is to empower the reader, so that she can read The Prince armed with analyses that I have provided, and come to the conclusions that she judges to be right as to Machiavelli’s purposes. In that sense, this book shares with The Prince itself a desire to put aside many orthodoxies that appeal to persons interested in the affairs of state but which, if actually applied, would undermine their power to understand and practise statecraft – a power that Machiavelli tirelessly sought to enhance. I believe that once Machiavelli is read in the way that I suggest – as the clear-sighted prophet of a new constitutional order with its basis in the union of strategy and law – his works can be very helpful indeed to the diplomat and the statesman. Furthermore, because he saw something on the historical horizon – the emergence of the modern state and its fundamental ethical qualities – that is still relevant to us and will be so long as we have states, he will remain influential. Finally, because we are entering an era not unlike Machiavelli’s own in which a new constitutional order is emerging, his work will become the subject of even greater contemporary interest.³ The morphology of the state was first depicted by Machiavelli with his description of the princely state, a constitutional order that would evolve, successively, into the kingly states, territorial states, imperial state-nations, and eventually the industrial nation states within which we now live. This achievement is clearer now than it has ever been, just as it is now clearer that he was grievously misunderstood by his feudal contemporaries.

Five particular ideas have structured the understanding of The Prince since it was posthumously published in 1532, and it is these basic background assumptions that have given rise to those longstanding scholarly problems that remain so notably prominent in the study of Machiavelli’s work and which are themselves artifacts of the Machiavelli Paradox.⁴ That paradox is: how can a man’s body of work mark him out as one of the most – perhaps the most – influential political philosophers since Aristotle when there is such profound disagreement over what he was actually saying?

The first of these background understandings is that The Prince is a ‘mirror book’ – that is, it is exemplary of a genre going back to classical times in which the writer advises a prince or official at court how to behave. Cicero’s De officiis provides a model for this genre, but so too do a number of other influential examples.² The Prince is obviously a radical departure from books of this kind because it does not advise a ruler to adopt the classical virtues and indeed urges that, in some contexts, the ruler should depart from such a practice. The observation that The Prince is a kind of perverse mirror book is the basis for the claim that a Machiavellian prince is one who disdains classical or Christian virtues – a claim that has provoked much controversy. But both the claim and the controversy, though derived from this background understanding, are not identical with it. Critics may differ as to whether Machiavelli is writing his mirror book to serve as a warning or as a guide, but they agree that it falls into the category of mirror books either way.

The second basic understanding is that The Prince is a work that seeks to serve autocracy and therefore appears to be incompatible with the republican ideas Machiavelli expressed in his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (hereinafter the Discourses). This observation has given rise to the following questions: was Machiavelli lying about his true preferences when he wrote The Prince? Did his views change as he became older? Is the corpus of Machiavelli’s work inconsistent, or is it perhaps coded in some way to hide his true preferences because they were likely to offend his political patrons?

The third fundamental notion is that The Prince represents Machiavelli’s solution to the problem of destiny and fate. The Prince counterposes two ideas – fortuna and virtù. It answers the question whether or not a prince can control his fate by suggesting that he can, mainly through the sufficient exercise of virtù. The metaphor for this struggle between fortuna and virtù given by Machiavelli is that of a mighty river, the currents and tides of fortune, that is banked and directed by levies, the product of human ingenuity and enterprise. The principal example of a leader of such virtù in The Prince is the violent, Nietzschean figure of Cesare Borgia, of whom Machiavelli appears to be a star-struck fan. But this observation, too, has given rise to some difficult questions. Because Cesare Borgia ultimately fell and did not master so much as suffer his fate; because Machiavelli suggests with respect to other contemporary figures – Pope Julius II and the Florentine gonfaloniere Piero Soderini among them – that it is the temper and character of the times that determine success; and because he concludes that no man’s nature is so flexible that it can invariably adapt to the change in the times – for these reasons it would appear that virtù is not sufficient to determine destiny. To account for this contradiction, it has often been suggested that perhaps Machiavelli came to the latter, more despairing view late in life when he found himself far from power and no longer able to influence events.

Fourth, it is well known that The Prince was originally dedicated to Giuliano de’ Medici, ruler of Florence, and it has long been assumed – an assumption for which there is good evidence⁵ – that it was prompted by the possibility that Giuliano, who was acquainted with Machiavelli and ...