The origin of this essay dates back to the political philosophy course delivered in 2004 by Olavo de Carvalho to the Public Administration students of the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná. From the notes prepared for these classes, the author wrote the first version of the essay, which was thought of as one of the chapters of a larger work on the revolutionary mindset, but ended up being published separately in 2011 due to its length.
Among the most famous modern thinkers, Niccolò Machiavelli is perhaps the first to present to the public such a disjointed and confusing doctrine. So disjointed and so confusing that one of his best interpreters, Benedetto Croce, summarized four centuries of investigations with the disenchanted conclusion that the Florentine thinker is ‘an enigma that will never be solved.’ After Croce, other first-rate scholars like Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, Hans Baron, and Maurizio Viroli believed they could solve the enigma; however, the solutions they offered differed so much from each other that they only managed to multiply it.
- Author’s Note
- 1. The obscurity of modern philosophy
- 2. Images of Machiavelli
- 3. Machiavelli’s pseudo-realism
- 4. The parody of prophecy
- 5. The liar
- 6. Three testimonies
- 7. Perverted nobility
- 8. Fleeing from experience
- 9. Layers of meaning
- 10. Parodic inversion of Christianity
- 11. The paradox
- Appendices
Author’s Note
THIS BOOK IS A CHAPTER from The Revolutionary Mind that has grown too large and acquired independent life. The same has happened with several other chapters that ruthlessly dismembered the mother cell’s body and will be released as separate volumes, including Descartes and Cognitive Parallax.
The material origin of this Machiavelli dates back to the notes I took for three classes of Political Philosophy that I taught to Public Administration students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná in 2004. After giving it the final touches in 2009, I had the opportunity to read Sir Isaiah Berlin’s essay, "The Originality of Machiavelli,"1 and verify that the idea of probing the meaning of Machiavelli’s work through a historical review of its successive interpretations from the 16th century to the present had a distinguished precedent. However, nothing seemed necessary to add to my conclusions after this reading, which was so fruitful in other aspects, since the purpose of Sir Isaiah’s study was entirely different from mine. What he sought to discover was the meaning of Machiavelli’s legacy “for us”: not what Machiavelli represented for himself, in his life and in his time, but the importance he had for other lives and other times. What had interested me precisely was the opposite: peeling back the various layers of interpretations, often mutually contradictory, and discovering an original Machiavelli, stripped of the pomp and expressions of repugnance with which History had covered him. Sir Isaiah was adding up, when what I wanted was primarily subtraction.
By his method, the author of “The Originality of Machiavelli” came to discover in the Florentine secretary a precursor of the liberal and democratic ideas that were so dear to himself. He recognized, however, that this historical heritage was completely alien to Machiavelli’s intentions and constituted rather “a happy irony of history.” Clearly, this was not the flesh-and-blood Machiavelli I was searching for, but rather the Machiavelli composed entirely of reflected images and attributed intentions, which his admirers and detractors had constructed not only through erudite interpretations but through practical consequences they drew from his work to guide their own actions. Sir Isaiah, somewhat Hegelian, took this historical compound as if it were somehow the essential nature of Machiavellian thought, revealed throughout the historical process by its transmutation into its opposite. The flaw in this method was failing to perceive that the historical consequences engendered by the influence of a work do not cease at a certain moment that can be taken as the final expression of its meaning; if, at a given moment, these consequences seem to have crystallized into a more or less definitive design, it is quite possible, and in certain cases even fatal, that in the next instant the series of consequences changes direction and ends up producing completely different situations. If Machiavelli was the unintentional prophet of liberal ideas and could be understood as such by Sir Isaiah Berlin in the 1970s, today it is almost impossible not to see him as the voluntary and conscious precursor of the highly bureaucratized and interventionist state that the American liberal democracy is becoming. The Machiavellian conception of the “Third Rome,” which for a long time hovered in the air as a sign of a hypothetical and unrealizable utopia, begins to acquire the features of a present and active reality through projects of centralized power that Barack Hussein Obama’s mentor, Saul Alinsky, seems to have copied directly from the pages of Machiavelli’s Commentaries on The Decades of Titus Livius.
On the other hand, although the Russian use of the title “Third Rome” has a different origin and is independent of its Machiavellian source, the inspiration that the new theorist of the Russian Empire, Alexander Dugin, draws from Machiavelli’s project of Italy’s restoration is evident. Just like Machiavelli’s Italy, Dugin’s Russia is a country reduced to chaos, corruption, and impotence due to the blame – according to Dugin – of foreigners. Unable to rise on its own strength, it must rely on a system of alliances from which, after defeating the adversary, it must emerge as an imperial power dominating the entire world. The resemblance to Machiavelli’s plan for the restoration of Italy could not be more evident.
The intention that moved me in this study was not to ascertain what the succession of historical versions did to Machiavelli, but, on the contrary, to deconstruct this edifice and ask to what extent Machiavelli himself was aware of the historical results he wished to produce. Without this, we would risk consecrating as the supreme method of historical interpretation the mere sum of the often interested projections that other men and epochs have cast upon the original intentions of the author.
So my question was: How did Niccolò Machiavelli understand himself, and to what extent can we, with relative certainty, chart the map of his horizon of consciousness? A horizon of consciousness is defined not only by what it encompasses but above all by what escapes it. The very plurality of contradictory interpretations of Machiavelli’s thought emerges, at least in part, from the blind spots that appear in decisive articulations of this thought, causing certain developments given by interpreters and successors to be nothing more than a flourishing of cancerous cells born from the prodigious mental confusion from which they germinated.
Rare thinkers throughout history have revealed as many blind spots in their vision of the world and themselves as those that the present study reveals in Machiavelli. Astonishingly often, he not only fails to understand the events he explores but also fails to understand himself, sprinkling his writings with unelaborated and often unnoticed contradictions. It is not surprising that such nebulous and confused thinking, made even more complex by a whole network of self-denials and camouflage, has been able to generate such disparate and contradictory historical consequences.
Richmond, February 20, 2011
1. The obscurity of modern philosophy
DIFFICULTIES IN INTERPRETATION of philosophers have always existed. They arise especially when their writings are in dead languages, separated from the reader by a long passage of time and not mediated by a continuous tradition of reading and transmission. This is what happened with some works of Plato and Aristotle when they reentered European culture in the 12th century, with the aggravation that they came in incomplete form. What remains of Aristotle is approximately one-third of what he wrote and consists only of class notes, compact and fragmentary, with the works that the author released for publication having disappeared, so clear and elegant that Cicero, judging from a literary point of view, described them as “a river of gold.” As for Plato, less than half remains. To make matters worse, he himself admitted to only writing the most easily understandable parts of his teachings, reserving the best and most difficult for oral exposition before a small circle of disciples.
It is understandable that, under these conditions, problems and errors of interpretation would accumulate. For centuries, readers had to be content with a general and schematic view of the thought of these two philosophers, leaving the understanding of innumerable important details for the future. Only gradually did the progress of philology bring about a more accurate reconstruction of the texts, comparing them with contemporary commentaries and approximating the order of their composition. Meanwhile, efforts in philosophical interpretation made the intentions of the whole more visible and distinguished the contradictions in the readings from those left unresolved by the philosophers themselves. If the 20th century did not establish a universally accepted consensus, it did at least condense the difficulties of interpretation into one or two points of divergence that do not substantially affect the basic understanding of the two philosophies.
Even before that, the interpretations that were made, though partial and insufficient, did not suffer from any serious overall misconceptions, and the commentaries of Avicenna, St. Thomas, and Francisco Suárez on Aristotle, the writings of the Cambridge Platonists of the 17th century, and the Aristotelian investigations of Franz Brentano are still read profitably.
In summary, we can say that in some way the modern intellectual universe has sufficiently understood Aristotle and Plato, and this understanding has continued to improve from the time when St. Thomas read the former in Latin translation because he did not know Greek, to the day when Giovanni Reale, a master of reading the ancients, managed, through the comparison of testimonies and the comparison with the internal structure of the system, to reconstruct what would have been the famous “oral teaching” of Plato.2
The experience we have with modern philosophers is very different. They do not write in dead languages but in the language of their contemporaries. The reactions of these contemporaries are not unknown to us, nor do they need to be unearthed from rare manuscripts, but they are well documented in archives and libraries, often published in widely circulated books, frequently accompanied by the authors' responses to their critics. The tradition of reading and commentary has been continuous over the centuries, providing a clear view of the evolution of debates and the status quaestionis. As for the original works, not only do we usually have them in reliable editions, but we also have the minor writings of the authors and even their personal correspondence, annotated by patient philologists who decipher for us every implied allusion to facts, people, and opinions of the time, so that only those who do not want to understand this material fail to understand it. Finally, historical research has reconstructed the biographical paths of each philosopher with sufficient precision, if not to clarify all the problems of their intellectual evolution and their relations with the social and cultural environment, at least to ensure that we know much more about them than we will ever know about Aristotle or Plato.
Despite all these guarantees, the interpretation of many modern philosophies presents difficulties from the very beginning that are incomparably greater than those faced by readers of ancient philosophers yesterday and today. These difficulties do not refer to details of the spiritual biography of the characters or to the clarification of what they may have thought about one point or another in particular. They refer to the essential meaning of their philosophies themselves, which seem to admit the most disparate and antagonistic readings and, for that very reason, to the place they should occupy in the general typology of ideas, in the history of thought, and, last but not least, in the framework of the reader’s agreements and disagreements. It seems that many modern philosophies, unlike the ancient ones, do not withstand attempts to make of them what one pleases, resulting, for example, over the generations and sometimes simultaneously, in a Machiavelli who is an apologist for tyranny and a Machiavelli who is a democrat, a Descartes who is a sincere Christian and an undercover anti-Christian, a Kant who is a Platonic idealist or a materialist positivist, a Hegel who is a precursor to Nazism or modern constitutional law, a Marx who is a humanist or an anti-humanist, a Nietzsche who is a fascist or a libertarian, and so on. These points are not of mere biographical or historical-cultural interest: they touch the foundations, the very vital centers of the respective philosophies, which become all the more evanescent and elusive the more efforts of interpretation are made and accumulated. In the midst of the abundance of documents and investigations, the reader’s intelligence finds itself in a deplorable poverty of understanding.
Finally, there is the most disturbing detail. Two of the philosophers who wrote the most, who left the most disorderly unpublished works, who dealt with some of the most difficult subjects that the human mind has ever occupied itself with, and who, to top it all off, never had the opportunity, the taste, or the intention to organize their ideas into a comprehensive synthesis (with the aggravation that one of them fundamentally changed intellectual orientations several times in his life), are nevertheless the ones that have raised the least difficulties of interpretation. I am referring to Leibniz and Schelling. Leibniz died in 1716. Some of his most important works did not see the light of day until the end of the 19th century, and the era of comprehensive interpretations only began with Bertrand Russell’s A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900) and L. Couturat’s La Logique de Leibniz (1901). As for Schelling, we know of the unfortunate fate that befell his academic career, dissipating the general interest of his contemporaries in his major works, particularly the Philosophy of Mythology and the Philosophy of Revelation, which were only read with the attention they deserved many decades later. Once these obstacles were overcome, no one can deny that we now have a sufficiently clear understanding of the thought of these two great philosophers and, in the case of Schelling, even of his complex inner evolution. In the interpretations of one or the other, there are no 180-degree antagonisms or divergences observed as in the case of Machiavelli or Nietzsche.
What this demonstrates beyond any possibility of doubt is that the difficulty of reaching a consensus in the interpretation of many modern philosophies is not extrinsic but intrinsic. It is not us, the readers, who struggle to understand them. It is they who explain themselves poorly or carry within them unresolved implicit contradictions, perhaps not even perceived (which means that their authors misunderstood themselves), or they hide some mystery of another nature within their fabric.
Why is it absolutely necessary to decipher this mystery or at least attempt to formulate it explicitly as a well-defined problem?
First, because modernity presents itself and boasts as an era of “enlightenment” – Erklärung, Enlightenment,3 l’Âge des Lumières – claiming the merit of having dissipated the veil of darkness that obscured the vision of previous generations, and it is not admissible that the lens entrusted with giving us a clearer image of the world remains so opaque in itself.
Second, because its successor, postmodernity, which boasts of having “deconstructed” the complex structures of modern thought and revealed its hidden main springs, does so through an even more obscure and impenetrable discourse, to the point that the leaders of this movement in the highest academic spheres have proven incapable of differentiating their discourse from the Dadaist parody constructed by physicist Alan Sokal.4 It is not known that throughout history this level of unintelligibility has frequently been achieved.
Third and finally, because never, as since the beginning of modernity, have philosophers had such power to influence the course of things in society and history, almost like rulers or prophets. Never, as in the last centuries, have the destinies of the masses and even the intimate feelings and personal fantasies of the common man been so directly determined by the doctrines of philosophers, which spread rapidly through the “academic proletariat” of universities, through mass media, and through the global network of computers, invading homes and consciousnesses – if not the subconscious – and quickly becoming shaping forces in the lives of the masses. Today, more than ever, it is necessary for the reader of the history of philosophy to know: De te fabula narratur. That history is the history of our lives. If we do not understand it, we will not understand ourselves.
2. Images of Machiavelli
AMONG THE MOST CELEBRATED modern thinkers, Niccolò Machiavelli is perhaps the first to present such a contradictory and confusing doctrine to the public. So contradictory and confusing that one of his best interpreters, Benedetto Croce, summarized four centuries of research with the disillusioned conclusion that the Florentine thinker is “an enigma that will never be solved.” After Croce, other first-rate scholars like Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, Hans Baron, and Maurizio Viroli believed they could solve the enigma; however, the solutions they offered diverged so much from each other that they only managed to multiply it.
Obviously, I do not expect to have better luck than these illustrious predecessors. I confess from the outset that I do not understand Machiavelli better than they do; perhaps I understand him even less. But my objective here is not to understand him, to make him more intelligible. It is to delineate, as precisely as possible, the profile of his unintelligibility because it has become so ingrained in five centuries of philosophical and political discussion in the West that it is no exaggeration to consider it one of the constants of modernity. At the risk of jumping to conclusions before stating the problem, it is necessary to note this astonishing phenomenon right away: one of the first philosophical icons of modernity is an author whom modernity itself admits not to understand. His ideas did not remain on paper, nor did they merely generate other ideas: they transformed into ambitions and actions, inspired coups and revolutions, founded nations and political regimes, but in the final analysis, we do not understand them. I ask the reader to keep this observation in mind, to which we will return in due course. For now, let us see how the confusion began.
The initial reactions to Machiavelli’s book, The Prince, established the popular image of its author as a cynical immoralist, a theorist of deceit and political violence, an apologist for tyrants, and, as Leo Strauss summarized, a “teacher of evil.” Even among the writer’s friends, there were those who, scandalized, turned their backs on him. Francesco Vettori himself, his intimate and confidant, on whom Machiavelli relied to help him regain the bureaucratic position he had lost when the Florentine Republic fell, in which he had served from 1498 to November 1512, delicately refrained from offering any assistance to the author of such literary villainy. A contemporary witness noted, "Everyone hated him because of The Prince. The good ones considered him bad, and the bad ones considered him even worse than they did."5
The scandal crossed borders. In England, Cardinal Reginald Pole denounced Machiavelli as "a satanic spirit, defender of despotism, and justifier of all forms of violence."6 William Shakespeare immortalized him in verse as “the murderous Machiavelli.”
The succession of condemnations culminated in the Council of Trent, which in 1564 ratified the inclusion of The Prince in the Index librorum prohibitorum, decreed five years earlier by Pope Paul IV.
But the posthumous flogging of Machiavelli was only beginning. The terms “Machiavellian” and “Machiavellism,” long established in the universal vocabulary of infamy, date back to 1576 when the French patriot Innocent Gentillet used them to characterize the reputation of the “Italianized French” – Catherine de' Medici and her court – whom he blamed for the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the massacre of Huguenots (Protestants) that took place in 1572.
From this perspective, Machiavelli was the apostle of Reason of State, which, in the name of the greatness and security of the homeland, granted rulers a safe conduct to lie, to commit crimes, to steal, to oppress, to kill, and ultimately to violate all the commandments of the Church and common morality.
Even an unconditional proponent of Reason of State, the Frenchman Jean Bodin, a philosopher much more competent than Machiavelli, did not fail to reject the unilateral amorality of his competitor, noting that within the structure of real existing power, the freedom of action of the monarch coexisted and should coexist, in perpetual creative tension, with the demands of morality and religion. Based on this, he condemned Machiavelli as "too frivolous and vicious."7
In the following century, a man as unsuspected of political naivety as Frederick II of Prussia would write Anti-Machiavel to "defend humanity against this monster that wants to destroy it."8 Voltaire, whose attacks on religion had everything to please Machiavelli, chose to subscribe to the thesis of the emperor, his patron, out of sheer sycophancy.
But dissenting voices did not fail to raise radical objections to the prevailing consensus. In 1585, Alberico Gentili, an Italian refugee in England and professor of Civil Law at Oxford, published in his treatise De legacionibus an enthusiastic praise that not only presented Machiavelli as a wise, erudite, and honest man but vehemently contested the prevailing concept that portrayed him as an advocate of tyranny. According to Gentili, Machiavelli was nothing less than… a republican, a staunch democrat. Everything said against him was born out of slander and misunderstanding. The Prince was not a treatise on immorality but a work of moral criticism; it was not the Bible of tyrants but a cruel and relentless portrait of tyranny. By pretending to offer bad advice to princes but actually describing what they were already practicing, the book exposed the dark secrets of bad rulers to public knowledge and self-defense.
Although relying on a figurative reading that inverted the literal meaning of the text, the interpretation that portrayed Machiavelli as a “misunderstood republican”9 was accepted by many illustrious individuals. Lord Bacon endorsed it without hesitation. Baruch Spinoza, in his Tractatus Politicus, praised the author of The Prince as a “wise man” who not only defended freedom but also “gave sound advice on how to preserve it.” From Spinoza, this version jumped directly to Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary and Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedia, becoming the prevailing opinion among the Enlightenment thinkers (except Voltaire). Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract: “Seeming to instruct kings, Machiavelli did much to educate the people. The Prince is the book of republicans.” Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), the historian and abolitionist leader, not only confirmed Machiavelli’s republicanism but also made the writer a hero of liberty and an example of high political morality. In his famous essay published in March 1827 in the Edinburgh Review, he wrote:
“We doubt whether it would be possible to find, in all the many volumes of his compositions, a single expression indicating that dissimulation and treachery had ever struck him as discreditable… We are acquainted with few writings which exhibit so much elevation of sentiment, so pure and warm a zeal for the public good, or so just a view of the duties and rights of citizens, as those of Machiavelli.”
With the advent of naturalistic social science in the 19th century, these reactions were challenged, some as undue intrusions of Christian morality into political affairs, others as youthful outbursts of republican enthusiasm. They gave way to the sanitized version of Machiavellism as an attempt to describe political reality with cold objectivity and “without value judgments.” Machiavelli’s politics would not have been immoral, just amoral or extramoral, as should be any science inspired by positivism.
Lord Lawrence Arthur Burd wrote in the introduction to his famous critical edition of The Prince: "The creation of the new method [of political science] was by no means the work of Machiavelli alone; it was due to the group of Italian publicists, of whom Machiavelli and Guicciardini are the most famous examples. Even when they do not explicitly state their method of investigation, they no longer argue ‘secundum Scripturae divinae auctoritatem, Philosophorum dogmata et exempla laudatorum Principum’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Argument’ of De Regimine Principum), but adhere to experience and abstain from speculative theories."10
The image of Machiavelli as a “forerunner” of the social science of Durkheim and Weber had defenders well into the 20th century. Ernst Cassirer wrote:
The Prince is neither a moral nor an immoral book; it is simply a technical book. In a technical book, we do not seek rules of ethical conduct or judgments of good and evil. It is enough if we are informed about what is useful and useless. Every word in The Prince must be read and interpreted in this way. The book contains no moral prescriptions for the ruler, nor does it invite him to commit crimes and villainies. It is particularly concerned with and intended for ‘new principalities.’ It tries to give them all the necessary advice to protect themselves from all dangers… Machiavelli studied political actions in the same way a chemist studies chemical reactions. Surely, the chemist who prepares a potent poison in his laboratory is not responsible for its effects… Machiavelli’s The Prince contains very dangerous and poisonous things, but he looks at them with the coldness and indifference of a scientist. And thus, he offers his political prescriptions.
This text is from 1944 (The Myth of the State is a posthumous publication from 1946). One year later,
in his book Machiavelli the Scientist (Berkeley, 1948), he compared Olschki’s new science of man, Machiavelli, to Galileo’s new science of nature: both of them did not study the ‘why’ or the ‘purpose’ of things but the ‘how.’ Would this be the key to Machiavelli’s so-called immorality? But no one considers as immoral the laws of the fall of bodies discovered by Galileo because the great physicist did not take into account the possibility that a falling body could hit and kill someone. Machiavelli would have merely studied the laws of human behavior in public life without concern for moral conclusions. He is a scientist.11
If the reader is counting with me, there are already three Machiavels – the immoralist, the democrat, and the scientist – none of whom accounts for the other two nor can be easily reduced to them. But now things are about to get complicated. Almost simultaneously with the scientific Machiavel, a fourth character appears, the patriotic Machiavel, created by the series of revolutions that culminated in 1861 with the creation of the independent Italian state, the work of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Count Camilo di Cavour, and King of Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, thus becoming the first ruler of the new unified Italy. In the wave of nationalist enthusiasm, the Florentine’s work was reread from a perspective that placed at the center and top of its inspiration the desire to unify the nation, which was fragmented into five autonomous principalities, and by expelling the French dominator, create a national state as other European peoples were doing. Pasquale Villari, Maquiavel’s first great biographer, firmly adheres to this thesis. Everything else in the writer’s work – real or apparent immoralism, nostalgia for ancient Rome, criticisms of the Church, pertinent observations, and pejorative distortions – would be mere pieces of a persuasion machine assembled for patriotic purposes:
When, completing his analysis, Machiavelli begins to state his conclusions, then finally the practical side and the real objective of his work become clear. It is a matter of achieving the unity of the Italian homeland and freeing it from foreign domination. 12
This interpretation could be dismissed as occasional publicity if it were not for two factors.
The first is that it was recently legitimized by one of the most serious scholars of the subject, Maurizio Viroli, with very solid reasons. I will come back to this later.
The second is that, as Italian nationalism intensified in the early 20th century, Benito Mussolini adopted Machiavelli’s thinking and made him one of the pillars of fascist doctrine, with the difference that he absorbed not only the patriotic detail as the revolutionaries of 1861 did but also the substance of his morality, his conception of the State, and his technique of governance, forming an inseparable theoretical and practical synthesis, as was the case in Machiavelli’s own work. The Duce’s enthusiasm for the thinker knows no limits. He writes about it for the first time in the article “Nationalism,” published in the newspaper La Lotta di Classi, advocating the formation of a national army, taking up a classic argument of the Florentine secretary. He returns to the subject in Popolo d’Italia on March 26, 1915, denouncing the weakening of the national spirit, using words that seem to be directly taken from The Prince, but vaguely attributing the blame that Machiavelli had placed on the Catholic Church to the Jews. On March 19, 1918, in a speech at the Teatro Communale in Bologna, he affirms that the boldness and Virtù (willpower) celebrated by Machiavelli are not only necessary for rulers but also for peoples (an idea that is implied in Machiavelli himself). On March 3, 1922, he laments that Machiavelli is in Italy “the least read and least practiced of Italian writers.” 13 In 1924, he writes a famous preface to The Prince, and in 1935, he promotes the widespread distribution of the book through cheap editions subsidized by the State. 14 But none of this is pure propaganda: he also ponders the teachings of the work and updates them for the current situation. Mussolini can be accused of many things, except for being a poor interpreter of Machiavelli. When he identifies the Prince with the State, he shows that he understood the master’s lesson very well, in which the amorality of the technique of governance was not a separate doctrinal element but the practical expression of nationalism in action, which in turn was embodied in the State as a sovereign entity, and this in the ruler who personified it. His idea of national militias strictly follows Machiavelli’s project. His conception of the State as superior to the Church and the permanent conflict between the individual and the State is also pure Machiavelli. 15
Mussolini’s genuine alignment with Machiavelli’s thinking did not go unnoticed, even by his most relentless adversaries. As early as 1922, the Catholic militant Vito G. Galati noted the Machiavellian inspiration of fascism in the study L’Ombra di Macchiavelli (“The Shadow of Machiavelli”). In October 1933, Leon Trotsky wrote in the article "What Is National Socialism?", published in The Modern Thinker:
Mussolini from the very beginning reacted more consciously to social materials than Hitler, to whom the police mysticism of a Metternich is much closer than the political algebra of Machiavelli. Mussolini is mentally bolder and more cynical. 16
Two other famous dictators who clearly drew inspiration from Machiavelli were Hitler and Stalin. It is not mere coincidence that in theory and political practice, both of them associated Machiavellian governance techniques not only with the cult of the State but also with extreme nationalism. “Extreme nationalism” is the very definition of National Socialism, while one of Stalin’s most ingenious – or properly Machiavellian – achievements was to reconcile, in strategy and propaganda, the administrative internationalism of the communist movement with the intense patriotic cult of Mother Russia, and this just a few years after Lenin declared that nationalism was one of communism’s worst enemies, which seemed quite realistic at the time.
In the end, the immoral Machiavelli and the patriotic Machiavelli are not as different as they seem. At least in practice, where Machiavellian opportunism erases differences as it suits. For the scholar, however, the problem remains of determining which of the two elements subordinates the other. This problem is essential. If immorality is the means and patriotism is the end, as Villari claims, the demonic traits of Machiavelli are greatly attenuated. If, however, patriotism is a subordinate element, a piece of machinery designed to replace the Christian God with a historical and earthly divinity, then it is no longer just immorality but something much worse.
But before scholars clearly formulated this dilemma, the progress of art and culture in the first half of the 20th century produced a fifth Machiavelli to further complicate the panorama. The amorality of Machiavellian political description would not have scientific inspiration but artistic. The new interpretation, stemming from Benedetto Croce’s strict distinction between ethics and politics (the realm of “good” and the realm of “utility”), 17 turned Machiavelli into a technocrat, a neutral advisor who designs the machinery of the State with the pure love of the artist for formal perfection, without considerations of purpose: technique for technique, art for art. This thesis, proposed by Italian scholar Luigi Russo, was brilliantly defended by Lauro Escorel:
He went so far as to completely detach himself from the political crisis of his world, believing in the possibility of resolving it as one constructs a great work of art. He was a man of the Renaissance, a ‘homo aestheticus,’ ‘amoral’ like the poet who cares only about the perfection of his verses; but to this poet, historical evolution proved him right. Politically and historically, Machiavelli is right; morally, his position cannot be defended. Based on Benedetto Croce’s rigorous separation between politics and morality, Luigi Russo proposed a solution to Machiavelli’s problem, perhaps the only possible one, to which Mr. Lauro Escorel also adheres: Machiavelli’s theory is irrefutable as a political doctrine, but the world of human coexistence is not only of a political nature, and it is not only political solutions that determine our destinies. Machiavelli’s Machiavellism is a technique without consideration of purposes. Fundamentally, it is a ‘pure’ technique without any purpose, just like works of art. That is why it is defined by the multiplicity of possible meanings. It is ambiguous, just like great works of art. 18
All these interpretations have their share of truth: Machiavelli’s politics contain elements of despotic immorality, democratic republicanism, patriotism, cold description, and artistic idealization. It also happened that many illustrious readers throughout the ages, without creating radically new interpretations, sought to emphasize in Machiavelli this or that aspect that made him somewhat a precursor to themselves. German nationalism, for example, following in Hegel’s footsteps, easily assumed the form of a cult of the abstract idea of the State, and thus the enthusiastic patriot historian Treitschke praises Machiavelli’s pioneering role as the discoverer of that idea. According to him, Machiavelli “was a powerful thinker who collaborated with Martin Luther in the liberation of the State.” 19 Liberation of the State means freeing the nascent nation-states from the bonds of supranational authority, whether the medieval Empire or the Catholic Church.
In the same vein, another German historian, without any nationalist preaching intention, correctly informs us that the amoralistic pragmatism of raison d’état was not unknown in antiquity. What was new about Machiavelli was that he elevated this doctrine to a more general and abstract level: “In substance, ancient raison d’état, to the extent that men were aware of it and even justified the actions of the powerful dictated by circumstances, did not rise, it seems, or at least did not rise with strict consequence, to the idea of a supra-individual and autonomous state personality vis-à-vis the powerful of the day.” 20 As Treitschke said, Machiavelli was the first to clearly understand that the substance of the State is power.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in turn, sees in Machiavelli a precursor to his own ideas about the dissolving influence of Christian ethics, which, according to both, is responsible for the “degeneration” of European peoples. 21
But when so many disparate elements accumulate without being able to form a coherent design, human intelligence cannot resist the impulse to rearrange the whole picture, trying to find a new formal connection that brings order to the ensemble. This is what the revolutionary ideologue Antonio Gramsci did with Machiavelli. Gramsci understood that Machiavellianism was not an apology for immorality and despotism, nor for democracy, nor a description of reality, nor a patriotic appeal, nor “art for art’s sake,” but a little bit of all of this synthesized in the form of a long-term action plan. The Prince did not exist: Machiavelli painted his portrait like in a magical ritual, summoning him into existence – if not immediately, at least in a distant future. Shortly before Gramsci, one of his mentors, the critic Francesco de Sanctis, author of the celebrated “Storia della Letteratura Italiana,” exclaimed: "It is the program of the modern world, developed, corrected, expanded, more or less realized. And great are the nations that come closest to it. Let us be proud of our Machiavelli. Glory to him wherever a part of the ancient world crumbles! And glory to him when another part is added to the new!"22
It is not appropriate to confuse things. According to Gramsci’s understanding, Machiavelli is not a “prophet” in the sense of predicting the future. He does not “foresee” this future but plans and seeks to force its advent through intellectual influence exerted on a ruler (in The Prince) and on two candidates for rulership (in the Discourses).23 Some interpreters have sought to limit the scope of the plan to the immediate circumstances of Italy. But this only applies to The Prince. In the Discourses, a much more ambitious plan of the Third Rome will emerge (we will see this later), a completely new model of society whose realization transcended immeasurably the solution to the Italian problem.24 It is “the program of the modern world” referred to by De Sanctis. The unification of Italy, according to Villari, could only be achieved under the leadership of “a reforming Prince, and by the [technocratically amoral] means suggested and imposed by History and experience.” The larger plan of the Third Rome, as Antonio Gramsci saw it, required something more. No individual ruler would be able to accomplish it, at least not entirely. What was required was an elite organization, the conscious vanguard of the world revolution: the Party of Lenin and Gramsci. If Machiavelli is therefore a prophet, he is not in the vulgar sense of a predictor but in the etymological sense of the Greek verb prophero: to command, to order, to make things happen.25 He sees himself as a new Moses, opening a path in the Red Sea of the politics of his time for the crossing towards the promised land, the Third Rome. However, lacking personal political power, he plays this role with the weapon of the intellectual: the written word.
By this time, Machiavelli’s reputation among the educated classes was already much better than in the 16th century. Dissolved by successive attenuating factors – republicanism, patriotism, science, art, prophecy – Machiavellian immorality seemed to have receded into the realm of popular legends, consacrated errors that scholars could not take seriously. It was then that a highly competent scholar decided to take all this deadly seriously. The reason that led Leo Strauss to consider this hypothesis was his own personal experience. As a German Jew who fled from Nazism, he knew that not everything a philosopher thinks can be put on paper. Often, writing serves more to conceal than to express a thought. In the case of Machiavelli, the suspicion was justified all the more because he himself had confessed to Francesco Vettori:
I believe in nothing I say and I say nothing I believe – and when I discover some small fragment of truth, I try to hide it under such a mountain of lies that it becomes impossible to find it.26
It is probably the most astonishing confession in universal history. After knowing it, no one should remain oblivious to Leo Strauss’s warning that many philosophical works may have two layers of meaning: an “exoteric” one for the masses, and an “esoteric” one for the happy few who are not scandalized by fearsome truths (or lies). Strauss used this criterion, with reasonable success, in the reading of Maimonides and Spinoza. The reason for using it in the case of Machiavelli lies not only in the above confession.
Machiavelli’s work is full of gross errors of all kinds: truncated quotations, mistaken references to names or events, abusive generalizations, unacceptable omissions, and so on. The minimum prudence required would be to “believe” in a hidden intention behind these errors and constantly seek the hidden meaning.27
The results of applying this “minimum prudence” to Machiavelli’s writings are frightening: the superficial immorality of the advice given to the Prince, softened in turn by a layer of seemingly moralistic exhortations, is only a façade intended to conceal a much deeper attack on religion, designed to involve the reader in blasphemous reasoning without realizing the guilt they share with the author by following his reasoning.
In the meantime, some new arguments have also emerged in favor of old hypotheses. The figure of the concealed republican is reinforced by the suggestion of American historian Garrett Mattingly that The Prince is not an apology for tyrants but a satire of them.
I suppose it is possible to imagine that a man who has seen his country enslaved, his life’s work ruined, and himself tortured almost to the point of death, could then go home and write a book intended to teach his enemies the proper way to maintain power, always writing, it must be remembered, with the dispassionate objectivity of a scientist in a laboratory. It must be possible to imagine such behavior because Machiavelli scholars do imagine it and accept it without a visible tremor. But it is a little difficult for the ordinary mind to comprehend.28
In addition to the implausibility of the situation, Mattingly also points out some glaring inconsistencies that seem to challenge a literal reading:
“Only in a satire can one understand the choice of Cesare Borgia as the model prince. The common people of Tuscany could not have had what they could expect of a prince’s rule made clearer than by the example of this bloodstained buffoon whose vices, crimes, and follies had been the scandal of Italy, and the conduct of whose brutal, undisciplined troops had so infuriated the Tuscans that when another band of them crossed their frontier, the peasants fell upon them and tore them to pieces” (Id., ibid).
However, if the thesis of Machiavelli as a republican and democrat has gained some favor among historians in recent decades, sometimes those who agree with it defend it with arguments that go in the opposite direction to Mattingly’s. Quentin Skinner, opposing Strauss’s interpretation at least in this regard, argues that it is wrong to seek in Machiavelli’s works the coherence of a single thought evolving over time: between The Prince and the Discourses, the author simply changed his mind. This implies, of course, that Machiavelli wrote both works with equal seriousness. Maurizio Viroli, providing strong evidence that Machiavelli’s modus arguendi is never scientific but rather rhetorical (which is in stark contrast to the interpretations of Cassirer, Max Lerner, and many others), sees The Prince and the Discourses as works of patriotic exhortation.29 In this perspective, neither of the two books could be a satire.
All these and many other partial additions have been incorporated into the increasingly enigmatic portrait of Machiavelli.
3. Machiavelli’s pseudo-realism
AS I EXPLAINED ABOVE, I do not intend to solve the enigma here, but only to articulate its data in a way that emphasizes the importance of this enigma as one of the constant elements that permeate the intellectual history of the West since the 16th century.
For this, one can start from Antonio Gramsci’s undeniable observation that, while “The Prince” is composed of elements collected from the usual conduct of Italian politicians of the time, its complete design is not a reality but a project. In order to bring this project into reality, Machiavelli himself did not have any political power, but only the intellectual’s own weapon: the written word. Interestingly, he despised this weapon and its users, and Strauss points out that in this regard, he stands alongside Socrates' realism against the unlimited trust that the sophists placed in the power of speech as an instrument of social transformation.30 He says that nothing can replace military power. However, this refers to the immediate practical context and the person of the Prince who acts within it, not to Machiavelli himself, his prophet. What he casts into the waters of the future is merely the fishing hook of discourse, to bring to the surface the new era that lies at the bottom of the sea of possibilities. Realizing this possibility depends on an understanding of the laws of historical necessity. Machiavelli boasts of being the first to possess this knowledge (we will see what it consists of), and thus being able to open unprecedented perspectives for humanity, not only for the theoretical understanding of society but for the creation of a new world.
In this sense, he anticipates the operation that will be described by Hegel:31
Each individual man is only a blind link in the absolute necessity by which the world builds itself forward (sich fortbildet). The individual man can attain dominion (Herrschaft) over a considerable extent of this chain only if he knows the direction in which the great necessity wants to move and if, from this knowledge, he learns to utter the magic words (die Zauberworte) that will evoke its form (Gestalt) (Phenomenology of Spirit, D 324).
Analyzing this passage, Eric Voegelin sees in Hegel not a philosopher committed to describing the structure of reality, but a sorcerer-conjuror determined to shape it according to the image of a hypothetical future:
Hegel betrays in so many words that being a man is not enough for him; and as he cannot be the divine Lord of history himself, he is going to achieve Herrschaft as the sorcerer who will conjure up an image of history – a shape, a ghost – that is meant to eclipse the history of God’s making. The imaginative project of history falls in its place in the pattern of modern existence as the conjurer’s instrument of power.32
Strangely enough, Voegelin does not make the same judgment about Machiavelli, to whom the analysis equally applies. Instead, he calls him (albeit in a work deliberately left unpublished) "an honest and healthy figure, certainly preferable to the contractualists, especially Locke, who try to conceal the reality of underlying power through the immoral charlatanism of ‘consent’".33 Voegelin even gives him the status of a “spiritual realist,” placing him on par with Plato and Aristotle, St. Thomas, Leibniz, and Schelling in this regard. According to the great philosopher from Louisiana, the spiritual realist is the thinker who, having a proper awareness of man’s position in the structure of reality, does not confuse immanence with transcendence and therefore does not harbor illusions about the perfectibility of this world. Although Voegelin later abandoned the use of this concept and, according to his disciple Dante Germino, revised his judgment of Machiavelli,34 the truth is that, from the strict point of view of comparison with the idealistic falsification of reality, this judgment is not at all inadequate. If there is one thing that Machiavelli cannot be accused of, it is disguising power relations under an enchanting veil or betting on a future society freed from repression and fear. On the contrary, his Third Rome is entirely founded on fear of authority. Later, Voegelin himself admitted that this was not enough to make Machiavelli a “spiritual realist,” and even acknowledged a strong “demonic” element in the Florentine thinker, which, while not contradicting the judgment on that particular point, significantly modifies the overall evaluation of Machiavelli. Voegelin died before being able to explain this modification further, and I do not intend to conjecture about it here. What seems evident to me is that the realistic pessimism regarding the perfectibility of the world is entirely compatible with Machiavelli’s intention to call forth a new world into existence through the command words addressed to the princes of the future by a revived Moses. And if I see no way to escape the conclusion that, in this respect, he was a precursor to Hegel’s work of sorcery, it is precisely because he is by no means a new Moses, but rather, as we will see, an anti-Moses, the secularist inversion, the parodic version of the Hebrew prophet.
4. The parody of prophecy
IT IS WORTH EXAMINING this more carefully.
(1.) Machiavelli never denies the existence of God, the prophetic power infused in Moses by Divine Providence, or the presence of a divine influence in the later expansion of Christianity. However, for him, all of this is summed up in the concept of “Fortune,” the set of determining factors of destiny that are beyond human control. Against Fortune, he opposes “Virtue” (Virtù), defined not in a moral or religious sense but as simple willpower, the capacity for decision and action of human beings in general, but especially of leaders, of princes.
According to him, ancient Rome was born from the Virtue of its founders but became corrupted and softened by the dissolving influence of Judeo-Christianity, the child of God, that is, of “Fortune.” From Judeo-Christianity, the Second Rome was born, the Rome of the Popes, whose enviable power was based on the unraveling of nations through the deleterious influence of a doctrine of resignation and compassion. He attributes to this influence all the evils of the European peoples, especially Italy. Both the liberation of Italy in the short term and the establishment of the Third Rome in an indefinite future must, therefore, be the work of Virtue that rebels against Fortune and revokes the decrees of Providence through an act of will.
Machiavelli believes in free will and appeals to men to use it voluntarily against God. Therefore, it is impossible for him not to be fully aware that, by assuming the mantle of Moses, he does so as a Moses turned inside out. The parodic inversion could not be more evident.
With this, both the sanitized images of Machiavelli as a scientist or artist and the naive censures that saw him as a vulgar amoralist are thrown into the trash. Giving “Machiavellian” advice to princes is clearly a sin against morality. But to invest oneself with prophetic authority to fight against Providence and try to reverse the divine course of History is not an “immorality.” It is not even a political perversion. It is a metaphysical rebellion, a sin against the Holy Spirit.
(2.) The parodic character of the undertaking becomes even clearer when we examine it from a chronological point of view. Until 1513, Machiavelli (born in 1469) had only written administrative documents of no great importance. The Prince, produced in that year, precedes by four years the Discourses on Livy’s First Decade, by six years the Life of Castruccio Castracani, by eight years the Art of War, and by twelve years the Florentine Histories. Clearly, Machiavelli’s conception of government, with the prophecy of the advent of the reforming Prince, was ready and finished at the moment when its author created, retrospectively, a global interpretation of History to justify it. His interpretation of the past is pre-molded by his anticipation of the future. This curious inversion of the structure of time is repeated almost invariably in all the thinkers who marked the modern cycle: Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and even Nietzsche. With great audacity, each of them believes to have glimpsed the future and takes it as a premise to explain the past. This is the phenomenon I call “pseudo-prophetism,” one of the structural characteristics of modern thought and especially of revolutionary mentality, in the explicit sense that I give to this term.
(3.) Even more curious is the relationship between the content of the two essential books, The Prince and the Discourses, and the role that Machiavelli assigned to them in the implementation of his own political career. The first is dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici, the ruling prince, and deals mainly with principalities. The second has as its central subject republics and is dedicated to two private citizens with some prospect of becoming rulers. Evidently, the prophet seeks to guard against possible setbacks in the realization of his prophecy. The foresight of the future could serve as a premise for a drastic reinterpretation of the whole of History but not to univocally guide Machiavelli’s own career. The Third Rome is an absolute certainty, even more firmly established than the past since it is its function, but it is not known for sure whether it will come in the form of a principality or a republic. It is advisable to be prepared for both eventualities by preemptively flattering the two possible types of rulers. Making prophecies for the rest of humanity is one thing; making them for oneself is another. Imagine if Moses, while showing the people the way through the waters of the Red Sea, tried at the same time to cover his bases by renting a little boat. By showing himself aware of this distinction, our new Moses, like Don Quixote, proves that he is loco si, pero no tonto. (“crazy, yes, but not foolish”)
5. The liar
IF THERE SEEMS TO BE something tortuous and dishonest in this, do not be surprised: “I never say what I believe, nor do I believe what I say.” These words make Machiavelli a living incarnation of the “liar paradox” and immediately place his reader at the heart of the problem that I named “existential self-reference”: Does the confessed liar tell the truth at the moment of confession or does he lie about all previous moments? Did he lead a life of lies or does he lie about the history of his life? In these conditions, interpreters quickly realized that it was impossible to understand Machiavelli without elucidating the exact relationship between the expressed meaning of his text and the unexpressed truth of his existence. The results they arrived at were the most divergent, but there are four personal details in Machiavelli’s life and work that should not be forgotten:
First: The man who considered himself capable of teaching the citizen of humble origin to rise to the highest levels of power never gave the slightest sign of having learned his own lessons. All he achieved in life was to hold a subordinate position for fourteen years, lose it due to political carelessness, partially regain it by the favor of the new rulers, exercise it for two more years, and then die.
Second: He showed the greatest contempt for intellectuals who, incapable of political action, tried to influence the course of public affairs through their written works, but he was never anything other than one of them.
Third: While his work presents him as a cold, pessimistic, and malicious observer, in political practice, he repeatedly showed naive and almost pathetic gullibility. This professor of opportunism never knew how to seize opportunities: “He was always in the wrong camp, and he was lucky only once: when he, the republican, died before the death of the Republic of Florence.” In his youth, he bet that Cesare Borgia only engaged in brutality in the service of the papacy because he intended to overthrow the Pope and reign in his place as a secular ruler. However, no matter how much it suited Maquiavelli’s own objectives, that was neither in the plans nor within the capabilities of the general. After this aborted first incarnation of the “Prince,” new errors of prediction awaited the prophet. After the overthrow of the Florentine Republic, he deluded himself with the hope that the new rulers, whom he had helped to fight, would keep him in office… due to his loyalty to the fallen government! Weeks later, he was dismissed and imprisoned. Finally, in exile, for years on end, he deluded himself about the possibility of returning to public administration by flattering the powerful in the most demeaning manner. They repaid him with complete contempt until, in the end of his life, sick and exhausted, he partially regained his duties thanks to the pity inspired by his former enemies, only to lose them again due to carelessness and regain them – once again out of charity – shortly before his death.
Fourth: He taught the Prince to rise to power with the help of allies and then kill them, but obviously, he himself, as the author of the plan and therefore one of the Prince’s greatest allies, would have been among the first to die if the plan were put into action. He despised the inventors of ideal governments that were never realized, but over the years, he gave no indication whatsoever that he realized that his own ideal government plan had never been realized and that he owed his survival precisely to that fact.
To say that this man is a realist, in the most demanding sense of the term, is unsustainable. We will see later in what partial sense he admits this qualification. But regardless of that sense, it must be compatible with the observation that Machiavelli was also a utopian idealist, not only in his political thought but also in the almost complete absence of conscious connection between that thought and his most direct and visible personal experience. The apparent realism with which he accepts the limitations of human action and describes the miseries of politics conceals not only the prophetic utopianism of the Third Rome but also the absolute inability of its inventor to examine his invention from the perspective of his own real position in existence. Hence the need to embody an imaginary character – the new Moses – and describe the world from the viewpoint of that fiction, concealing the depressing reality that contrasted with it. This displacement between the axis of theoretical construction and the axis of lived experience I call “cognitive parallax,” another permanent characteristic of modern thought. One of the most obvious manifestations of parallax is when the very act of an individual saying or writing something proves the falsehood of what he says or writes: There is no clearer example of this than a coup plan that includes, as one of its basic conditions, the elimination of the plan’s author. Later on, I will explain this concept more clearly, but the general notion I convey here is sufficient for the reader to note that parallax in no way equates to conscious lying, hypocrisy, or dissimulation. Behind these veils, the “Machiavellian” liar, hypocrite, or dissimulator truly believes in something. It is in this subjective or imaginary truth, and not in the disguises that conceal it, that parallax resides – the gap between basic beliefs and the reality of one’s life. At the core of all the feints, detours, disguises, and cunning of the “Machiavellian” liar, lies the residue of unremovable naivety of someone who is incapable of becoming aware of their own situation and, even more so, of confronting it with the content of their general convictions as translated into texts for publication. Dante Germino asks why Machiavelli remains for us, in Croce’s expression, “an enigma that can never be solved”? And he answers: “Because he was confused. Why was he confused? Because he lived in what Voegelin himself called ‘The Age of Confusion,’ in which the foundations of Western civilization were crumbling around him.”
However, it would be even greater naivety to try to explain Machiavelli through his “unconscious.” Just as in the liar paradox, the victim of cognitive parallax is not completely unaware of oneself, but lives in a twilight between truth and lies, unable to firmly establish oneself in the former because it would immediately dispel the lie, but also unable to lie completely because the lie adopted as the guiding thread of action would become the truth of one’s existence: the true existence of a liar.
6. Three testimonies
MAQUIAVEL LEFT THREE extraordinary testimonies that do not allow us to doubt that he was aware of this ambiguity.
The first is the tale Belfagor Archdevil, in which a first-rate demon, sent to Earth to investigate whether women are as bad as they say, marries one of them and, indebted by matrimony, ends up being corrupted by human beings. It is a hyperbolic anticipation of Rousseau: the demon is good, the social environment corrupts him. Human wickedness does not have this mitigating factor since the devil does not influence it in any way, only observes it, just as Machiavelli, by instilling future rulers with a love for lies and brutality, remains innocent, like a pure observer of customs.
The role reversal is just a divertissement, of course, but a second testimony indicates that Machiavelli, on his deathbed, still took it seriously to a certain extent. Ill, abandoned by doctors, he tells a dream to his friends.
He sees a crowd of poor ragged, emaciated, and gaunt people; he asks who they are and they respond that they are the blessed of Paradise, of whom the Scriptures say: Beati pauperis quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum.35 After they disappear, a group of nobly dressed characters gravely discussing politics appears before him; among them, he recognizes Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus, and other famous names from classical antiquity. Inquiring who they are, he learns that he is in the presence of the damned in Hell, for it was written: Sapientis huius saeculi inimica est Dei.36 After the vision dissolves, he is asked which of the two groups he would prefer to join. He answers that he would rather go to Hell with the noble spirits and discuss politics than be sent to Paradise among the ragged ones who had appeared to him first.37
The meaning of this dream does not need to be investigated psychoanalytically. It had already been explained in advance by the third testimony on our list, dated December 10, 1513. This day does not appear in festive calendars. It does not evoke any notable public event. But it is the date of an essential document in the history of the transition from classical and medieval thought to “modern” mentality. On this day, Niccolò Machiavelli, secretary of the second chancery, dismissed shortly after the Medici’s return to power, confined to the Tuscan territory and prohibited from entering the Palazzo Vecchio where he had faithfully served the extinct republic of Florence for fourteen years, writes the famous letter describing the misery of his state:
Then comes the lunch hour when, with my family, I eat the food that this poor house and meager estate allow. Once fed, I return to the inn; there, my usual companions are generally a butcher, a miller, and two potters. I spend the whole day with them, playing cards, and from that arise a thousand disputes and a torrent of injurious words; and most of the time we argue over trifles, and they have even heard us shouting from San Casciano. Thus, surrounded by these tight-fisted individuals, I relieve my brain of its mold and vent my frustrations against the malignity of my fate, glad that it tramples me in this way, to see if in the end it will be ashamed of treating me like this.
When night comes, I return home and enter my study; at the entrance, I remove the everyday clothes covered in mud and dust and clothe myself in regal and appropriate garments; and thus suitably dressed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received amicably by them, I partake of those delicacies that are suitable and natural to me; where I am not ashamed to converse with them and ask them about the reasons for their actions; and they kindly respond to me; and for four hours, I do not experience any fatigue: I forget all concerns, poverty does not frighten me, death does not intimidate me; I am fully absorbed in them.38
The first paragraph accounts for the moral and intellectual degradation of the bureaucrat, a consequence of losing his position in the state hierarchy. The second exalts the refuge that the intellectual, fleeing from external and internal misery, finds for a few hours each day in reading the classics of historiography. Both paragraphs seem sufficiently truthful: they correspond to what is known about Machiavelli’s life during that period. What does not seem right is the relationship between them.
How is it possible for a man vocationally directed toward the meditation of antiquity and the classics (“the delicacies that are suitable and natural to me”) to degrade himself to the point of engaging in gambling and petty disputes with illiterate and rustic people, simply because he lost the job that guaranteed him a good standard of living and association with the wealthy? Why didn’t the intellectual, exiled in his own land, separated from his bureaucratic duties, take advantage of the spare hours of the day to dedicate himself even more to his studies, as any of the great philosophers would have done in his place? The daily routines of many of them are known. Activity at the Academy and the Lyceum went from morning to night. Plato and Aristotle only stopped studying to teach, and vice versa. From Socrates' countless conversations, not one is known to be about trivial matters. Leibniz stole every interval of his diplomatic tasks for science, studying at night and, during long journeys, maneuvering the inkwell and pen as best he could amidst the bumps of the carriage to scribble mathematical treatises and theological expositions. Nietzsche, who had only a few minutes of productive activity each day due to the terrible headaches of tertiary syphilis, did not waste them on dissipations: knowing himself incapable of continuous work, he learned to condense his insights into brilliant axioms. And I won’t even mention, of course, the strict discipline of monk-philosophers, Benedictines or Franciscans, for whom study and teaching were, like prayers and fasting, an integral part of devotion to the one necessary thing.
Seen from the perspective of the second paragraph, the first seems strange. It becomes even more implausible when we read that the daily transfiguration of the common gambler into a companion of conversations with Cicero and Livy occurred through such a simple ritual as changing clothes, reverting to the previous state after a night’s sleep and lunch. Even worse: how could a soul alternate so easily between self-destructive masochistic depression (“venting my frustrations against the malignity of my fate, glad that it tramples me in this way”) and the state of Olympian tranquility of a spiritual companion to kings, princes, and sages of other eras by such means? A person does not change their personality as if they were literally changing clothes.
It is possible, of course, to conjecture that Machiavelli simply lied. That may very well be the case since he confesses to being a liar himself.39 Let us admit, then, that he invented those things. But why would he have invented them precisely in that way? If the passage does not express what happened, it expresses what the author wanted us to imagine happened. And why would he have wanted us to imagine it that way, as an abrupt and inexplicable cut between two lives, one vulgar and the other noble, lived by a single character in the same day? The fiction, assuming it is fiction, presents us with the same enigma it would if it were true.
7. Perverted nobility
A PLAUSIBLE SOLUTION can be found if we wonder what Machiavelli, in royal attire, conversed with the nobles of old in the sanctum sanctorum of his office, far from the coarseness of butchers and millers that he indulged in a few hours earlier. The answer is not so difficult, because The Prince, the author’s most famous work, was conceived during this period of isolation; it is the living result of these imaginary conversations. The book deals with “sovereignty, its nature, the ways to conquer it, preserve it, and lose it.” The content of the advice the author received from his masters is well known: sovereignty is conquered through cunning and betrayal, preserved through lies and murder, and lost through loyalty and compassion. Morally, it would be difficult to consider these conducts much superior to the exchange of insults among card players. The difference between the two worlds in which Machiavelli’s daily cycle transited is definitely not a moral one. More precisely, it is the transition from lesser immorality to greater immorality, or from mere transgression to high-style crime. The feeling of moving from a lowly world of vulgarity to the sacred enclosure of lofty cogitations does not reflect a passage from impurity to purity, from the mundane to the divine, from the lowly world of transient contingency to a Platonic sphere of timeless archetypes, but merely a transition from spontaneous evil founded in ignorance to conscious evil, reflected upon, planned, and transfigured into a work of art. However much the sages of old insisted on speaking to him about something else, the hearing he grants them is selective: he only apprehends the lower part corresponding to sapientia huius saeculi. The inner temple in which Machiavelli takes refuge from the ambient vulgarity is, without a doubt, the Inferno that he will declare choosing at the gates of death. As Leo Strauss rightly saw, "to recognize the demonic character of Machiavelli’s thought is to recognize that he belongs to a perverted nobility of a very high level."40
The importance of this passage also stems from the fact that it shows us the true source of Machiavelli’s political vision: not the pure realistic observation of facts, not the scientific objectivity that some of his modern devotees have attributed to him, but a curious arrangement that allows for the cold observation of historical-political details to be fitted into an idealized contemplation of demonic malice.
That is why the two political models he invented respectively in The Prince and in Discourses – the all-powerful ruler and the “Third Rome” –, although filled with realistic details and even astute generalizations, are also imaginary, mythical entities that never came to historical fruition. The former is a model of amoral efficiency whose only relatively successful historical personification, for a time, was Josef Stalin, four centuries later, in a distant land with an inglorious end.41 The latter, the all-powerful State that closed the gates of heaven and reigns over a mass of human termites reduced to "absolute terrestriality,"42 had several aborted incarnations throughout History and resurfaced in the 20th century as the macabre ideal of Antonio Gramsci, but definitively, it is not a reality: it is an archetype.
It is difficult to know if Machiavelli’s description of his period of ostracism is, in a literal sense, real or fictional. What is certain is that, in both cases, it is an inversion of the true meaning of the events. When Machiavelli says he felt humiliated and constrained among his fellow players, he does not mean that he was truly better than them. Rather, the evil that resided in them was too small for his personal aspirations. The ascent from vulgarity to nobility through the daily ceremony of changing clothes may have been mistakenly interpreted as an analogue of Rousseau’s romantic escape from the jungle of the city to the solitude of primordial nature, or more generally, as the rejection of a stupid world by a demanding intellectual. In fact, it clearly expresses a counter-initiation in the strict sense that René Guénon gives to the term,43 the ritual that allows for the transfiguration of the simple human sinner into an ascetic of evil, the transfiguration of base passions into spiritualized perversion, the sacrifice of human intelligence in exchange for drops of demonic cunning.
8. Fleeing from experience
WOULD IT MAKE SENSE TO CALL this “realism”?
When Lord Lawrence Arthur Burd writes that Machiavelli abandoned scholastic argumentation "secundum Scripturae divinae auctoritatem, Philosophorum dogmata et exempla laudatorum Principum", opting instead to cling to “experience,” he adds that, in the case of Italian publicists, "unfortunately, the peculiar nature of their experiences often led them to fallacious results, as seems very clear in Machiavelli."44
But that was not the only limitation of Machiavelli. Lord Burd’s paragraph shows that, for Machiavelli and his companions, the divine Scriptures, the sentences of philosophers, and the commendable examples of princes had become dead letter, fixed doctrinal formulas behind which they no longer grasped any content of inner or outer experience. That is the same as saying that they did not understand them at all.
The greatest proof of this is the unsustainable and self-contradictory explanation that Machiavelli gives for Moses' success, attributing it to the power of arms and Fortune. On one hand, the liberator of the Hebrews would have won because he was an “armed prophet,” in contrast to the unarmed prophet contemporaneous with Machiavelli, Girolamo Savonarola, who failed miserably.45 But Savonarola did not fare poorly for lack of weapons, but because he was not a prophet at all. His decline did not stem from any battle, but from a public challenge to prove the authenticity of his prophetic mission by crossing the fire without being burned. The monk accepted the challenge but presented a substitute to face the flames in his place, which was naturally interpreted by the people as unequivocal proof of imposture. "Savonarola lost in a single day his aura of divine prophet."46 There is no record that Moses, with or without weapons, failed under similar circumstances. The comparison between him and Savonarola is forced to the limits of stupidity. For what purpose? Machiavelli was no fool, but he often relied on the stupidity of the reader and emerged victorious. At first glance, the paragraph seems to exalt Moses as a wisely armed prophet and to depreciate unarmed Savonarola as a reckless one. In fact, what he says is that if Moses had been exposed as Savonarola was, it would hardly affect the successful fulfillment of his prophetic mission, since Moses had weapons. With Savonarola being a pretentious fool, Moses is reduced to the condition of an armed pretentious fool.
Setting aside the slanderous depreciation, a problem remains: even if we admit the hypothesis that Moses succeeded through the force of arms rather than authentic divine charisma, it would be necessary to ask how he managed to continue to be obeyed after his death, considering that the dead do not possess weapons. Machiavelli would respond by appealing to “Fortune.” The continuity of Judeo-Christianity is due to the influx of divine providence, which, as we have seen, Machiavelli identifies with the pure power of uncontrollable chance and points to as the essential enemy of human will, to be overcome by the force of Virtù and arms. This creates an unsolvable problem. Moses, winning through arms, was an incarnation of Virtù and therefore fought against the Fortune that simultaneously aided him. Such a glaring contradiction could not have escaped Machiavelli himself. It is also not possible that he did not perceive the falsity of the improvised explanation for Savonarola’s failure, an event of which he himself was a witness. He knows perfectly well that he is lying.
On the other hand, it is evident that the models of perfect princes proposed by philosophers and the Church were not mere “castles in the air.” They only appear as such when viewed in isolation from the body of knowledge regarding the structure of the human soul, passions and temptations, “discernment of spirits,” etc. The exposition of the duties of rulers was nothing more than a minimal fragment of the moral teaching regarding the duty of state—the obligations of each person according to their position in society—which constituted a chapter of general morality, which in turn was articulated with a formidable deposit of psychological and anthropological experiences and observations that were usually transmitted through scholastic teaching. To claim that some of the deepest connoisseurs of the human soul, such as St. Augustine or St. Bernard, produced “castles in the air” without any basis in direct experience is a formidable aberration that, at first, the reader is tempted to explain by ignorance of the texts. But to what extent did Machiavelli really ignore the works of the scholastics and, through them, the entire teaching of the Church? This point does not seem to have been sufficiently elucidated, but one thing is certain: entire sections of The Prince, from a formal standpoint, are a parodic imitation of the modus exponendi of scholastic treatises, and no one can parody what they are completely ignorant of. The hypothesis of intentional lying is, once again, the most viable.
Furthermore, how can we accept that the author of The Prince was sincere in condemning philosophers as builders of utopias, when precisely the inventor of the most famous ideal regime of antiquity, Plato, is among the wise men in royal attire whom he, in his famous dream, prefers to accompany to Hell in order to converse with them about politics, rather than entering Heaven with a multitude of ragged poor?
How was it possible for Machiavelli, by turning his back or pretending to turn his back on such a rich legacy of experiences, to imagine at the same time that he was the first to descend from the realm of general ideas to concrete experience? How could he deceive himself or lie so much about himself? The automatic response that he preferred direct and living experience of the present over a past known through the eyes of others is invalid because he welcomes and meditates attentively on the experience of ancient Romans condensed in the works of Livy, Caesar, Cicero, and all the others. There are only two hypotheses to explain this phenomenon. First, Machiavelli truly did not understand the Scriptures, the sentences of the prophets, or the commendable examples of princes, perceiving in this material nothing but empty phrases and “speculations in the air.” Second, he was prejudiced in his selection, accepting only the materials that aligned with his secular and amoral preferences. The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive: incomprehension and aversion attract and reinforce each other. Whatever the case may be, the Judeo-Christian experience was infinitely broader in terms of time, space, and variety of recorded human and spiritual situations than the Italic-Roman experience. By choosing to consider only the latter, disregarding the former a priori or reducing it to what it had in common with its lower and material aspects, Machiavelli needlessly narrowed the horizon of his observations, adjusting the selection to the purposes of the politics he intended to impose.
Anthony Parel observes that
one significant way in which Machiavelli contributed to the new confidence in man was his separation between politics and religion and his challenge to the secular authority of the Church. Political activity, Machiavelli believed, can be isolated from other forms of activity and treated on its own autonomous terms. In short, politics can divorce itself from theology, and government from religion. The state is no longer seen as having a moral purpose or end. Its purpose is not the formation of human souls but the creation of conditions that will enable man to satisfy his basic desires for self-preservation, security, and happiness. Religion has the vital function of personal salvation, of serving as an important means of social control—a basis for civic virtue rather than moral virtue.47
All of this is correct, but the reduction of religion to theology and theology to morality is entirely based on Machiavelli’s personal dogma, which does not correspond at all to the texts and facts. Religion, in itself, is not a system of beliefs or a moral code (the symbolic obscurity and the existence of many immoral episodes in the biblical account should be enough to eliminate these two illusions immediately): it is a collection of internal and external experiences, condensed into symbolic narratives and transmitted from generation to generation by a lineage of prophets, apostles, and priests, periodically relived in rituals and slowly, very slowly, consolidated into a system of beliefs and rules that can serve as a “instrument of social control,” precisely when the meaning of the original experiences has become too distant in time to be easily reactivated by personal participation. Furthermore, if religion can become an instrument of social control, the ubiquity and effectiveness of this instrument are too well known to be abolished a priori from an investigation of power that aims to be realistic and objective. On the other hand, the goals of “self-preservation, security, and happiness” that, according to Machiavelli, the political society must fulfill obviously depend on moral and spiritual factors, and excluding these factors contradicts the very terms of the new methodological proposal.
Finally, the crucial problem remains: if the essence of politics is Virtù and the mission of Virtù is to subjugate Fortune, which in turn is identified with the will of God, what realism is there in isolating politics from religion, that is, from the knowledge of “Fortune” as such? Fortune is both the encompassing backdrop within which political activities unfold and the primary obstacle to be overcome by them. Who would call a general “realistic” if, in his battle plan, he began by disregarding the terrain and the enemy? Machiavelli seems to believe that simply turning his back on Fortune would abolish or neutralize it. Since this is obviously impossible, a political science worthy of the name, or even a practical political wisdom based on common sense, would require, above all, an investigation of Fortune and the limits it imposes on human action. Only within these limits would it be possible to define Virtù and prescribe a reasonable course of action. Machiavelli not only overlooks these obvious facts with a self-confidence of a madman, but by identifying Fortune with God, he shows no sign of realizing that he is, at the same time, proclaiming the impossibility of separating politics from religion—a separation that, on the other hand, forms the basis of his “scientific” project.
Machiavelli’s famous realism is therefore not a realism in the serious sense of the word: it is an idealized realism, selectively shaped according to the mythical mold of the Prince—the ruler who, separated from the general conditions of human life and magically leaping over millennia of historical background, reigns omnipotent over an abstract Italy specially constructed for him by a philosopher hypnotized by the mythical vision of ancient Rome. Hence the accuracy of Lord Burd’s observation that “the peculiar nature of their experiences often led them [Machiavelli and his peers] to fallacious results.” It would be more accurate to say, instead of “peculiar nature,” the limited, provincial, and historically isolated nature of their experiences. Even within these limits, the gaze that Machiavelli casts on the immediate modus operandi of politics, if it seems “realistic” in terms of critical pessimism and the a priori exclusion of the possibility of elevated and holy motivations in human actions, is obviously affected by a subjective bias in that Machiavelli enjoys the wickedness he observes and contemplates it with the fascinated gaze of an appreciator of art. His preference for the intrinsic value, rather than the instrumental value, of evil and sin is clear and cannot be hidden behind any claim of scientific objectivity.
9. Layers of meaning
The MULTITUDE OF DISCORDANT INTERPRETATIONS of Machiavelli’s work reflects the “confusion” referred to by Dante Germino, a confusion that partly lies in the historical context and partly in the work itself. It has been rightly observed that this work repels unambiguous interpretations and consists of a series of “layers” of meaning. The method of reading layers was well developed in the 20th century by the phenomenological school, especially by the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, and its application to the case of Machiavelli may indeed yield something.
The layers that I can identify in it are, to some extent, the same as those historically revealed to successive interpreters. They naturally go from the external to the internal, from the accidental to the essential, and from the provisional to the enduring, showing that the cumulative work of understanding and critical discernment undertaken by various generations was by no means a vain effort.
The immorality that impressed the early readers of The Prince, whatever its greater or lesser significance in the overall work, whether it constitutes the essence of Machiavelli’s thought or the wrapper of some deeper idea, is in itself a real and undeniable fact. The reality of the “immoralist Machiavelli” is confirmed by the comedy The Mandrake, in which an indecent plot woven between a husband, a lover, and a friar is crowned with success, proving that "in life, the rogues, the hypocrites, and the astute are right."48
The fact that Machiavelli’s advice was not his inventions but at least in part a transfer of real political practices that he had closely observed, confirmed by the reading of ancient history, brings to light a second aspect: the “observant Machiavelli.” It is true that he enthusiastically approved the cruelty and malice of a Caesar Borgia, recommending them as models of Virtù. But, to show you how consistent this was with the customs of the time, Borgia himself was indeed an agent of the Pope, and a book that would later be placed on the Index was even published with the pontifical imprimatur.
Machiavelli does not limit himself to description and observation but articulates a formidable set of strategies and tactics aimed at the formation of an independent Italian state. He is the “patriotic Machiavelli.”
The observation of customs, combined with the nationalist political project, produces the image of the ideal independent State and its also ideal ruler, the all-powerful Prince. As Antonio Gramsci observed, "the utopian character of The Prince lies in the fact that the Prince did not exist in historical reality [...] but was a pure doctrinal abstraction, the symbol of the leader, the ideal condottiere."49 The Prince would therefore be a historical anticipation of the Sorelian “myth,” a utopian image cast upon the collective imagination to induce the people to organized action. This is the “myth-making Machiavelli,” in which the realism of means merges into a utopian projection of ends.
But Machiavelli does not limit himself to the observation of facts and the creation of myths. Between one and the other, he mediates through attempts at generalization about the formation and fall of States, about the various behaviors of rulers, about national defense, etc. By linking present facts with historical experience, these generalizations have the structure of a rudiment of political science. This is the “scientist Machiavelli.”
Both the ideal Prince and the independent Italian State did not function in practice as the Sorelian myth they were intended to be. The conditions of the time did not allow for the advent of either. Machiavelli, as if anticipating this frustrating outcome, fortifies his project with the backdrop of a broader and long-term conception. It is the “Third Rome,” an anticipation of the modern lay State, as emphasized by de Sanctis. Its creator corresponds to the “prophetic Machiavelli.”
The Third Rome is not a copy of the first. It is its optimized version. It is free from the mortal defect of Ancient Rome: its inability to defend itself from the dissolving influence of Judeo-Christianity. In the new State, religion will not be entirely eliminated but rather subjugated and used for the Prince’s purposes.50 By emphasizing the unprecedented and futuristic nature of his speculations, Machiavelli is precisely referring to this, not only to the personal truculence of the Prince that so impressed the English cardinal. He is fully aware of laying the foundations of a new civilization, founded on the exclusion of all spirituality and, as his disciple Antonio Gramsci later said, on the “absolute secularization” of thought. When he compares himself to a new Moses, he is also aware of the parodically inverted nature of his undertaking. It is not about parting the waters of the Red Sea but about closing them off to make any escape from the walls of the State impossible. He is the “anti-Moses Machiavelli.”
When Machiavelli confesses that he says nothing of what he believes and does not believe anything of what he says, hiding under mountains of lies any minimal truth he may come across, he shows that he perfectly knows that all the layers described so far are veils or disguises intended to cover and at the same time dialectically reveal the ultimate purpose of his project: the post-Christian or anti-Christian State. Little else matters to him. The means can be moral, amoral, or immoral. The discourse can be chronicle, science, myth, defamation, flattery, or pure and simple lies. The form of the State can be monarchical, republican, or mixed. The government can be tyrannical, democratic, or a mixture of both. Italy can separate from the Vatican or merge with it to hollow it out from within. All of this depends on the occasion and convenience, hence the impression of neutrality, balance, and realism, as well as the impossibility of reducing Machiavelli’s thought to a fixed doctrinal formula, as all its antagonistic elements are absorbed not into a theoretical conclusion but into the ultimate goal, which is the only necessary thing and to which everything serves: abolishing Fortune in the name of Virtù, subjugating God to a human will that freely chooses Hell. For this purpose, even the very meanings of Virtù and Fortune can be scrambled, designating the former at times as brute force, at times as disciplined conduct of citizens,51 and the latter at times as fortuitous chance, at times as divine providence, separating or mixing these conceptions as desired to use truth as camouflage or camouflage as an ambiguous expression of a truth that can always be denied in the next moment. In short, everything is allowed: the only thing that matters is to quickly reach the Third Rome. The fact that the plan for this endeavor could only be expressed through a complex system of detours, disguises, and apparent or true paradoxes is not due in any way to the fear of ecclesiastical reprisal, unlikely in an era of chic neopaganism, but rather to the very nature of the project, which, inspired by the fundamental lie of “absolute secularization,” could only be expressed in a language of twilight and self-contradictions. These contradictions are so abundant that they have disoriented many generations of readers. They are not only internal to the work but also reveal themselves in its historical antecedents and subsequent development of events. Two examples will illustrate this latter aspect. On one hand, one of the immediate sources that inspired the plan of the Third Rome was the foolish hope that Caesar Borgia himself, an agent of papal authority, would overthrow the Pope and establish the lay State in the Vatican. Not only did the famous Duke fail to do so, but he ended his days in disgrace, showing that malice and truculence do not have the practical omnipotence that Machiavelli wanted to see in them. On the other hand, the only lay State that, approaching the model outlined by Machiavelli, that is, the mixed aristocratic-democratic regime, managed to establish itself successfully and endure, was the United States. With one essential difference: the American State, far from seeking to subjugate Christianity to worldly ends of lay authority, became deeply imbued with biblical influence and made Judeo-Christian morality, as Alexis de Tocqueville aptly observed, one of its constitutive pillars. That the formal conception of the Machiavellian State, undoubtedly ingenious in itself, would be embodied precisely in a Christian State and not in its opposite as Machiavelli intended is one of those ironies of history that remind us that, in the end, the devil is a servant of God. This is undoubtedly the figure of the “Satanist Machiavelli,” who knows very well who he works for and can only confess it in a doubly ironic way: before the devout masses, he appeals to false displays of piety to pretend that he works for God when he knows he works for the devil; before the masses of anti-Christian schemers, he pretends to work for the devil when he knows perfectly well that his wicked work ultimately contributes ad majorem Dei gloriam.
According to his son Piero’s account, at the age of thirteen, Machiavelli confessed his sins to a friar in his final moments and died in the grace of God. We do not know if the account is true or if, in this case, the repentance was sincere or just the final act of a bitter comedy, whose characters, surviving the author, still stir on the stage of the world.
10. Parodic inversion of Christianity
GOING NOW FROM THE CENTER to the periphery, let us try to grasp the internal order of Machiavelli’s thought as it is constituted and developed over time.
Removed from power, reduced to the solitude of a mediocre life, the Florentine secretary conceives a new formula of government that, he imagines, can seduce the current and potential rulers in order to attract their sympathy towards the competent official excluded from state affairs. The most appealing aspect of the formula is the offer to free these rulers from all moral and psychic constraints of religion. In short, Machiavelli captures the conflict between the noble caste and the priestly caste—a recurring theme since the beginning of the world, with mythical resonances, as seen in the traditional symbolism of the she-bear and the wild boar—but which was particularly acute at the emergence of nation-states in opposition to the old ecclesiastical project of the European Empire. He discovers a way to intervene in this conflict, favoring the noble caste in such a way that it cannot deny him a reward.
The project takes shape in two stages, corresponding to the author’s two main books, “The Prince” (1513) and “Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy” (1517). The first focuses on the most immediate problems of achieving absolute power and outlines the ideal portrait of the prince capable of establishing the new state of affairs. The second greatly expands the scope of the project and the framework of historical references that underpin it: the local principality is transfigured into a universal republic, and the plan for Italian independence becomes a utopia of a new world civilization.
The reasoning that Machiavelli offers in favor of subjugating and eventually destroying the Church by the ascending noble caste also unfolds in two stages. In “The Prince,” it appears in the form of practical immorality that exempts the ruler from all moral obligations imposed by Christianity. In the “Discourses,” the demolition of the Church reaches a higher stage: the complete slanderous falsification of the history of the Church and the construction of a model of the State based on the parodic inversion of Christianity.
The first of these aspects is well known even in popular literature, and there is no need to dwell on it. The second aspect is much more interesting, but even this does not need to be exhaustively addressed: the general arguments of Machiavelli against the Church have already been widely discussed in introductory works. What is significant for the purposes of this chapter is the tactic he employs to make them plausible. This tactic consists of articulating praises, slanders, and ambiguities in such a confusion that the reader, unable to grasp a clear doctrinal formula that summarizes the author’s thinking on the matter, is left with only the vague feeling that they have no alternative but to endorse, albeit vaguely and implicitly, the Machiavellian project in a stumbling manner because it appears, as de Sanctis said, as the very project of modernity, to which no one can object except at the price of going against what everyone around proclaims as an inevitable historical necessity.
Let us examine some samples of how Machiavelli creates this confusion. To begin with, he admits that religion is useful for the maintenance of the State, and he praises the legislator Numa for having integrated religious institutions into the structure of the Roman State since they allowed the ruler to be obeyed by the people by promising celestial rewards when there were neither appropriate earthly rewards nor punishments to obtain the same result. He acknowledges that Christianity played the same role in the origins of European governments and that it can continue to do so usefully in the future State, as a “positive factor in the exaltation of patriotism, in the creation of the civic virtues indispensable to the life and defense of the State.” Combined with other perfunctory praises that appear here and there in Machiavelli’s writings, this idea seems to imply a benevolent and even conservative conception of religion. However, it contrasts so strongly with his apology for anti-Christian methods in the art of government that it becomes inevitable to wonder what remains Christian in a religion reduced to an instrument of the State. On the other hand, as Machiavelli, anticipating Kant and positivism, resolutely affirms that “we have no knowledge of supernatural things” in order to take into account the teachings of religious doctrine in interpreting human affairs, and that therefore politics must be approached independently of theological considerations, it is clear that the residual Christianity of the future State will be reduced to a function identical to that of Numa’s religion: leading the masses to obedience through the Machiavellian use of illusory beliefs. The greatest quality of Christianity, in Machiavelli’s eyes, is precisely being a fraud. He does not withhold praise for this fraud, but in comparison to genuine Christianity, they may constitute the most slanderous attack that the religion had suffered until then. The reader, undecided in the face of apparent contradictions, is left unsure whether Machiavelli was ultimately pro-Christian or anti-Christian, but cannot shake off the feeling that treating Christianity as a useful fraud is a legitimate and even praiseworthy approach due to its “neutral” and “balanced” character.
In another passage of the “Discourses,” Machiavelli again seems to defend the Church, even more forcefully, by stating that the evil lies not in Christianity itself but in its decadent version, created by a clergy enriched by extortion and corrupted by idleness. This appeal to a return to “primitive Christianity” sounds deceptively pious, as later would the identical exhortation propagated by Liberation Theology. It is worth examining the entire passage:
Rome was full of miracles, among which the one in which, when Roman soldiers sacked the city of Veii, some of them entered the temple of Juno, and approaching the statue of the goddess, asked her if she wanted to go with them to Rome: ‘Vis venire Roman?’ Some believed they saw her respond with a gesture or a word. Filled with religious devotion, these soldiers (as Tito Livio comments, noting that they had entered the temple without disorder, dominated by respect and devotion) easily believed that the goddess gave the question the answer they had probably assumed… if religion could have been maintained in the Christian republic as its divine founder (Datore) established, the states professing it would have been much happier. However, religion has greatly declined. We have the most striking proof of this decline in the fact that the peoples closest to the Roman Church, the capital of our religion, are precisely the least religious. If we were to examine the primitive spirit of religion, observing how its present practice deviates from it, we would undoubtedly conclude that we have reached the moment of its ruin and punishment.
The “primitive spirit” of Christianity does not consist of practicing the evangelical virtues in the strict sense, for Machiavelli despises them. Even less so in the revelation of the supernatural, of which, according to him, we have no knowledge. Therefore, the sublime quality of primitive Christianity can only consist of its ability to produce “miracles” in the Roman sense of the term, that is, not authentic divine interventions in the course of events, but rather appearances that can be interpreted as such by the credulous people, as in the example of the soldiers in the temple of Juno. In short, primitive Christian religion had the gift of manipulating souls to induce obedience. The evil of decadent Christianity lies not in the loss of evangelical virtues but in the loss of the ability to deceive the masses. Despite the blasphemy hidden under mountains of disguises, it could not have escaped Machiavelli himself, who adds the exquisite detail of attributing to Christ Himself the merit of the art of deception, miserably lost by His successors. It is this transfigured Christ into a Machiavellian politician that Machiavelli, pretending to praise the Christ of the Gospels, offers his devotion to.
The intentional parodic inversion becomes even more evident when, in the “Discourses,” Machiavelli returns to a theme from “The Prince”: the newly created and unstable principality. How will the new ruler consolidate his power? The answer is that he must radicalize the novelty of the situation, turning everything upside down suddenly, “making the rich poor and the poor rich, just as David did when he became king, who ‘filled the poor with goods and sent the rich away with nothing’.”
In this paragraph, there are three highly significant details. First, it contains the only biblical quotation that appears in the “Discourses.” Second, it illustrates the ideal conduct of the prince through the biblical precedent of the rise of King David, but instead of using the respective passage from the Old Testament (2 Samuel 5:1–16), Machiavelli presents a passage from the New Testament (Luke 1:53) that is completely unrelated to David’s episode. Third, it is not recorded in the story of David that he did anything similar to what Machiavelli recommends to the prince (on the contrary, the prophet Nathan accuses him of exploiting the poor and sparing the rich).
11. The paradox
AWARE OF THE RADICALLY anti-Christian nature of his utopia, Machiavelli, in his final moments, confesses his sins, receives the sacraments, and dies within the Church, without publicly retracting a single word he said. Clearly, this poses a problem, but this problem is, once again, the paradox of the liar. Did Machiavelli lie in his confession or did he sincerely confess a life of lies and blasphemies? Presented this way, the problem is unsolvable. Only God knows what transpired. Fortunately, one does not need to be God to distinguish between subjective sincerity and objective self-knowledge. Machiavelli may have been subjectively sincere in his confession, but that does not imply that he had a true understanding of the extent of his actions or a clear comprehension of the existential connection between actions and words. The latter hypothesis can be dismissed from the outset, given the vast distance between the “Machiavellian” content of his works and his actual conduct in politics, characterized by naive devotion to the powerful. It is not so easy to eliminate the possibility that he regarded his writings as political acts, but when we inquire about the objective of these acts, we find nothing grand or demonic—only the pedestrian ambition to please rulers and regain his employment. The disproportion between this personal objective and the magnitude of the power that Machiavelli grants to the ambition of rulers is so colossal that we must resolutely bet on a drastic separation between “life” and “work.” To engage with Machiavelli’s discourse with the necessary minimum of credulity, essential for not considering it purely psychotic invention, we must not demand a strict grounding in lived reality, whether that of the author, ours, or historical humanity. We must read it with that suspension of disbelief that Coleridge demanded of the reader of imaginative works.
It has been thoroughly demonstrated by Maurizio Viroli that Machiavelli was not a political scientist committed to deriving objectively valid conclusions from a sufficient range of facts.52 The evidence offered is the overwhelming predominance of rhetorical argumentation over logical-dialectical proof in The Prince and Discourses.
However, rhetorical argumentation is structured as a game of proportions among four elements—the situation, the judge or listener, the speech itself (form and content), and the objective to be achieved.53 And the fact is that in Machiavelli’s works, these elements do not form any proportion. First and foremost, the objective is twofold and disconnected: the fact that the ruler to whom the discourse is addressed might accept the proposed plan does not imply in any way that he would consent, in the same act, to reward the author by restoring his lost position. On the contrary, we have seen that once the plan is accepted, the author’s own life would be in danger. Equally ambiguous is the situation of the discourse: it is at the very moment when Machiavelli finds himself radically excluded from power that he makes an effort to reason from the perspective of the ruler, defending that viewpoint rather than his own as a dismissed official. How was he able to distance himself so much from himself and become so close to those he had so many reasons to hate? The answer was provided by Machiavelli himself in his famous letter of December 10, 1513, to Francesco Vettori: in order to think like kings and princes, he detached himself from real life and, dressing himself as a king and prince, imaginatively transported himself to another world. The fact that this other world was that of the condemned in hell, which did not detract from their elegance and nobility, was something he himself was aware of, even admitting it on his deathbed. However, classifying whether he actually chose to go to hell with them is nothing more than the last joke of a great jester, as his Christian death a few days later forces us to do, following the lesson of his competent biographer Roberto Ridolfi.54 Kings and princes may go to the devil if they wish. Machiavelli, more prudently, sends for Friar Mateus to administer the sacraments to him.
Machiavelli’s rhetoric, therefore, does not seem to have a rhetorical objective, except in the very ambiguous sense that the nominal objective of the discourse is not the real objective of the author. He sells to the reader-prince a plan, a strategy, and a system of justifications that he himself did not buy—neither in life nor in death.
Shortly after publishing Discourses (1517), Machiavelli lost interest in the political speculations of antiquity. The commentary on Livy halted at the first Decade and remained abandoned until the author’s death. The following year, he dedicated his time to theatrical and philological tasks, and the rest of his life to chronicling Italian history, interrupted only by a brief interval in which he completed The Art of War (1521), a belated summary of the conclusions drawn from his experience as an organizer of the Florentine militia.
It is doubtful, then, that he took those speculations seriously in a vital sense, as he did not give them any practical application or follow-up. However, this does not mean that he despised them. While writing, he entered a state of genuine self-exaltation, seeing himself as a bold pioneer, a trailblazer of the future, and even a new Moses opening a path in the mare magnum of the struggles between the priesthood and the nobility. Having done so, he proceeded to forget everything and returned to his mundane tasks as a subordinate official and a responsible family man mindful of his obligations to both this world and the next.
In short, Machiavelli neither believed nor disbelieved in what he said. This distinction simply does not apply to his case. He freely moved between truths and lies, with the freedom of an artist who delights in creating his work without needing to justify its effects in the real world, or even intellectually comprehend it in a differentiated manner. This work is not a political philosophy or a political science; it is a simulation of both. It is not a rhetorical exhortation but a simulation thereof, aimed at an entirely different objective than the one nominally proposed to its listeners. It is also not a parody of contemporary customs: every parody has a moral foundation, but Machiavelli vacillates between condemning political customs in the name of morality and condemning morality in the name of an idealization of the worst political customs. It is, throughout, a fictional speculation, a speculation of the possible without the slightest concern for distinguishing it from the true and the probable, but marked by an extreme ability to make it pass as plausible. In short, it is a poetic simulation of rhetoric, just like the speeches of Caesar, Brutus, or Henry V in Shakespeare’s plays. The only difference is that this simulation was calculated for its target audience to take it as authentic rhetorical discourse. If during the course of its creation, the author occasionally convinced himself of the justice of the cause he pretended to defend, it did not prevent him from continuing to act in contradiction to it and, in his final moments, renouncing it completely, confessing his sins to the God whom he had himself covered in blasphemies.
Appendices
Philosophies and Their Structure
Diário do Comércio, 9th October 2014
The structure of a philosophy is what it has most patent and most hidden at the same time. Patent, because it is present in all its parts, even the smallest and humblest, which are nothing outside of it. Hidden, because it is only present in the background, as a key to locking the whole, and never as an explicit part or theme in any of the parts.
The philosopher who took as his theme the structure of his own philosophy, to discourse on it, would already be inserting it as part of a larger structure at that very moment.
One of the consequences of this is that the structure cannot be revealed by any “text analysis,” no matter how meticulous and well-cared-for it may be, which only leads to the structure of the exposition, or the written work, whose relationship with the structure of the philosophy itself is varied and ambiguous. The method for understanding the structure of a philosophy must be based on the following principles:
(1) Every philosophy, however abstract and disinterested it may seem, is an intervention in the course of human affairs. It always aims to modify or reinforce the state of things in society, culture, science, religion, customs, or even the human condition as a whole.
(2) To this end, it conducts an in-depth examination of the obstacles, cognitive or of any other kind, that hinder or complicate its achievement, trying to create the intellectual and practical means to remove them.
(3) Its structure, therefore, is defined as an articulation of ends and means. What is the proposed historical-cultural goal, and what is the strategy, both cognitive and persuasive, used to legitimize and make it feasible?
In other words, the structure of a philosophy is only revealed when the discourse in which it is expressed is examined not as a pure system of ideas and doctrines but as human action, the intervention of an intellectually privileged individual in the lives of his presumably less gifted peers willing to listen to him.
Now, the examination of a discourse as a mode of human action is the specialized field of rhetorical studies, the art of persuasion. To understand the structure of a philosophy, the articulation of its ends with its means, it is therefore necessary to examine it from a rhetorical point of view, considering it as an effort of persuasion aimed at producing specific effects in historical-social life or even human life in general.
What often causes this obviousness to be forgotten is that the exposition of philosophical ideas is generally made through a logical-dialectical discourse that despises the appeal to rhetorical persuasion and intends to place itself in the field of strict demonstration, intellectual certainties immune to the attractions of oratory.
It happens that this discourse, as such, is not “the” philosophy, but only the set or system of intellectual means by which it seeks to achieve its ends. If we examine it “in itself,” without subordinating it to the ends it must serve, we lose ourselves in an infinity of “philosophical problems” or accidents along the way, without ever realizing the structure of the philosophy in question, which consists precisely in the articulation of ends with means.
In the effort to discern this structure, it is necessary to understand the logical-dialectical discourse as part and instrument of a persuasive effort, that is, of an undertaking that, taken as a whole, is and can only be of a rhetorical order.
The method, therefore, to discover the structure of a philosophy lies in the rhetorical analysis of its discourse, discerning in it the four elements that in classical treatises define all rhetorical discourse: the “situation” of discourse, that is, the historical, social, cultural, and psychological framework in which it emerges and in which it intends to intervene; the “judge,” that is, the specific audience it addresses and intends to influence; the “objective” or goal, that is, the specific modification it intends to introduce into the framework; and finally the “discourse” itself, that is, the set of means of argumentation, proof, and persuasion put into action to achieve this end.
Fortunately, the objective or goal – the “why,” ultimately, the philosopher is doing what he is doing – is explicitly stated in most philosophies. You just have to look for it.
The difficulty lies in that it does not always appear in the parts considered most important or noble of the philosophical work – sometimes it only appears in personal letters or minor works –, so the scholar, especially when trained in a tradition that privileges the analysis of texts as such and focuses on the most prestigious ones, can get lost in a tangle of difficulties along the way and never get to ask where, after all, the philosopher is leading him. This is how the most refined sophistication of analytical means can become a fine technique for not understanding anything.
Although I know of no case where the goal has remained completely hidden, the philosopher may have good reason to keep it discreet when he considers it too dangerous or revolutionary to be publicly displayed in the most noble and conspicuous parts of his written work. In this case, it is necessary to look for it in smaller and occasional writings, whose strategic importance in the whole escapes the attention of the common analyst, dazzled by the prestige of the “great works.” This is precisely the case with Immanuel Kant (in the illustration), Descartes, and Machiavelli.
More Parallax
O Globo, December 28, 2002
Some readers ask me for more explanations about the so-called “conceptual parallax” that I mentioned the other day. I’ll try.
Every philosophical statement about reality in general, humanity in general, or knowledge in general necessarily includes, among the objects to which it applies, the real person of the issuer and the discourse situation in which the statement is made.
Whatever a man says about these matters he also says about himself. No one has the right to constitute himself, without further ado, as an exception to a theory that purports to cover the genus or species to which he himself belongs.
This elementary methodological precaution has been neglected by virtually all the most important philosophers of the so-called “modern” cycle, as well as by many of the schools of thought that dominate the contemporary intellectual universe.
As a result, we have an imposing gallery of doctrines that tell us nothing about the world in which they were produced, much less about the real people who created them, but everything about an invented world that does not include them and that they merely observe from outside, from an imaginary privileged observation post. This observation post corresponds, structurally and functionally, to that of the “omniscient narrator” in works of fiction, which is not affected by the course of the narrated events. Constructed with a fictional technique, but totally unconscious of the expedient they employ, these philosophies are works of fiction that dare not present themselves as such.
Some examples:
Descartes says he will seriously examine his own thoughts and begins to do so in the form of autobiographical introspection. Along the way, he loses the thread of his personal and concrete self, his biographical self, and begins to speak of a generic and abstract self, the “philosophical self.” He is not even aware of the jump and believes he continues to make autobiography when he is only making logical construction. He ends up believing that he is really this philosophical self, under whose shadow the real self disappears completely. Result: his self-observation falls into the grossest errors, such as forgetting that the temporal continuity of the self is a presupposition of the cogito and not a conclusion obtained from it.
David Hume says that our general ideas have no cognitive value at all because they are merely fortuitous agglomerates of bodily sensations. At no time does he realize that the philosophy of David Hume, itself composed of general ideas thus formed, cannot be worth much either. The philosopher’s alienation in creating his philosophy could not be more complete.
Machiavelli teaches that the Prince must conquer absolute power and then get rid of those who helped him rise. Now, who could have helped the Prince more than the philosopher who taught him the formula for conquering absolute power? If the Prince took him seriously, he himself, Niccolò Machiavelli, would be the first to be thrown in the trash along with his book, evidence of the crime. Contrary to the general praise that consecrates Machiavelli as the first “realistic” observer of politics, the Prince is an idealized model that can only be described in literature precisely to the extent that no contemporary manages to embody it in reality. The alienation reaches its peak when Machiavelli says that all the evils of the State come from contemplative intellectuals who, unable to act in politics, theorize about it — which is precisely what he is doing. Moreover, Otto Maria Carpeaux had already noted that Machiavelli’s view of politics is not political: it is aesthetic.
Karl Marx assures that only the proletariat, as the last and extreme victim of alienation, can realistically grasp the entire course of the alienating process and, therefore, free itself from it. Only the proletariat, in short, has adequate historical consciousness. But isn’t it an extraordinary thing that the first, indeed the very first to personify this proletarian consciousness is a bourgeois? I do not say that this is impossible, but, in the light of Marxist theory, it is a most remarkable and improbable exception. Karl Marx passes over it with the greatest innocence, without even remotely noticing a shift in focus, a parallax between the character he represents and the content of his speeches. In Karl Marx’s world, Karl Marx does not exist.
And so on. I have devoted my courses to the meticulous examination of these and many other similar cases for several years now. The most interesting aspect is the fictional criticism of fictional philosophy. Indeed, the best critical observers of philosophical alienation were fiction writers, especially Dostoevsky, Kafka, Pirandello, Ionesco, and Camus. The Demons, The Trial, Henry IV, Rhinoceros, and The Stranger are pieces of an immense literary indictment against the pretensions of modern philosophy. Here, the contrast outlined by Saul Bellow between the “intellectual” and the “writer” applies: on one hand, the builder of elegant alienations; on the other, the spokesman for “authentic impressions,” sometimes simplistic truths that burst the intellectual balloon. You see, don’t you? When I grow up, I want to be a “writer.”
Speaking of alienation: our elected president seems to have no idea of the trouble he has gotten himself into by adopting a line of action that implies the conciliation of the irreconcilable: on one side, the Lula-Bush alliance; on the other, Lula-Chávez. Maybe he is too happy with his social rise to be able to think about these horrible things.
When Constantine C. Menges predicted the imminent creation of a Lula-Chávez alliance, the entire Tupiniquim media gathered to discredit him. Well, now the alliance is there. It was made by the ostensible taking of sides by the future Brazilian government in an internal Venezuelan dispute, and the journalists who participated in the anti-Menges campaign do not even have the decency to acknowledge: “We were wrong.”
Machiavelli and the Fools
Diário do Comércio (editorial), September 26, 2007
“I never say what I believe, nor do I believe in what I say - and if I discover a little piece of the truth, I immediately hide it under so many lies that it becomes impossible to find it.” No, do not neutralize this confession made by Niccolò Machiavelli to a friend by applying the “liar’s paradox” to it. He is perfectly sincere here, as he writes privately about his public work. The technique of superimposed, interwoven, and mixed lies is indeed the secret of this work, so obscure that Benedetto Croce declared it impenetrable, but it opens wide as soon as we discover this key, provided by the author himself in a moment of frankness, or perhaps weakness.
Machiavelli is not the vulgar immoralist that his first critics saw in him, nor the scientific realist that his modern admirers made of him, nor the clear patriot that many Italian interpreters celebrate.
He is the creator of the revolutionary plan to destroy Christianity from within and subjugate it to an economically egalitarian and politically totalitarian state, which today we would call a socialist state. He is also the inventor of the strategy entrusted with achieving this end: to disorient and dominate society through a dizzying bombardment of lies and histrionic pretenses, purposely contradictory to each other so that their victims do not perceive the unity of the political objective behind everything.
Who best understood Machiavelli was Antonio Gramsci, but he did not understand him perfectly. His own sociopathic amorality as a revolutionary made him blind to the satanic character of the Machiavellian enterprise and made him see in it, on the contrary, all the illusory beauties that had been put there precisely to seduce half-baked intellectuals.
What Gramsci clearly saw was that the Prince was not an individual, but a revolutionary elite capable of controlling the subtle engineering of deceit and conquering, before the sly gaze of helpless adversaries, “the omnipresent and invisible power of a categorical imperative, of a divine command.”
If you want an immediate example of how this works, look at the “Media-less Movement.”
Take note. For almost two decades, the newspapers and TV channels of this country not only glorified the idols of the communist revolution, demonizing their adversaries, and not only spread over the São Paulo Forum the protective mantle of silence that allowed it to grow unnoticed, but also systematically refrained from reporting the genocidal atrocities committed by communist regimes and their allies during this period, and provided full support for all the initiatives of the “politically correct cultural revolution”: abortionism, gay activism, racial quotas, drug legalization, etc. More leftism than this, not even in Pravda.
For years I tried to convince liberals and conservatives that they should organize a protest movement against this hegemonic domination that marginalized them to the point of only allowing their survival as ideological succubi of the dominant current. As they did not do so in time, the left itself now does it in their place, pretending to be an oppressed victim when it is in fact the sole author and beneficiary of the crime. It is a bluff so monstrous, so cynical, that it deceives even the cleverest observers and ends up passing for a good-faith enterprise.
It’s a commonplace example. The technique of stupefying contradiction is in everything the left does. As long as their adversaries do not catch on to this, they will continue to be made fools of every week.
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In Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, trans. Rosaura Eichenberg, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2002.↩
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Giovanni Reale. Para uma Nova Interpretação de Platão. São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 1997.↩
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The term is said here in English. The Portuguese term, “Iluminismo” (“Illuminism”), is not as evocative.↩
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Imposturas Intelectuais. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2006.↩
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Giovanbattista Busini, cited in Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 114.↩
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Lauro Escorel. Introdução ao Pensamento Político de Maquiavel. Rio de Janeiro: Simões, 1958, p. 90.↩
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See Friedrich Meinecke, L’Idea della Ragion di Stato nella Storia Moderna, 2 vols., trans. D. Scolari. Florence: Valecchi, 1942, vol. I, pp. 71–92.↩
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“Ever since Niccolò Machiavelli’s day The Prince has been considered by some to be a diabolical production, and its author’s name has been held synonymous with Satan (hence, according to Samuel Butler, ‘Old Nick’). Passages have been quoted out of context to prove their author depraved and immoral. Although such a practice is unfair and does not do justice to Machiavelli’s whole thesis, it must be admitted that he exalts the state above the individual; that the most enthusiastic exponents of his theories have been Napoleon, Bismarck, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; and that his state is exempt from the obligations of ‘religion’ and ‘morality’” (Buckner B. Trawick, World Literature, 1962).↩
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The term is from Maurizio Viroli.↩
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Cited in Escorel, 1958, p. 3, footnote 1.↩
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Otto Maria Carpeaux, “Inteligência de Maquiavel” (Intelligence of Machiavelli), in Ensaios Reunidos, 1942–1978. De ‘A Cinza Do Purgatório’ até ‘Livros na Mesa’. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks/UniverCidade, 1999. Vol. I, pp. 778–9. The reference is to L. Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist (Berkeley, 1945, reed. 1948).↩
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Pasquale Villari. Niccolò Machiavelli e i suoi tempi. Ilustrati con nuovi documenti. Volume III ed ultimo. Firenze: Sucessori Le Monnier, 1882, p. 379. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/niccolmachiavel13villgoog. Accessed on May 12, 2011.↩
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Quoted from Pietro Caporilli, “Le lezione del ‘segretario fiorentino’ nella politica di Mussolini e Napoleone,” n.d. Available at http://classic-web.archive.org/web/20041213181607/http://www.carpe-diem.it/cultura/htm/macc.htm. Accessed on May 13, 2011.↩
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Cf. Anne Lyon Haight and Chandler B. Grannis, Banned Books 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D. New York and London: R.R. Bowker Co., 1978.↩
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“The individual tends to continually escape. He tends to disobey the law, not pay taxes, not go to war. There are few – heroes or saints – who sacrifice their selves on the altar of the State. All the others are in a potential state of rebellion against the State.”
In the original: “L’individuo tende ad evadere continuamente. Tende a disubbidire alle leggi, a non pagare i tributi, a non fare la guerra. Pochi sono coloro – eroi o santi – che sacrificano il proprio io sull’altare dello Stato. Tutti gli altri sono in stato di rivolta potenziale contro lo Stato” (“Preludio al Machiavelli,” in Gerarchia, aprile 1924, Scritti e Discorsi, vol. IV, p. 109).↩
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Leon Trotsky. “What Is National Socialism?” In: The Modern Thinker (newspaper), October 1933, with a postscript from November 1933. Available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm. Accessed on May 13, 2011.↩
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See Benedetto Croce, Estetica come Scienza dell’Espressione e Lingüística Generale, chapter I. 1st edition. Milan: Sandron, 1902. (There are several later editions, NE).↩
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Carpeaux, Ensaios Reunidos, vol. I, 1999, p. 779.↩
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Quoted in John Bowle, Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Introduction, New York, Oxford University Press, 1954, p. 356.↩
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Friedrich Meinecke, L’idea della ragion di Stato nella storia moderna. Firenze: Sansoni, 1924 (1970), p. 41.↩
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See Friedrich Nietzsche, Humano, Demasiado Humano, § 224, (several editions in Portuguese, NE).↩
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Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana. Firenze: Editore Salani, 1965, p. 110. Original: “È il programma del mondo moderno, sviluppato, corretto, ampliato, più o meno realizzato. E sono grandi le nazioni che più vi si avvicinano. Siamo dunque alteri del nostro Machiavelli. Gloria a lui, quando crolla alcuna parte dell’antico edificio. E gloria a lui, quando si fabbrica alcuna parte del nuovo.”↩
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Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Chapter 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958.↩
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See Vicki B. Sullivan, Machiavelli’s Three Romes. Religion, Human Liberty and Politics Reformed. De Kalb (Illinois): Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.↩
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He calls Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus “prophets,” alongside Moses, showing that he emphasized the concept of command, regardless of the cognitive aspect intrinsic to the term in a religious context.↩
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Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 1958, p. 36.↩
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Id., ibid.↩
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“Machiavelli’s Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?” in The American Scholar 27 (1958): 482–491.↩
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Viroli, 1998, Chapter 5.↩
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Strauss, 1958, pp. 223–225.↩
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“Hegel was of course obsessed with the political weakness of Germany; living in the Napoleonic period of collapse, of negation, he hoped, following the dialectic, for the reaction, for the re-affirmation of German might. He aspired, Dr. Sabine believes, to be the Machiavelli of a new Germany” (John Bowle, Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Introduction, New York, Oxford University Press, 1954, p. 43).↩
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“Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (12): Published Essays 1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, Baton Rouge and London, Louisiana University Press, 1990, pp. 213–255.↩
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Eric Voegelin. The collected works of Eric Voegelin (22): History of political ideas, vol 4, Renaissance and Reformation, chap. 1. Ed. with introduction by David L. Morse and William M. Thompson. Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1998.↩
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Dante Germino, “Was Machiavelli a ‘Spiritual Realist’?” In: ERIC VOEGELIN SOCIETY MEETING 2000, Panel 2. Washington: Eric Voegelin Society, 2000. Available at http://www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2000%20Papers/PANEL2.shtml. Accessed on May 13, 2011.↩
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“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”↩
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“The wisdom of this world is enmity with God.”↩
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Escorel, 1958, pp. 82–83.↩
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Cited in Escorel, 1958, pp. 68–69.↩
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Cited in Strauss, 1958, p. 36.↩
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Strauss, 1958, p. 13.↩
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See the pathetic description of Stalin’s final moments in Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 1879–1939, translated by Joubert de Oliveira Brizida, Rio de Janeiro, Nova Fronteira, 2004, vol. I, Introduction.↩
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The expression is from Antonio Gramsci.↩
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See René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, reissued 1972.↩
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Lawrence Arthur Burd, in Il Principe, introd. Lord Acton, Clarendon Press, 1891, p. 283, cited in Lauro Escorel, Introdução ao Pensamento Político de Maquiavel, Rio, Simões, 1958, p. 3.↩
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“...all the armed prophets succeeded, and the unarmed ones failed. For, in addition to what has been said, the nature of the people varies; and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to maintain them in that conviction. Therefore, they must be ordered in such a way that when they no longer believe, we can make them believe by force. Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus could not have made their constitutions be observed for a long time if they had been unarmed; just as it happened in our times to Friar Girolamo Savonarola, who failed in his attempt at reform when the multitude ceased to believe in him. And he did not have the means to keep those who had believed in him firm, nor to make the unbelievers believe.”
In the original: "...tutt’i profeti armati vinsono, e li disarmati ruinorono. Perché, oltre alle cose dette, la natura de’ populi è varia; et è facile a persuadere loro una cosa, ma è difficile fermarli in quella persuasione. E però conviene essere ordinato in modo, che, quando non credono più, si possa fare loro credere per forza. Moisè, Ciro, Teseo e Romulo non arebbono possuto fare osservare loro lungamente le loro constituzioni, se fussino stati disarmati; come ne’ nostri tempi intervenne a fra’ Girolamo Savonerola; il quale ruinò ne’ sua ordini nuovi, come la moltitudine cominciò a non crederli; e lui non aveva modo a tenere fermi quelli che avevano creduto, né a far credere e’ discredenti"( The Prince, ch. VI).↩
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Escorel, 1958, p. 24.↩
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Anthony Parel. The Political Calculus: Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972, p. 38.↩
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Carpeaux, História da Literatura Ocidental, 1961, p. 483.↩
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Antonio Gramsci. Note sul Machiavelli: sulla politica e sullo Stato moderno. Volume 4 of “Quaderni del cárcere”. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1973, pp. 3–4.↩
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A project that will be later taken up literally, in theory, by Antonio Gramsci, and, in practice, by the systematic infiltration of the KGB in the Catholic hierarchy, giving rise to the “liberation theology.” See Ricardo de la Cierva, Las Puertas del Infierno. La Historia de la Iglesia Jamás Contada, Toledo, Editorial Fénix, 1995, and La Hoz y la Cruz. Auge y Caída del Marxismo y la Teologia de la Liberación, ibid., 1996.↩
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For example, in Discourses, I–4: “Né si può chiamare in alcun modo con ragione una republica inordinata, dove siano tanti esempli di virtù; perché li buoni esempli nascano dalla buona educazione, la buona educazione, dalle buone leggi” and id. I–10: "quelli che in stato privato vivono in una republica, o che per fortuna o per virtù ne diventono principi…"
In English: “Nor can it be called, with any reason, a disordered republic where there are so many examples of Virtù; because good examples arise from good education, good education from good laws,” and id. I–10: “those who in a private state live in a republic, whether by Fortune or by Virtù, will become princes…”↩
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Maurizio Viroli. Machiavelli. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.↩
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See Olavo de Carvalho, Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva. Introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos, São Paulo, É Realizações, 2006.↩
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Roberto Ridolfi. Biografia de Nicolau Maquiavel. São Paulo: Musa Editora, 2003, pp. 471 et seq.↩
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