Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli (3 May, 1469-21 June, 1527) was an Italian political theeorist and historian most well known for his work The Prince. Machiavelli's name has been used for centuries to describe the use or approval of unscrupulous political action, despite the fact that he was well respected as an honourable man, who was the victim of corruption, political deceit and violence throughout his political career in Florence. His concept of civic virtue became a central element of republicanism, which strongly influenced the development of European and American political thought. However he is is best known for his book The Prince, which made his name a byword for deceit, despotism and political manipulation.

Biography

His father was a Florentine lawyer of moderate means, who came from an old and noble family. He supervised the superb humanistic education the boy received in the classics, literature, philosophy, and law.

From the age of 20-29 he worked in Rome, employed in the banking business. In 1498 Machiavelli was elected to the Florentine chancery ("civil service," in modern terms), as secretary and second chancellor. The city deliberately gave preference for top positions to well-educated humanists, even more than experience or political connections. He was the staff aide to the Ten of War, the committee responsible for Florence's foreign and diplomatic relations. He acted as secretary to its ambassadors and drafted detailed reports on foreign affairs. He served until 1512, when the Spanish overthrew the Republic.

He married Marietta Corsini in 1501, who bore him six children, and suffered his infidelities with patience; she outlived him by a quarter of a century.

Machiavelli devoted himself with single-minded intensity to the grueling and poorly paid service of the Republic. In 1507 he added the role of chancellor of the Nove di Milizia (Nine of the Militia), a magistracy he fought to create because Florence needed a citizen army. He argued that putting every citizen in arms was much better than using mercenary troops which, he said, were largely responsible for the military weakness of most Italian states.

Florentine diplomacy

Italy was a scene of intense political conflict involving four dominant city-states (Florence, Milan, Venice, and Naples), along with the Papacy, France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire.

When Machiavelli was growing up Florence was under the control of Lorenzo de' Medici. Italy was invaded in 1494 by Charles VIII of France, who forced the Medici family to flee. A republic was established but it immediately came under the dictatorship of religious fanatic Girolamo Savonarola. The people turned against the monk and executed him in 1498.

Machiavelli was a trusted advisor to the head of the republic, Piero Soderini, who sent him on numerous diplomatic missions. Although he never had decisive authority, Machiavelli's missions often proved to be of considerable delicacy and importance. They included visits to several courts. In 1500 he spent six months at the court of Louis XII of France, to find out the terms on which the king would help Florence fight its war against the rebellious subject-city of Pisa. Florence depended on its powerful ally to maintain its independence against powerful foes, but France thought Florence was a poorly governed, small weak state.

He spent some four months at the court of Cesare Borgia(1475-1507), the aggressive young Spanish duke who kept seizing territories across Italy and demanded an alliance with Florence. The duke went out of his way to expound his policies and the ambitions underlying them and Machiavelli was greatly impressed. The duke, he reported, is "superhuman in his courage", as well as being a man of grand designs, who "thinks himself capable of attaining anything he wants". Moreover, his actions are no less striking than his words, for he "controls everything by himself", governs "with extreme secrecy", and decides and executes his plans with devastating suddenness. Machiavelli saw that Borgia was no mere upstart but someone who "must now be regarded as a new power in Italy." Borgia was the most ruthless prince in Italy and became the model for The Prince.

At Rome, in 1503, he kept an eye on the election of a new pope (Julius II); and at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian in 1507 he discussed the terms of a payment which the Emperor had demanded from Florence.

Machiavelli was an unusually keen observer. In writing his books during retirement he incorporated verbatim into the Discourses and especially The Prince, the evaluations, and even the epigrams, that he prepared as a working diplomat.

When the Spanish took over in 1512, reinstalled the Medicis and ended the republican experiment, Machiavelli was seen was a dangerous opposition leader. He was dismissed from his post, tortured and released from imprisonment shortly afterwards. He then retired from public life to his modest family property for the next six years in an effort to provide for his wife and children.

Author

By 1518 Machiavelli was giving public lectures of his written work, particularly the Discourses on the first ten books of Titus Livius and The Art of War, the latter of which was to be one of his only important books to be published in his lifetime. Only after his death were his great books published: The Discourses (in 1531) and The Prince (1532). In the last period of his life he received an annual grant from the Pope to write his history of Florence and to improve the defenses of the city. However, in 1527 the army of the Holy Roman Empire sacked Rome and the Pope was taken prisoner. At the same time the Papal government of Florence was overthrown and once again became a Republic. Although known as a committed Republican, he found it hard to gain back the favour of the Republicans because of his active collaboration with the last government.

Shortly after the coup Machiavelli became ill with a stomach complaint and died, leaving his family in poverty. Although he had being disappointed in not being able to play a more active role in the political life of the city, the commentaries and analyses he produced ensured a long lasting legacy.

The Discourses

The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius is Machiavelli's fullest discussion on his views on the practice of politics and government, and on the theories that should guide that practice. It was written in the same period as his more well known work, The Prince (1513-1519 approx.) The latter is a brief handbook on for the use of rulers, the former is an extended commentary on the first ten of thirty five books that remain of Livy's History of Rome, making him an important classical scholar in addition to his contributions to political philosophy.

The Art of War

The Art of War is considered to be the first major work on modern military thought. In seven volumes it examines military strategy and the relationship between war and politics.

The Prince

Machiavelli's best known work The Prince, made his name a byword for deceit, despotism and political manipulation. Indeed the reader can easily find passages that seem to favor despotism and to be utterly at variance with moral ideas. The The Prince advocated desperate measures for a desperate situation; Machiavelli's ridiculed half-measures and hos dramatic statements and antithesis combined to produce bold and startling generalizations. Politics, he argued, is an art independent of morality and religion in its necessary methods. He has often been charged with cynicism for trying to discover permanently valid rules for political behavior based on observation of how men do in fact behave rather than on moral evaluation of how they ought to behave.

Machiavelli discovered the laws of politics by observing diplomacy firsthand and studying history --from what he called his "long experience of modern affairs and continuous study of the ancient world." He was not actually empirical; he formed conclusions first then sought out examples in history.

The Prince is not a cold plea for despotism but a book of highly emotional content infused with indignation and passion, which differentiates between authoritarian and despotic rule. At the end it rises to the crescendo of an appeal for strong leadership to create a powerful native state and free Italy from foreign domination. To free Italy required ruthless action, he argued.

Italy could not be freed by hiring soldiers because:

"Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous. And if a prince holds on to his state by means of mercenary armies, he will never be stable or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal; they are brave among friends; among enemies they are cowards; they have no fear of God, they keep no faith with men; and your downfall is deferred only so long as the attack is deferred; and in peace you are plundered by them, in war by your enemies. The reason for this is that they have no other love nor other motive to keep them in the field than a meagre wage, which is not enough to make them want to die for you. They love being your soldiers when you are not making war, but when war comes they either flee or desert.

Allies were not muchj better, for, "the arms of another man either slide off your back, weigh you down, or tie you up."

Impact of The Prince

The practical influence of his advice on actual politicians was minimal; it was first translated into English only in 1640, after a century. Few politicians needed to read a manual on how to manipulate people; usually it was the critic of a politician who complained he acted in Machiavellian fashion.

Machiavelli did influence Italian nationalists during the Risorgimento (unification movement) of the 19th century and under Fascism. They tended to misread him as a proponent of the centralized Italian state; rather, his patriotism was devoted to the city-state rather than the nation.

Machiavelli was not thoroughly consistent. Some contradictions include the a despairing view of the nature of man coupled with a fervent belief in the ability of a leader possessed of virtù (excellence of character) to liberate Italy from foreign domination; this with the backing of the people, despite former evidences of the people's corruptibility.

History of Florence

The History of Florence (1925) displayes dramatic power as the patriotic reader is swept along from the origins of Italian medieval civilization to the threshold of the French invasions at the end of the 15th century.

The major themes in History of Florence are the necessity of basing strong government on ultimate consent, and the inevitable corruption of the state if it tolerates political factions. As a scholar Machiavelli relied heavily on the details as related by earlier chroniclers, but he shaped and combined his material with the purpose of discovering the true causes of historical events as revealed by the psychology of individual persons and the conflicting interests of classes; he used history to provide lessons which he thought remained permanently valid. He was one of the first historians to ignore the role of divine intervention in shaping history, a mark of his commitment to Humanism.

Contributions to Political Philosophy

Machiavelli was in many respects not an innovator. His largest political work seeks to bring back a rebirth of the Ancient Roman Republic; its values, virtues and principles the ultimate guiding authority of his political vision. Machiavelli is essentially a restorer of something old and forgotten. The republicanism he focused on, especially the theme of civic virtue, became one of the dominant political themes of the modern world, and was a central part of the foundation of American political values.

Machiavelli studied the way people lived and aimed to inform leaders how they should rule and even how they themselves should live. To an extent he admits that the old tradition was true - men are obliged to live virtuously as according to Aristotles Virtue Ethics principle. However, he denies that living virtuously necessarily leads to happiness. Machiavelli viewed misery as one of the vices that enables a prince to rule Machiavelli states boldly in The Prince, The answer is, of course, that it would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved. In much of Machiavelli's work, it seems that the ruler must adopt unsavoury policies for the sake of the continuance of his regime.

Hans Baron was the most influential scholar to study Machiavelli. Najemy (1996) examines Baron's ambivalent portrayal, arguing that Baron tended to see Machiavelli simultaneously as the cynical debunker and the faithful heir of civic humanism. By the mid-1950s, Baron had come to consider civic humanism and Florentine republicanism as early chapters of a much longer history of European political liberty, a story in which Machiavelli and his generation played a crucial role. This conclusion led Baron to modify his earlier negative view of Machiavelli. He tried to bring the Florentine theorist under the umbrella of civic humanism by underscoring the radical differences between The Prince and the Discourses and thus revealing the fundamentally republican character of the Discourses. However, Baron's inability to come to terms with Machiavelli's harsh criticism of early 15th-century commentators such as Leonardo Bruni ultimately prevented him from fully reconciling Machiavelli with civic humanism.

Pocock (1981) traces the Machiavellian belief in and emphasis upon Greco-Roman ideals of unspecialized civic virtue and liberty from 15th-century Florence through 17th-century England and Scotland to 18th-century America. Thinkers who shared these ideals tended to believe that the function of property was to maintain an individual's independence as a precondition of his virtue. Consequently, in the last two times and places mentioned above, they were disposed to attack the new commercial and financial regime that was beginning to develop

Further reading

See the more detailed guide on the Bibliography subpage

• Bondanella, Peter, and Mark Musa, eds. The Portable Machiavelli (1979)
• Burd, L. A., "Florence (II): Machiavelli" in Cambridge Modern History (1902), vol. I, ch. vi. pp 190-218 online edition
• Hulliung, Mark. Citizen Machiavelli (1983)
• Jensen, De Lamar, ed. Machiavelli: Cynic, Patriot, or Political Scientist? (1960) essays by scholars online edition
• Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince, ed. by Peter Bondanella (1998) 101pp online edition
• Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince, (1908 edition tr by W. K. Marriott) Gutenberg edition
• Skinner, Quentin. Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction (2000) online edition
• Viroli, Maurizio. Niccolo's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli (2000) excerpt and text search
• Viroli, Maurizio. Machiavelli (1998) 252pponline edition