More Thoughts on Machiavelli

I'm considering one reasonably well-known statement from Chapter Six of The Prince: "Hence it is that all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed." For Machiavelli this is the central lesson of history. But it is also a message that goes against that of the church: for the 'unarmed prophet' is Christ. The 'prophet armed' is, of course, Mohammed.

However, I do not think that 'Old Nick' was delivering am anti-Christian message as such. After all, for centuries the Christians had taken up arms, in wars both just and unjust. Machiavelli’s great crime was, as I have said, to describe the practice of politics, free from ethical and theological fictions: for it was right, as he puts it, "to represent things as they are in real truth, rather than as they are imagined."

In essence, therefore, the message was a practical one; that in a world of deceit and treachery that those who seek to act virtuously in every way-to follow pure Christian doctrine, if you like-are on the road to self-destruction, not self-preservation. If the Prince is to maintain his rule he must learn "how not to be virtuous and make use of it according to need." Christ was shown the kingdoms of the world and rejected them. For the Prince Machiavelli repeats Satan's temptation, urging him to take up the sword for the sake of the good that can only be accomplished by the possession of power.

Machiavelli intended his brilliant little treatise both as a satire and an analysis of how attain power and, more important, how to hold it. In the treacherous world of sixteenth-century Italian realpolitik there is simply nothing to be gained from the exercise of virtue for the sake of virtue. The exhortations of his Humanist contemporaries, notably Thomas More and Erasmus, the Christian ethics they advance, were no more than a comforting illusion. It's acutely ironic that the Church, for all its disapproval, advanced men like Pope Julius II, for whom The Prince might very well have served as a personal manifesto

Thoughts on The Prince

Insofar as Machiavelli's perceptive little essay is based on a realistic appreciation of forms of political practice, independent of received wisdom and theological precepts, it is perhaps the most brilliant expressions of Renaissance thought.

There was nothing new in The Prince: it had all happened before; the cynical and brutal manipulation of power was part of European history. What was new was Machiavelli's honesty, his willingness to see through hypocrisy and false conceits; to describe politics as it was practiced rather than as some abstract Aristotelian or Platonic model.

If properly read it is acutely funny, one of the wittiest satires ever written about politics; a satire on the unruly and selfish behaviour of leaders, kings and princes of all kinds. Or, if not that, it is offered as a kind of mirror, showing an image of power, and the misuse of power, from which all those with any sense of morality should recoil! Or he produced the book because this is what he knew that people like Lorenzo de Medici would want to hear, a justification of themselves. However it is read it is a little work of great value. So says The Princess!

Burke and Orwell

This is the bicentenary of the death of Thomas Paine, a political writer I have no particular respect for, despite the modish enthusiasm, I thought I would add a piece on the two I admire most: Edmund Burke and George Orwell.

Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Reflections on the Revolution in France might be read as prophecies and warnings. Orwell's chief concern is with the globalisation of totalitarianism. Edmund Burke, writing in 1790, warned that the upheavals in France would only lead to further political destruction, terror and dictatorship.

Both men also expressed views that were not wholly welcome in their own political and intellectual milieus; in the case of Burke, the radical Whigs of Charles James Fox; and in the case of Orwell, the circle most associated with the left-wing demimonde. Their critiques were thus all the more trenchant because they were made from within the citadel, so to speak, not from the perspective of the establishment.

Orwell and Burks also shared a distrust of their fellow intellectuals. Orwell expressed his contempt of a certain kind of 'Bloomsbury highbrow' in The Lion and the Unicorn, his wartime essay on socialism and patriotism, just as Burke disliked Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 'literary cabal', as he put it, of the French philosophes. On the fate of Marie Antoinette he wrote "But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators, has succeeded."

Both Burke and Orwell, two of the greatest political writers in the English language, were, in essence, defending human values threatened with destruction by waves of violence and intolerance. Both stand against the notion that cruel means justify abstract ends. I'm reminded, in particular, of Burke's warning in Letters to a Noble Lord to those aristocrats of his day who embraced radical chic-"...these philosophers consider men in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump."

But it is in his riposte to Rousseau, the grandfather of Fascism and Communism, that he is at his greatest: "Society is indeed a contract...but becomes a partnership...between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born." You will find an echo of this in Orwell’s defence of patriotism as "…the bridge between the future and the past."